At the former Nazi extermination camp of Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during World War II, thousands gathered Monday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day by singing the Israeli anthem in a deeply symbolic act of defiance and resilience.
This year's March of the Living, an annual educational program that brings people from around the world to Poland to study the Holocaust, took on heightened significance in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack in Israel – the deadliest antisemitic attack since WWII. Some 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered in the Hamas onslaught, shattering the vow of "never again."
Video: Live footage of the March of the Living
The main march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Monday drew 8,000 participants from dozens of countries, including 55 Holocaust survivors. Speakers drew parallels between the Nazi genocide and the recent events, with the march held under the theme of "solidarity and shared fate with the Jewish people."
"We stand here facing all our enemies, who seek time and again to harm us," Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency, said at an opening ceremony Sunday in Budapest marking 80 years since the Holocaust in Hungary. "In the spirit of [Jewish heroines] Hannah Senesh, in the spirit of Rose Lubin, in the spirit of thousands of soldiers who left everything and fought for the Jewish people, and for the State of Israel."
At Birkenau, seven torches were lit representing various commemorations - for Hungarian Jewish victims, all Holocaust victims, the commitment to fight antisemitism, Jewish unity, Holocaust education, the Righteous Among the Nations, and the rebirth of the Jewish people with Israel's founding.
The diverse participants included a delegation of Oct. 7 victims and their families, university presidents from the US seeking to counter campus antisemitism and Israeli singer Noa Kirel, descended from a Holocaust survivor grandfather.
"In such a difficult year for the Jewish people, I will march proudly...to cry out against antiדemitism," Kirel stated.
