AUSCHWITZ – Standing between the cold remains of crematoriums two and three, where five thousand victims were reduced to ashes each day during the Holocaust, survivors, world leaders, and various dignitaries paid their respects on Thursday.
Polish President Andrzej Duda welcomed President Isaac Herzog, saying that Auschwitz was a “warning sign to the entire world.”
While Auschwitz was significant to the Jewish nation, Duda said, it was also the site where many Poles died as well.
The Nazi occupation of Poland
Turning to Herzog, Duda said, “We will walk together, the 47th March of the Living, in a symbolic manifestation of life, remembrance, and also a dramatic call: Never again.”
Herzog thanked Duda and said, “Standing here together, I hope we march together to a shared future built on a common past.”
He then read from the diary of Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit), who described the immense thirst and despair experienced by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
“While we are here, the souls of dozens of Jews still thirst for water and freedom,” Herzog said. “Returning the hostages is something all humanity must do; I call on the International community to join together and end this ongoing crime.”
“Once you have walked into Auschwitz, you will never come out the same person,” Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said.
“As I believe in personal relations, I was able to bring a delegation today of 40 diplomats from various areas such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. Sadly, it is harder to bring Western European diplomats to see Auschwitz,” Danon told The Jerusalem Post.
“It is very important for me that the entire world understands what happened on October 7,” he added.
Former hostages attend the ceremony
Eli Sharabi, who survived Hamas captivity, stood near the crematorium wrapped with the Israeli flag and said that, while the Holocaust cannot be compared to anything else in history, “We, who were kidnapped, are proof of the triumph of the Jewish spirit.”
Sharabi told the gathered audience that “the Jewish people hold life as scared, not death.”
“We have a country,” he said, “and it is a strong one. We call on all world leaders to return all the hostages home and bring those who are no longer alive back for burial in Israel.”
SHELLY SHEM TOV, the mother of Omer Shem Tov, who was released from Hamas captivity, said that upon seeing the pile of glasses on display at the museum in Auschwitz, she thought about “those who dropped their glasses when they were kidnapped and could not see, the children who hid in the closet and heard their being parents murdered.”
“My son returned, but there are still people trapped in a pit, crying out to be saved. We have a home now; we must bring them back,” she said.
Held under the slogan “Never Again is Now,” the memory of Holocaust survivor and Kibbutz Nir Oz educator Alex Dancyg also bridges past and present.
“He was my mentor when I became involved in the Witnesses in Uniforms program,” guide Zohar Malovski told the gathered reporters. “I have several academic degrees, but the time I spent under Alex’s guidance was the most meaningful.”
Dancyg , who kept up the spirits of fellow hostages kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7 in the Gaza tunnels by holding informal classes on Jewish history and civilization, was murdered.
Today, his legacy will continue digitally through an application that will spread his scholarship to those who visit the Auschwitz museum and his kibbutz.
“Alex was a walking encyclopedia on what it meant to be a Polish Jew, both before and after the war,” Malovski shared.
“His son, Yuval, is working on building a dialogue center where an ongoing dialogue between Poles and Jews, especially among members of the younger generations, can thrive.”
Among the 12,000 visitors was Jewish teenager Veronica Uri from Budapest, who was wearing a shirt designed by American pop artist Keith Haring. Having come out as a gay man who openly discussed being infected with HIV in the media during the 1980s, Haring’s vivid and easily communicative works endure to this day.
Roughly 15,000 gay men died in the Nazi-built camps. Those who the Nazis marked with the pink triangle (Rosa Winkel) that signified their supposed sexual orientation “never lived long,” a Polish member of the European Parliament, Robert Biedroń, wrote in reference to Dachau.
Viktor, a young man in the uniform of the School of Forestry in Tuchola, Poland, came to honor Polish forester Adam Loret. The school was named after Loret, a pioneer of understanding and cultivating the forest’s resources in Poland. Loret was murdered by the USSR while attempting to rescue the Polish state’s forestry records.
All Polish security service members wore red triangles on their lapels, honoring the Poles who perished during the occupation of Poland.
Bridging the gap between the Jewish past and this digital age, a TikTok delegation of content creators participated in this year’s March of the Living as well. Guided by Suzana Nahum Zilberberg, Batel Sananes Mekaitten learned about how Jewish children attempted to survive the Nazi occupation in the sewer tunnels of Poland’s capital.
“I was here as a high-school student, but coming here as a mother of two sons is an entirely different story,” she shared with her followers, who number over 300,000.