News
The 23rd March of the Living
On April 28 the 23th March of the Living took place at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. Approximately ten thousand people, mostly young Jews from all around the world, but also a large group of Polish youth, marched from the 'Arbeit macht frei' gate at Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was the last March of the Living before the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp falling on 27th of January 2015.
This year, the organisers especially wanted to commemorate the round anniversary of the extermination of the Jews from Hungary. In 1944, Germans deported from this country to Auschwitz approximately 430 thousand Jews - men, women and children. More than 75 per cent of them were murdered immediately after arrival in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Those events will also be commemorated through a special anniversary project of the Museum carried out in social media.
'What is essential, is that everyone - especially young people, but not only them - gets to know the historical facts, learns the history and draws conclusions from what happened in Europe 70 years ago” said Aharon Tamir, Head of the March of the Living. 'Nowadays, we observe in Europe and elsewhere in the world an escalation of phenomena such as Holocaust denial, racism and aggressive anti-Semitism. This is why it is so important to know the facts and this is why we want to get as many people to see with their own eyes what happened 70 years ago,' he stressed.
The leaders of this year's march included delegation of judges of the Supreme Court of Israel led by its chairman Asher Grunis. Participants were joined in Auschwitz II-Birkenau by the President of Hungary János Áder.
The March of the Living ceremonies took place at the memorial at the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, near the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria II and III. In many places in the former camp, participants of the March left wooden plaques with the names of the murdered, symbolising Jewish gravestones (matzevas). Many of them were placed on the ramp where the Nazis carried out the selection of Jews brought from all over Europe.
The March of the Living has been organised since 1988 on the Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), whose date is related to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The first march was attended by approximately 1.5 thousand Jews. Since 1996, it has been held annually. The largest took place in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when it was attended by nearly 20 thousand people.
The Holocaust was an unprecedented attempt at mass murder through industrial methods, which has never before or ever since been carried out on such a scale. The idea was to lead to the "final solution of the Jewish question" - the murder of an entire nation. In Auschwitz, the largest extermination centre, the Germans exterminated more than one million one hundred thousand people, mostly Jews, but also including Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war and citizens of other nations.
