Against the twin backdrops of Israel at war and rising Jew-hatred around the world, some 7,000 people from around the world marked Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, by marching the two miles between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Poland.
Known as the International March of the Living, the annual event is designed to create a new generation of witnesses to the murder of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The task is taking greater importance as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles.
“Our job in being here in Poland, and standing in Auschwitz and Birkenau and all these other places, is to be part of the next generation of witnesses,” Evan Ravski, rabbi of Synagogue Emanu-El, a Conservative synagogue in Charleston, S.C., told JNS before joining the march.
“We are becoming that legacy, we’re becoming that memory, and it’s becoming our responsibility—our obligation to carry that memory on,” he said.
The 38th annual march began under the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes You Free”) sign at Auschwitz and ended with a ceremony of almost two hours culminating in the singing of “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”), the Israeli national anthem.
Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, told attendees that the Nazis worked to strip their victims “of their humanity” and “erase their stories.”
He said the march renders the Nazis’ plans null and void, ensuring that ”the stories of the survivors are told and the stories of those who perished are told, and their memories will not be forgotten. ”
But concerns about ongoing violence in the Middle East and the spike in Jew-hatred since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, shared the podium with concerns over the Holocaust.
“Every year, the march dedicates itself to whatever is happening in the world,” Monise Neumann, national consultant for March of the Living, told JNS. “While the underlying theme is becoming the torch bearers, there certainly is a different focus based on world events.”
‘I need to become a witness’
Fifty Holocaust survivors led the march—10 from Israel—though another 1,000 participants scheduled to arrive from the Jewish state couldn’t attend because of the ongoing military actions against Hezbollah and Iran.
Agam Berger and Omri Miran, whom Israel liberated after Hamas took them hostage on Oct. 7, participated in the ceremony, as did survivors of the antisemitic attacks at Sydney’s Bondi Beach and in Manchester, in the United Kingdom. So did Abbie Talmoud and Catherine Szkop, whose co-workers at the Israeli embassy, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were gunned down on a street in Washington, D.C.
Talmoud, 25, told JNS that “we keep saying ‘Never again,’ but clearly that didn’t happen.”
“I lived through something that proved we did not learn our lesson,” she said.
“It could have been my name added to the Book of Names,” Szkop, 29, of Michigan, told JNS, of the book displayed at the death camp, and elsewhere, with the names of many of the 6 million Jews Holocaust victims.
The crowd at the march was predominantly but not exclusively Jewish. Imams marched. So did non-Jews from Poland and Hungary and police officers from around the world.
“Having people like that, who are here, who are not Jewish and who otherwise don’t necessarily have a direct connection to the Holocaust or to what happened here, having them as ambassadors to go back and share their story, sometimes it’s even more powerful than coming from within the Jewish community itself,” Rabbi Mitchell Berkowitz of B’nai Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Rockville, Md., told JNS.
“Of course, it’s important for us to do this. I think Jews should have the opportunity to do this and to become the next generation of witnesses, but it can’t stay within the Jewish community,” he said. “We need to make sure others are part of this as well.”
The marchers included Anita Zucker of Charleston, S.C., board chair of a family-owned company and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She said that she regularly speaks at schools about the Holocaust—485 children this year alone, from fifth grade and to high school.
“I need to become a witness,” Zucker told JNS. “My parents were my witnesses, and they’re no longer here, and so for me, it was very important that I see this with my own eyes and take it all in so I can become, as they say, that agent of memory and that agent that becomes the witness.”
‘Just by being alive’
Among those who marched was a group of six Jewish members of the New Jersey State Police force, the Jewish Troopers Association. (The acting police superintendent, Jeanne Hengemuhle, the first woman to hold that post, stood on stage during the ceremony honoring police officers protecting citizens against antisemitism.)
“If we were here in the 1940s, we wouldn’t be here talking about this,” Lt. Marc Zislin, president of the association, told JNS. “What’s significant about all this now, 80-plus years later, is the fact that we can be here in uniform as Jews.”
Risa Prince, of Hilton Head, S.C., is president of the Low Country Coalition Against Hate in her home state. The group was formed in 2018 in response to a Holocaust denier running for mayor. (He lost.)
“What I didn’t know what to expect was how I would be changed from this trip,” Prince, whose husband Mark was the son of Holocaust survivors, told JNS.
“What I have found is a way of dealing with it that allows me to say, ‘The Nazis failed, and we succeeded just by being here, just by being alive,’” she said. “Even in the worst of humanity, hope wins.”
Nate Leipciger, 98, a Canadian who was participating in his 22nd March of the Living, told JNS that the “form of antisemitism may change, its language may evolve, but the consequences are always the same—tragic.”
“I still do not understand how I survived and am here,” said the Slovakian-born Naftali Fürst, 93, of the northern Israeli port city of Haifa.
“I feel I am the weight of those who were murdered and could not be here,” he told JNS. “I am their spokesperson.”
“Antisemitism has been normalized, and has become a way of life,” said Yoni Finlay, 40, of Manchester, who was seriously injured in the Yom Kippur synagogue attack.
“I don’t know if there is even shock anymore,” he told JNS. “We are just waiting for the next attack.”
Jim Skinner, sheriff of Collin County, Texas, was part of a delegation of 130 law enforcement officials from around the world.
He told JNS that the event closed a circle for him, as he visited Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks, and highlighted the consequences of hate and motivated him to redouble his efforts to confront Jew-hatred.
Loay Al-Sharaf, a social-media influencer in Abu Dhabi who was part of a group of 30 Muslims who support the Abraham Accords, at the march, told JNS that “the Nazis are still not completely defeated, because people believe like the Nazis.
At one point in the march, a delegation of Israeli soldiers and officers stopped to salute a group of survivors.
“If you were here, none of this would have happened,” the Warsaw-born survivor Irene Shashar, 88, whose mother smuggled her out of the Warsaw Ghetto, told the Israeli soldiers.
“We have to be united and not divided,” said the survivor, who lives in the central Israeli city of Modi’in. “We have to remember to not just cry over the dead but to yearn for a better life and future.”
Jonathan D. Salant has been a Washington correspondent for more than 35 years and has worked for such outlets as Newhouse News Service, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, NJ Advance Media and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A former president of the National Press Club, he was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists D.C. chapter’s Journalism Hall of Fame in 2023.
Etgar Lefkovits, an award-winning international journalist, is an Israel correspondent and a feature news writer for JNS. A native of Chicago, he has two decades of experience in journalism, having served as Jerusalem correspondent in one of the world’s most demanding positions. He is currently based in Tel Aviv.