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Thousands of people across Britain will come together on Tuesday to remember and honor the millions killed in the Holocaust and mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Senior politicians, dignitaries and religious leaders will join survivors at a national commemoration in central London, while 70 candles, designed by the sculptor Anish Kapoor, will be lit at venues across the UK, one for each year since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

More than 2,400 events have been planned from Shetland and the Outer Hebrides to Truro, Cornwall, and across Northern Ireland and Wales.

In central London, around 1,000 guests will hear speeches and watch film footage to mark one of the most defining events of the 20th century. One of the candles will be lit at Auschwitz itself, where European leaders are expected to join survivors to honor the millions murdered during the Holocaust.

In London, actors including John Hurt, Michael Palin, Keeley Hawes, Christopher Eccleston and Sarah Lancashire will give readings for the commemoration, which will be shown on BBC2 at 7pm during an hour-long broadcast presented by David Dimbleby.

Performers will include cellist, singer and conductor Simon Wallfisch, grandson of 89-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – a surviving member of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, who played cello for the notorious Dr Josef Mengele.

Events are also being staged at community centers, school libraries, cinemas, museums, arts venues, railways stations and places of worship.

Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said: “The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 is ‘keep the memory alive’. It is vital that we all remember and reflect upon the horrors of the past and honor those who survived. On Holocaust Memorial Day we remember for a purpose, we learn from the past and consider how we can help build a better future.”

Six moving portraits – animated photographs of Holocaust survivors – have been created by the trust and will be projected on to the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank on Tuesday and on to screens in Belfast, Bristol, Bradford, Glasgow and Manchester.

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the trust has also launched its Memory Makers initiative, with seven British artists and writers, including Stephen Fry, spending time with survivors to bring their stories to a new audience through the written word, ceramics, sculpture, illustration and film collage.

A workshop of the role of rescuers in the Holocaust is being held at a young offenders institution in Co Durham, while an exhibition at HMP Leeds will see a holocaust survivor give a talk and light one of the Kapoor candles.

In the Lake District, where about 300 Jewish children came to recuperate from the Theresienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic, a memorial candle will be lit in Kendal.

David Cameron is expected to announce on Tuesday detailed plans for a new memorial to the Holocaust, recommended by the Holocaust commission, which was set up last year and whose members include the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the actor Helena Bonham-Carter, whose grandfather helped save hundreds of Jews during the second world war.

Cinemas across the UK will be showing special screenings of films and a number of schools have planned activities to mark the day.

Marks-Woldman said of the events: “It is a chance for the nation to come together and remember the Holocaust and all the victims of Nazi persecution and the genocides which have taken place since then.”

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