Officials stress importance of keeping memory of the Holocaust alive

Events marking Holocaust Remembrance Day culminated Monday with the annual March of the Living in Poland, from Auschwitz to the Birkenau death camp, where thousands attended a commemoration ceremony.

Dozens of delegations of young Jews from all over the world attended the ceremony in the company of Holocaust survivors, delegations from Israel, and a delegation from the Israel Defense Forces project "Witnesses in Uniform," which educates Israeli soldiers about the Holocaust.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, Chief Justice Miriam Naor, and Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who is a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, led the march.

Bennett read verses from a number of Psalms and said that "these verses, written thousands of years ago by King David, demand that God not be silent in the face of those trying to kill his people. And standing here, on the blood-soaked ground of Auschwitz, the silence is deafening."

Bennett addressed the thousands of young people who took part in the march: "I want to urge you ... talk with the survivors who are here today. Listen to them. Remember their names, their stories, and their faces. Sadly, there are people who are trying to rewrite history and alter the facts. Some deny the Holocaust even happened. Others try to scale it down. They continue where the Nazis failed: to make it as though millions of Jews with parents, friends, wishes, and fears never existed. But they're wrong. They're evil. And they will fail. So talk with the survivors, so that one day you can tell your grandchildren, 'I was at Auschwitz with a survivor of the Holocaust.'"

March of the Living Chairman Dr. Shmuel Rosenman told the marchers that since the March of the Living began in 1988, over 250,000 youth from all over the world had taken part in the march along the tracks.

"We are walking in the spirit of the profound words of Dr. Elie Wiesel, of blessed memory, who said: 'When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.' We are determined to fulfill this, to embed the memory of the Holocaust in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world," Rosenman said, adding that the tragedy of the Holocaust must never become a "faded memory," but remain a memory that every human carried in his heart forever.

Elisha Wiesel, son of Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, said, "My father never forgot. The things he saw stayed with him all the days of his life. He lived to speak of them to me and to my children. My father was a witness. He was a witness to the worst atrocity man has ever unleashed on fellow man. And he was a witness who believed that to acknowledge the suffering of another and to have them feel less alone was an imperative for every human being."

The marchers included many Holocaust survivors, who served as living testimony to what took place in the concentration camps. Survivor Edward Mosberg of New Jersey marched with his granddaughter Jordana Karger, both wearing striped cotton shirts of the type concentration camp prisoners were forced to wear. Mosberg was carrying a Torah scroll in a special covering that bore the names of the Nazi extermination camps.

Survivor Ed Gitelman, who marched with his friends, carrying an Israeli flag and wearing special kippahs, said he was one of a group of 80 people who joined the march so that "everyone will remember and it won't happen again."

Gitelman, from Panama, said visiting the camps was a painful experience, but "we need everyone to learn from these things so it will not happen again."

Nate Reimer, a young man who attended the march with a group of friends from Los Angeles, calling visiting the place where people had been murdered and tortured and was now a site people were going to the trouble was visiting was a "real victory."

When the March of the Living was over, Bennett met with 12 education ministers from European countries, including Portugal, Austria, Malta, Hungary, and Greece, to sign a joint declaration to strengthen the memory of the Holocaust and contain anti-Semitism, racism, and Holocaust denial.

Bennett said in the meeting that "what appears in history books and what we see in movies is no longer enough, and the survivors are disappearing. In an age when Holocaust denial is gathering momentum and anti-Semitic activity is taking place on a daily basis everywhere, we must ensure that the memory of the 6 million murdered Jews be preserved forever."

Austrian Federal Education Minister Sonja Hammerschmid, who initiated the meeting, said, "Every country and society has its own episodes of painful history, be it connected to events of mass violence, to colonialism or others.

"Austria and Austrian schools need to confront the long history of anti-Semitism, including before the rise of the Nazis, and especially the involvement of so many Austrians in atrocities during World War II -- and foremost the Holocaust. We in Austria feel privileged to learn from the experiences of other countries -- like Israel -- and we gladly invite others to share ours."

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