On April 14, I marched with the living through a valley of the shadow of death.
Seven thousand people, most wearing cobalt blue T-shirts and jackets that invoked the flag of Israel, walked through the gates of Auschwitz under the metal “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) sign.
We marched on a rocky road between the brick barracks of the concentration camp, along iron train tracks, past the gas chambers and crematoria, and into the labor-death camp of Birkenau.
It was 3 kilometers filled with waves of blue-clad delegations from dozens of countries, including students, teachers, family groups, congregations, philanthropists, police officers, military attachés, soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces and survivors of the Nazi camps.
And 1,000 Christian students from Austria marched with us.
It’s difficult to convey the joy of such an expression of life, triumphant at the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s goal to “cleanse” the world of its Jews, wearing the blue-and-white flag of the Jews’ victory over his genocidal plan.
It is particularly important for understanding that anti-Jewish hatred must be pointed out and confronted, especially after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 men, women and children were slaughtered—the largest mass murder since the Holocaust—and 251 others were kidnapped and dragged into the Gaza Strip.
I decided to join the March of the Living (MOTL) with my daughter Sonya this year after seeing the impact of the Oct. 7 massacre on her. It was time to put Oct. 7 in its proper context: as an expression of irrational, barbaric hatred against innocent people guilty of nothing more than their identity.
Sonya was excited to go, and she recruited two more members of our family—our cousin Ricky and his daughter Erica—to join us. Both of them described the March as being on their “bucket list.”
I am concerned about the fact that soon, the world will lose its remaining Holocaust survivors. About 220,000 are still alive—the youngest being 80 years old, born in a camp at the end of the war and miraculously saved by his mother’s fellow inmates.
The 50 survivors who came on the March were a critical part of the experience. They are the witnesses to the horror, giving their testimony to the world in the hope that the horror will never be repeated. As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel reminded us: “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.”
The delegation that our family joined for the March was a group of Christian educators, real estate developers, home-schoolers and barbecue-grill purveyors from Wisconsin, Kansas City, Florida and Georgia. They welcomed us with open-hearted kindness and interest, and we were grateful beyond words for their support and belief in the importance of Holocaust education.
The guide for our group was Alan Goodman, a Jewish educator originally from Philadelphia who now lives in Israel. He was intensely concerned with making the Holocaust real, showing how each of the 6 million victims was an individual person.
My family was struck by our group’s empathy and concern. Teachers struggled with how to teach the Holocaust.
Shayna, a teacher from Wisconsin, told us that she has her high school classes read Wiesel’s quintessential book on the Holocaust, Night, every year, but she now wanted to change how she teaches it. In the past, she asked students to respond to questions like, “How does the author’s relationship with his father affect his response to what happens to him?”
Now she wants to ask them to research an individual name in the book and, if possible, find out who he or she was and what they did before being murdered by the German Nazis.
On a brief tour of Krakow, Poland, we stood as a group next to the only remnant of the city’s ghetto wall, filling the sidewalk.
A young woman in a hooded jacket pointed her arms like a lance, shoving us aside as she cleared a path and quickly walked through the group. As she exited our circle, she stumbled, and I thought I saw a foot quickly withdraw from her path.
I looked across at the owner of the foot—a diminutive, bubbly woman from Georgia—and questioned her with my eyebrows. She smiled back with a slight nod.
Later, I asked her to confirm my impression, and she did, saying that she felt she had to do it because Jews are always so gentle. She said someone had to fight back for us.
A new exhibit at Auschwitz had walls of life-sized films about life before the years of World War II and the Shoah. The films showed Jews sunbathing at the beach, a father chasing his child in the waves, smiling young women in bathing suits, families walking in the park.
It was probably the most shocking exhibit we saw. These Polish Jews were individuals, as our guide insisted, with lives just like ours.
He emphasized the ambiguous moral nature of choices that people were forced to make. Who is willing to risk his own life and that of his family by hiding a neighbor?
Schindler saved hundreds of Jews, but he received the expropriated Jewish-owned enamel factory because he was German, and his business thrived because of Jewish slave labor. His status as a Righteous Gentile is controversial for that reason. But the factory windows are plastered with photos of the more than 1,200 Jews he saved.
For one of the final “torches” lit at the closing ceremony of the March, Irene Shashar, whose mother hid her in a cupboard in Warsaw during the war, appeared with Agam Berger and Omri Miran, Israeli hostages who were taken on Oct. 7 and had survived the nightmare of being held for months on end in tunnels in the Gaza Strip—for 482 and 738 days, respectively. With them was IDF Maj. Rabbi Shmuel Slotki, whose two soldier sons were killed as they fought Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terrorists on Oct. 7.
The torch symbolized the resilience of these individuals, who survived horrific attempts to exterminate the Jews.
Earlier, Berger had played on a violin carried through the Second World War by Motele Schlein, an orphaned boy who escaped Nazis using his precious instrument, playing on Belarus city streets disguised as a beggar. As he played, he listened to German soldiers and conveyed intelligence to Resistance fighters in the forests. Motele was shot and killed while running to warn the Jews that the Nazis were on the move. His friends saved the violin.
MOTL found the violin in the Yad Vashem warehouse 80 years later. Berger played it on April 14 in Motele’s memory.
The Passover Haggadah says, “In each and every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us.” The March of the Living reminds us that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
