News
Extend Your Hands to Each Other...
Over 1,500 young Jews from all over the world, accompanied by Holocaust survivors and a group of several hundred Poles, walked the three-kilometer road between the sites of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps. President Aleksander Kwaśniewski of Poland and President Moshe Katsav of Israel were special guests.
Before starting out on the March, the guests laid wreaths at the Death Wall and President Katsav planted a tree in front of Block no. 27, which houses the exhibition dedicated to the martyrdom of the Jews. The birch tree commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, and the Jewish resistance movement in the ghettos and concentration camps.
The main ceremony began once the marchers arrived at the ruins of the Birkenau gas chambers. Avraham Hirschschon, who conceived the idea of the March, said that the time had come for Polish and Jewish young people to extend their hands to each other, share responsibility, and fight against Holocaust denial.
Addressing the participants, President Kwaśniewski referred to the signet ring offered to Shevach Weiss, ambassador of Israel in Poland, by the children of a former camp inmate. Kwaśniewski said that the story of the ring exemplifies the commonality of the fates of the Jews and the Poles.
"We join with you in the awe that overwhelms everyone in this place. We, too, feel the pain that fills you, for the Jews exterminated by the Nazis were citizens of the country we live in. These Polish Jews had been connected with the Republic, for better or worse, for hundreds of years. It was precisely here that they built their culture, cherished their traditions and customs, and influenced the growth of local communities. Three quarters of the Jews scattered throughout the world today have their roots right here! Over three million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War. They lived their lives to a rhythm unknown anywhere else. Those lives radiated energy and were refracted in a splendid palette of colors.
"Summoning up this image is doubly necessary: in order to say that the history of the Jews in Poland is not only their Destruction, and also in order to discover, among the terrifying numbers of victims, the faces of these people, their achievements, their passions, and their everyday lives."
President Katsav and Meier Lau, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, also spoke. Then survivors lighted six candles, commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the war.
In conclusion, Yehuda Schwarz called on those present to recite the Kaddish. Schwarz was born in Gorlice, Poland, and lived there until the outbreak of the war. He was liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Of his whole family, only he survived the war.
