Thousands of people from all over the world took part in a Holocaust memorial march on Thursday (May 5), walking down a 3-kilometre path linking the former Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The sound of the shofar, a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies, signalled the beginning of the march to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The “March of the Living” is both a silent tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and the name of an annual educational programme to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hate. Students visit the death camps created by the Nazis in the occupied Polish territories during World War Two.
Young people also get the rare opportunity to meet with the last witnesses of the Holocaust.
“To tell them, to educate them: this is the whole thing. That this never ever happens again,” one survivor, Edward Mosberg, told Reuters. Mosberg, who now lives in the United States, was accompanied at the march by his young granddaughter.
Auschwitz, located near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, has become a poignant symbol of the Holocaust which claimed six million Jewish lives across Europe.
Until the liberation of the camp area by the Red Army in 1945, around 1.5 million people were murdered there, mostly European Jews, but also Poles, Roma people, Soviet prisoners of war and homosexuals.
