AUSCHWITZ – Irene Shashar was a child when she hid in the sewer tunnels of Nazi-occupied Warsaw; on Tuesday, she held hands with former IDF soldier Ori Megidish, kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 terror attack and rescued from the Gaza tunnels by Israel’s security forces.
“We defeated the enemy, all of us, each in a different way.” Shashar said as they embraced and wept under the infamous camp entrance bearing the German words Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free).
Wrapped in the blue and white flag of Israel, Agam Berger, another former military spotter kidnapped by Hamas, hugged Holocaust survivor Gita Koifman.
“This is a special march. I want people to remember it forever,” Koifman told The Jerusalem Post.
“There is a danger Auschwitz will be forgotten. It must never be dropped from memory. The world is cruel, and we [Jews] never know what is waiting for us,” she said and burst into tears.
In the Hall of Names, representatives of all branches of the IDF searched for the names of their relatives. The massive pages contain the names of four million eight hundred thousand Holocaust victims with known names, places of birth, and the locations they were slain at.
One million and two hundred thousand murdered Jews are missing; these compose “the unseen million” historians and researchers strive to rescue from oblivion.
Surviving Nazi death camps
Roughly eight thousand visitors paid their respects at Auschwitz on Tuesday in English, Hebrew, French, and Polish.
As different groups walked, it seemed that a strange fold in time and space took place at the museum site, with yellow paper-cut Stars of David, worn by many Poles last week to mark the Jewish Ghetto Uprising, seen alongside yellow ribbons, worn by Israelis, calling for the return of those still held captive by Hamas.
The block where Primo Levi was sick with scarlet fever is there, as are the blocks that hosted Soviet POWs, brutally killed in their thousands by the SS, and the black and white photographs of the Polish inmates who were hanged in July, 1943, in the largest execution in the camp’s history.
Part of the monstrosity of the Germans, Levi wrote in his 1975 book The Periodic Table, was that you had to be healthy enough for them to murder you. Inmates were forced to work, and part of the sadism was that an orchestra was created to march them off and greet them when they returned.
Shmuel Gogol, who was given his harmonica by Janusz Korczak when he was living in the Warsaw Jewish orphanage, survived by playing it in the orchestra. Korczak was murdered in Treblinka, as were his beloved orphans.
Four other death camps, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno, form the hellscape where the Jewish people of Europe were murdered. Auschwitz was where the trains from Romania, Hungary, Corfu, and other places finally stopped.
It was where 90% of the passengers were gassed and burnt to ashes shortly after arriving. This is why it became the memorial site that most educated people on Earth imagine when they think about the Holocaust.
Part of the Nazi mechanism was that money looted from Jewish communities paid for their own transportation.
The Nazis wanted to eliminate political opposition, explained Zohar Malovski, a licensed guide of the camp’s history and one of the pillars of the IDF Witnesses in Uniform program, to the gathered reporters.
“When you send a family the ashes of an opposition activist, no message can be more terrible. Especially when the family is asked to pay a few marks to cover the cost of the delivery,” he added.
Holocaust survivor Naftali Furst spoke with prison inmates, hi-tech workers, and President Isaac Herzog during this year’s Zikaron Basalon (Memory in the Living Room), transmitted from the President’s House on Tuesday evening. Furst was liberated from Buchenwald by the US Army.
“I actually feel closer to the prison inmates than to the hi-tech workers,” he told the Post.
“They understand what I went through; they are all in uniform, they are all men, and I can feel the pain they are in.”Furst survived the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. He is adamant that Auschwitz was “an industry of murder” and that “this is the only place in the world where this has happened.”
When Rudolf Höss commanded Auschwitz, his children asked him about the smoke rising from the chimney.“It is the Jewish devil blowing away,” he told them.
When Furst visited Germany, he spoke in parliament and said that it is mind-boggling to realize educated engineers went to work each day to design the most efficient ovens, where humans could be incinerated effectively, and then went home and enjoyed some music on the radio.
“When I came to Israel in 1944, the Holocaust was not spoken about,” he said. “We were asked: ‘How could you allow so few people to commit such horrors to you?’”
“I suspect that, in 2050, those who will be young then will ask us how did we permit our country to crumble into such an abysmal state that has no end in sight. I was given a Zionist, Socialist education which called for love between nations and peace. The first thing is to be a mensch (a human being).”
Arne Rabuchin, a loyal Post reader since he came to Israel in the 1980s, is alive today thanks to the Danish resistance.
“8,000 Danish Jews were able to escape to Sweden, among them my parents. This is my second visit to Auschwitz,” he said.
Good-humored, Rabuchin is happy to share how he was sent to Lebanon by the IDF during his service without knowing a word of Hebrew or of his time working with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) on the Israeli-Egyptian border.
He becomes more serious when he discusses what he sees in the world today.
“The antisemitism we see around the globe is terrible,” he said.
Herzog and Polish President Andrzej Duda will lead the March of the Living on Wednesday from Auschwitz to Birkenau, marking 80 years of the camp’s liberation.
They will be joined by Holocaust survivors, who will walk alongside Merrill Eisenhower, the great-grandson of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in honor of the sacrifice of the Allied forces during WWII.
Former hostages, bereaved families, and IDF soldiers will march together under the message “Never Again Is Now.”