The great grandson of American general Dwight D. Eisenhower will join scores of aging Holocaust survivors and the presidents of Israel and Poland on the March of the Living in Poland next month to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, organizers announced on Tuesday.
The annual march from Auschwitz to Birkenau will take place on April 24, marking 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the end of World War II.
Merrill Eisenhower will join Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Polish President Andrzej Duda alongside 80 Holocaust survivors ranging in age from 80 to 97. Some of the survivors were freed by U.S. and Allied troops led by his great grandfather, such as former Israeli Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a child survivor of Buchenwald who personally met General Eisenhower upon the camp’s liberation.
Half of the survivors attending the event live in Israel, and the other half are from various countries around the world.
“Marching in the March of the Living is a way to close the circle and fulfill the testament of my comrades…to tell their story of their heroism,” said Aliza Vitis-Shomron, one of the last surviving fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, who will be attending the event. “We have proven to the world, and to the Germans, that we survived the inferno, the valley of death, and that we built families who will march with us in the March of the Living, bringing pride to the State of Israel.”
More than 300,000 participants—including world leaders, educators, Holocaust survivors and both Jewish and non Jewish students from dozens of countries around the world—have taken part in the annual 2-mile walk along the railway tracks from Auschwitz to Birkenau since the New York-based educational program was founded nearly four decades ago.