Seventy years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish resolve it epitomized in the face of the Nazi death machine, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz will lead the March of the Living in Poland on Monday. Each year, thousands of Jews attend the March of the Living on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Auschwitz-Birkenau. This year's march will see the participation of Israeli students, Israeli soldiers and a delegation of the Israel Police headed by Deputy Commissioner Maj. Gen. Israel Yitzhak. Gantz is visiting Poland as part of the IDF's Witnesses in Uniform program, through which IDF officers tour the Nazi concentration camps in Europe. He is accompanied by his wife Revital and his son, Nadav, an enlisted soldier in the Paratroopers Brigade, and other members of the IDF top brass. Relatives of fallen soldiers are also part of the Witnesses in Uniform mission, as is Noam Gershony, a wounded veteran who fought in the 2006 Second Lebanon War and who won a gold medal at the London Paralympic Games last summer. Gantz's delegation will also visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Jewish quarters in Warsaw. For Gantz, the visit in Poland has a sentimental value because his mother, Malka, was a Holocaust survivor. Just last week, Gantz paid a special visit to Holocaust survivor Esther Friedman, who was saved by Gantz's mother. Holocaust Remembrance Day will officially commence at 8 p.m. Sunday with a state ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will speak at the ceremony. On Monday, a two-minute nationwide siren will sound at 10 a.m., after which a wreath-laying ceremony will begin at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial at Yad Vashem. Netanyahu and Peres will also attend that ceremony, along with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is visiting the region. "The central theme for this years Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day is Defiance and Rebellion during the Holocaust: 70 Years Since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising," says Yad Vashem on its website. Yad Vashem head Avner Shalev will launch the traditional torch-lighting ceremony and Aliza Vitis-Shomron will speak as the representative of the Holocaust survivors. Six torches will be lit in memory of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. Peretz Hochman, one of the leaders of the Polish uprising in Warsaw, was to have lit the first torch, but he died last week, and his widow, Sima, will now perform that role. The second torch will be lit by Otto Pressburger, a former prisoner at Auschwitz who later made aliyah and joined the pre-state Haganah militia and became a career officer in the IDF. The third torch will be lit by Dina Ostrover, who jumped from a moving train and later hid a Jewish couple. Eliezer Eizenschmidt, also an Auschwitz survivor who had to endure a death march toward the end of the war, will light the fourth torch. Miriam Liptcher, who was left sterile by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's human experimentation program, will light the fifth torch. Baruch Kopold, who fought the Nazis as a partisan, will light the sixth torch.
