March of the Living U.S. Students See Pain of Past but Are Inspired to Hope in the Future

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen — all these people headed to the same place for the same reason,” Dganit Abramoff, 16, said. Dganit was one of 51 students from Los Angeles who lined up with 18,000 people from about 50 countries to walk the 1.8 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau, following in the footsteps of concentration camp prisoners marched to the gas chambers 60 years ago.

She was taking part in March of the Living 2005, an educational program founded in 1988 in which Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers from around the world, along with adults and an ever-decreasing number of survivors, travel to Poland and Israel. The march itself takes place on Yom Hashoah, which fell this year on May 5, a chilly, gray day spattered with intermittent heavy rain.

“This experience turns history into personal memory. These students will take on the task of becoming witnesses to the Shoah for the next generation,” said Stacie Barrett, director of youth education series for the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education. She led the 51-member Los Angeles-area delegation.

But the trip wasn’t only about the Holocaust. On Sunday the group flew to Israel, cheering as the El Al plane landed at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Emily Lorber, 17, one of the four teenagers in the group who never had been to Israel before, stared out the window, transfixed by her first look at the Jewish state.

“The center of Jewish life has transferred from Central Europe” to Israel, said Yoni Bain, 18.

But the members of the group are unlikely to forget what they had seen in Poland.

And though the students accepted the responsibility of becoming witnesses, many clearly had come with individual expectations. For David Grossman, 18, the trip was an opportunity to struggle with God and make the Holocaust more personal.

Eliyah Shachar, 18, came to understand her grandmother’s pain. And Max Kappel, 17, wanted to find a tangible place to help make sense of what he had learned about the Holocaust.

What all the students quickly discovered was that they couldn’t anticipate what they’d feel, or when they’d feel it.

For some, the march was the high point of the week, as they walked in small clusters, near participants from South Africa and Siberia, France and Canada, following behind the “L.A. Youth USA” placard that Yoni held high.

Abby Schwartz, 18, found herself talking to a group of 37 Polish Boy Scouts. The scouts, who ranged from 13 to 20 years old and whose uniforms were a military tan, came from the southern town of Opola. “We came here because we know there’s pain here. The Germans killed these people,” scout Michael Hoffman, 16, said.

Sarah Warren, 17, marched with her mother, Jackie Heller, part of a second Los Angeles contingent of 25 adults. They talked about Heller’s grandmother, who hid in eastern Poland during the Holocaust and whose entire family was killed.

The day before, in Krakow’s cemetery next to the Remu Synagogue, Sarah, along with the rest of the teen group, had visited the grave of her ancestor, Reb Yom Tov Lipman Heller, the 17th-century head rabbi of Poland.

“Your heritage always feels like it’s so far away, but today for the first time I feel that I can grasp it,” Sarah said.

Six more chaperones — educators, rabbis and a social worker — accompanied the group, along with Holocaust survivor Nandor “Marko” Markovic, 82, and his wife Frances.

Markovic often talked to the students about his life, telling them how the Nazis invaded his shtetl, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1941, and took his father away. A year later, they arrested Markovic, then 16, his mother, his brother, two sisters and other family members, and shipped them by cattle car to Birkenau. All were immediately killed except for Markovic and his brother, who were transferred to a series of work camps.

Later, as the war was ending, they were sent on a forced death march. After many weeks, Markovic collapsed, wanting to die. His brother kissed him goodbye.

Afterward, an SS soldier put a gun to his head, then didn’t shoot. “For you I won’t waste a bullet,” the Nazi said. “You are dead already.”

But the students on the trip inspired Markovic. “You give me hope,” he told the teenagers.

And Ari Giller, 18, an Asian adoptee who has always felt disconnected from his heritage, drew inspiration from Markovic, as did many of the teens. “It’s pretty intense how he went through this huge ordeal and came out a faithful Jew with a good attitude,” Ari said. “He makes me feel good about humanity.”