Thousands mark Jewish heroism with ‘March of the Living’ at Auschwitz camp

(i24) Thousands of people gathered at Poland’s former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Tuesday to mark Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day with the “March for the Living,” an annual rally that commemorates the victims and survivors of the genocide.

The crowd of some 9,000 people, mostly Jewish, included Holocaust survivors who lived through the despair of Auschwitz or another death camp where Nazi Germany sought to kill off Europe’s Jewish population. Marchers, some draped in Israel’s blue and white flag, followed the route from Auschwitz’s infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate to the Birkenau site, the scene of the camp’s two main gas chambers.

The march featured seven torchbearers – six for each million Jews murdered and an additional one to celebrate the State of Israel. Among the torchbearers were U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides and his immediate predecessor, David Friedman.

This year’s theme was “Jewish heroism,” as some of the participants will travel to Warsaw on Wednesday for observances marking the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which will be attended by the presidents of Poland, Germany, and Israel. The Uprising was the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

German forces established Auschwitz after they invaded and occupied Poland, and killed more than 1.1 million people there, most of them Jews but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. In all, about six million European Jews died during the Holocaust.