MARCHING
WITH PRECIOUS SURVIVORS
This year’s delegation of March of the Living UK marked a sombre moment in post-war history. Poignantly, it might be the last time those travelling to the major sites of the Shoah are accompanied by survivors.
This was my second March of the Living and as we walked through Auschwitz-Birkenau I felt a sense of shock when I realised I had become slightly desensitised as I stood on those infamous train tracks, looking upon the rubble of the gas chambers and crematoriums.
We have all spoken about the six million before but it is a number impossible to visualise. However, looking at two tonnes of human hair, tenst of thousands of shoes, glasses, suitcases, pots, and pans, housed in the barracks of Auschwitz I, something in me broke.
It is the closest you can get to comprehending that each life was murderously stolen – and yet it is still not enough.
As I stood there looking at people from around the world pouring over the Book of Names, desperately searching for ones they might recognise, I felt a wave of pain and resolve. Tragically, there will never be enough time and it is also impossible to learn about every victim of the Holocaust.
But there, in one of the darkest places on earth, Jews and allies had gathered at their own volition, to bear witness.
The trip itself was much more than a visit to Auschwitz. The itinerary of the programme was expertly organised to educate about the whole gamut of the Nazis’ cruelty in the Holocaust. We visited the sites of ghettos in Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow, small spaces where hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. We read testimonies of life under such hardship, where hundreds of thousands perished in the appalling conditions.
We learnt of brave acts of defiance – including armed resistance – of those who against all odds found the strength to fight.
We also visited sites of mass graves in various forests. These ‘killing pits’ are so striking today as the memorials marking these acts of such evil, sit against the backdrop of peaceful, idyllic nature. At one site, we heard the testimony of Mala Tribich.
Her strength and composure was remarkable as she stood where her mother and sister were shot. On my previous delegation I had visited Majdanek, a death and concentration camp, and Belzec, an extermination camp.
This year, we visited Treblinka, an extermination camp active from July 1942 to October 1943, where up to 925,000 Jews were slaughtered. Unlike Majdanek, which was left largely intact, Belzec and Treblinka are now memorial sites, as the physical evidence of the camps’ existence were entirely erased by the Nazi regime.
The few testimonies we have were left by the few who managed to escape or survive as Sonderkommandos (Jews who were forced to help operate the Nazi camp system), those like Treblinka survivor Hershl Sperling.
Talia Ingleby, a member of the World Jewish Congress Jewish Diplomat Corps, reflects on her life-changing participation in this year’s March of the Living UK delegation.
Talia Ingleby* (article from Jewish News UK)