27th March of the Living with Presidents
of Poland and Israel
Paweł Sawicki
On 12 April, the 27th March of the Living was held on the site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. More than 12,000 people - mainly young Jews, as well as 2,000 Polish youth - gathered at the “Arbeit macht frei” gate of the former Auschwitz I camp to march to the premises of the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The March was led by the Presidents of Poland and Israel - Andrzej Duda and Reuven Rivlin.
The March of the Living has taken place for 30 years. The first March was organised in 1988. This year’s March was 75 years after the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Before the official commencement of the March, the Presidents of Poland and Israel visited the hall with the Book of Names at the “Shoah” exhibition in block 27 - with over 4.2 million names of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Then, they commemorated the victims of the Nazi German camp by placing candles at the Death Wall in the courtyard of Block 11, where the SS men shot and killed about 5,500 people, primarily Poles.
After passing through the “Arbeit macht frei” gate, the participants walked from the site of the former Auschwitz I camp to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The main ceremony was held at the memorial commemorating the victims of the camp, located near the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria II and III. Six symbolic candles were lit symbolizing the six million victims of the Holocaust.
"We meet at the place where Nazi Germans perpetrated the most horrendous genocide in history. It is beyond comprehension how such cruel crimes could have been committed," said President Andrzej Duda.
"We come here together – Jews, the nation of Survivors, and Poles, the nation who was also brutally persecuted by Hitler`s Third Reich – in order to jointly pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. We come together because we do remember and want to pass on the truth about what happened here to future generations," he added.
"That very coexistence of our nations was brutally interrupted by Germans, who imposed their own, inhumane laws upon the occupied Polish lands. They confined Jews to ghettos and punished those who assisted them with death. They wanted to break solidarity among the citizens of the Republic of Poland; they separated our nations with walls and barbed wire fences. Despite that, Poles helped Jewish people in many different ways," Duda emphasized, citing the example of the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota”, as well as people who helped to convey information about the Holocaust to the free world, among others Calvary Capt. Witold Pilecki and Jan Karski.
"Auschwitz concentration camp was established in the spring of 1940, with its first inmates being representatives of the Polish elites active in the anti-German resistance movement. Soon more camps followed, including the largest one in Birkenau on the premises of which we are standing right now. In that way, the former Polish-Jewish town of Oświęcim vanished in the shadows of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And the land of Polin – a blessed place which for centuries welcomed Jews from abroad fleeing persecution – turned into the place of the Shoah, ominously prepared by Germans - said the Polish president.
The March began from the 'Arbeit macht frei' of the former Auschwitz I camp. Photo by Wojciech Grabowski