Auschwitz march ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto

WARSAW, Poland – Thousands of people gathered at the former site of Auschwitz on Tuesday for the March of the Living, an annual Holocaust remembrance march taking place this year on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella spoke at the event, warning that ideas from the 1930s were making a comeback “at a time when Russia’s inhumane aggression against Ukraine is still raging.” He called the memory of the Holocaust “an eternal warning that cannot be ignored.”

“Hate, prejudice, racism, extremism, anti-Semitism, indifference, illusion and the hunger for power lurk, constantly challenging the conscience of individuals and nations,” said Mattarella, whose nation under dictator Benito Mussolini sided with Adolf Hitler’s Germany during the war. .

Participants in the event included Holocaust survivors who lived through the agony of Auschwitz or one of the other death camps where Nazi Germany tried and came close to exterminating Europe’s Jewish population.

Some attendees, including people from Israel and the United States, came face to face for the first time with something that had long been a part of their psyche: the watchtowers, the remains of the gas chambers and the huge piles of shoes, suitcases and other objects that the victims brought with them on their last trip.

German forces established Auschwitz after they invaded and occupied Poland during World War II, killing more than 1.1 million people there, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs, and others. In all, some 6 million European Jews died during the Holocaust.

Elderly survivors, some draped in Israel’s blue and white flag, gathered under the gate with the cynical words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes you free) before the march.

The event, while somber, is also a celebration of survival and the state of Israel, and some participants clapped and sang as they prepared to march near the gate.

The March of the Living, which takes place every year on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, began at that gate and led to Birkenau, the large encampment 3 kilometers (2 miles) away where Jews from all over Europe they were transported by train and murdered in gas chambers. .

Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, president of the march, said that the young participants would take responsibility for carrying forward the memory of the witnesses.

“They will be the voice of the voiceless once they see and understand what happened in the past,” he said.

Some of the participants planned to travel the next day to Warsaw to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, which will be attended by the presidents of Poland, Germany and Israel.

The revolt was the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and remains a potent national symbol for Israel.

On Tuesday, Polish Culture Minister Piotr Glinski attended a ceremony that symbolically marks a new stage in the development of a museum scheduled to open in three years, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Officials buried a “time capsule” containing memories and a message for future generations on the grounds of a former children’s hospital that will house the museum.

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Rafal Niedzielski contributed from Oswiecim, Poland.