Young and Old, Jew and Gentile Come Together for March of Living

Nazis murdered Mary Karaso’s entire family at Birkenau. Her mother, father and three siblings all died at the notorious death camp. And yet, sitting in a wheelchair just a few feet from the train tracks on which cattle cars herded her relatives into the camp — and looking out at row after row of the red-brick barracks that were likely their last home — Karaso felt satisfied.

“I very much wanted to be here, to see this place, to make a Kaddish here before I die,” the 85-year-old Karaso said May 5. “Now I am peaceful and satisfied.”

Karaso was part of a Greek delegation to the March of the Living, an annual event that, in normal years, brings Jewish teenagers to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day to march from Auschwitz to nearby Birkenau, where most of the camps’ prisoners were gassed. That is followed by a trip to Israel to mark the Jewish State’s Memorial Day and Independence Day.

Because this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Allied defeat of the Nazis, march organizers opened the trip to groups that have not previously been included — adults, multicultural groups, university students and young professionals.

They came from Russia and Romania, Panama and Poland, Ukraine and the United States — and from roughly 50 other nations — to remember and to honor, to mourn and to warn.

There were financial planners from New York and policemen from Austria, representing groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League to the Polish Jewish Student Union.

Some wore kippot, some the black hats of the fervently religious; others sported baseball caps. Some wrapped themselves in Israeli flags, some in windbreakers; still others wore the habits of Catholic nuns or priests’ collars.

They all marched through a chilly rain along the 1.8 miles of bucolic roadway linking the two camps that comprised the killing center where the largest number of Jews were gassed, shot, beaten, starved and burned to death during World War II.

The marchers passed through the gates at Birkenau and moved into the area where the Nazis’ infamous selection process was carried out. From there, they circled behind yard after yard of barbed wire and onto a large field for what march organizers said was the largest-ever Holocaust memorial ceremony.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hustled into the ceremony under a tight security cordon, asked those in attendance to “remember those who were sacrificed, and remember the murderers,” adding, “Remember the silence of the world.”

The Israeli flag, visible everywhere throughout the large crowd, “was missing so much here 60 years ago,” Sharon said. “Remember that; do not ever forget it.”

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel delivered the event’s keynote address.

“Here in this place, one could have thought that this was the end of Jewish history,” he said.

“Jewish history has not ended here,” he added. “It was wounded and remained alive, filled with renewed creative energy.”

Also attending the ceremony were 30 members of the German Parliament; education ministers from some 35 countries; more than a dozen members of Knesset; Marek Belka, the prime minister of Poland; the U.S. and British ambassadors to Poland; and Edward O’Donnell, the American special envoy for Holocaust issues.

“The Holocaust is not about the past only; it’s about what happens” now, O’Donnell told JTA. “It’s about the lessons.”

Groups from around the world dispersed throughout Krakow and Warsaw on Wednesday to tour sites central to the once-thriving Polish Jewish community and to the Jews who lived here under German occupation.

They visited synagogues and cemeteries in Krakow’s old Jewish district, the ghetto into which Krakow’s Jews were relocated by the Nazis and the factory in which businessman Oskar Schindler saved dozens of Jewish lives.

On Krakow’s central square, a young boy could be heard asking his mother in Spanish, “Manana Auschwitz?” or “Auschwitz tomorrow?”

In a stirring Yom Hashoah address Wednesday evening just outside the main synagogue of Krakow’s prewar Jewish community, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, told some 5,000 people gathered to mark the occasion that the ground on which they stood, where Polish Jewry had thrived, was “holy ground.”

Foxman, whose ADL sent six groups totaling 240 people on the march, invoked what he called the “11th Commandment”: “Never again to be silent” in the face of hatred, bigotry, racism and oppression.

No matter how often he addresses the Nazi genocide publicly, it’s always a very personal experience, he said.

“I say to myself, ‘How many more times can one live through it?’ ” Foxman told JTA. “You ask yourself, ‘Can I cry again?’ And the answer is yes.”

“The Poles and the Germans would like it to be over, but it’s not over,” he added. “If it’s not over for me; it’s not over for them.”

Sebastian Schonberg, 16, a German studying the history of World War II in a high-school history class near Cologne, said he joined the march to clear his name.

“It’s a little strange to come here,” he said, waiting at the gate to enter Auschwitz. “Our last generation did this here. I feel very bad about the past. We want to show that we are not like the last generation.”

Olivia Bettan, 21, a student from Paris, said she came in defiance — to make a point in the face of rising anti-Semitism in her country.

“I’m here today to remember the memory of all the Jews killed and to remind the next generation,” she said, standing mere feet from the first crematorium built by the Nazis at Auschwitz. “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism again in France. It’s very important to make clear that we are all together so that it will never happen again.”

Walking alone through the first floor of a dank building that once was a barracks housing Jewish prisoners, just a short distance from the building in which Nazi doctors performed sometimes-deadly sterilization experiments on Jewish women, an Israeli lieutnenant colonel marveled at “how important it is that Israel exists.”

“The opportunity to come and stand here as an Israeli air force man, in uniform, is a very big honor,” said Yitzhak, 48, who could not give his family name for security reasons. “Today, it wouldn’t be a simple matter to do this to us again.”

Thursday was Sister Joseph Spring’s third time visiting the camps. Spring, 59, said that as she learns more about the Holocaust she feels increasingly compelled to teach adults and youngsters about the genocide.

“I think it was the most cataclysmic tragedy of the 20th century,” said Spring, who spent five years in charge of curriculum development for 56 New Jersey-area Catholic schools. “I don’t look at this as a Jewish issue. It’s just as much a Christian responsibility.”

“We have a responsibility to atone,” she added.

Gladys Beata, 21, isn’t entirely sure if she’s Jewish. Her grandmother converted to Christianity around the time the Nazis came to power, but she won’t talk about why or what religion she practiced beforehand. It’s not an uncommon story in Poland, where many young Jews were raised by Christian Poles in an effort to save them from the Nazi war machine.

Either way, Beata marched. Growing up near vast killing grounds was difficult to swallow, she said.

“I grew up with this thing, that something like this could happen here,” she said. “When I was young, my mother told me what happened and I couldn’t believe it. It’s a hard part of history, but we have to remember.”

The ceremony also included a performance of the Yiddish song “My Yiddishe Mama” by Israeli cantor and Broadway star Dudu Fisher, along with the chanting of El Maleh Rachamim, a traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, and the recitation of Kaddish.

And so, after 60 years, Karaso of Greece — along with 18,000 others — at long last was able to recite Kaddish for the family she lost at the site of their deaths.

As the ceremony drew to a close with the singing of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, hundreds of blue and white flags blew in the wind, no longer missing at Birkenau.