Traveling for a week to Poland on the 80th Anniversary of Liberation left me with many questions. By taking this important journey, it showed me we must build hope for tomorrow. As the child of Holocaust survivors and Holocaust Director, what I saw was difficult to comprehend.
Since 1988, the International March of the Living (MOL), has planned trips for high school students, survivors, and adults to visit historic sites around the significant date on the Jewish calendar: Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. This embodies collective memory and celebrated with intense emotion. On Yom HaShoah we remember the Six Million who perished. They died with the hope that some Jews would survive to continue the legacy and heritage of Judaism.
The trip was so meaningful in many ways. No words can express the emotions marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau with 8000 participants from around the world on the International March of the Living.
I was proud to join the Florida Southern Region for the experience of a lifetime. After seeing heavy emotional historical sites left me with many questions. There are many answers to “how can this happen? “The take away is learn from the past and never let this happen again.
I walked the path of memory and resilience with students, adults, and survivors on the March of the Living 2025. There are no words that fully capture what it means to be a part of this program.
Being with this group is more than a responsibility, it is a sacred honor. Each step of the trip felt heavy with history, but also lit with the strength of those who remember and those who now carry the memory forward. Watching the students listen and learn with reverence, ask questions with empathy was so powerful.
The Ghetto Heroes Square was a place where the Krakow Ghetto was liquidated. Photographs of children carrying chairs inspired an artist to create a memorial at that site. It consists of 33 oversized bronze chairs, each representing 1000 Jews. Vacant and sparsely occupying the vast space of the square, the Empty Chairs powerfully evoke the absence of the annihilated Jews.
One of the many highlights experienced on April 24th, was walking the 1.8-mile path from Auschwitz to Birkenau with so many from all over the world. The Shofar sound started the March with first the dignitaries such as the President of Poland and President of Israel. After them, followed 80 Holocaust survivors, then thousands of high school students and last marched the adults. At the end when we walked into Birkenau, the air felt like we were walking into history. Each step made me think of those that walked that path 80 years earlier. Just as the ceremony started, it was cut short to 15 minutes due to thunderstorms. How meaningful that after walking in the mud and rain, I got to go into a dry, warm bus. It really was an event with a very positive feeling of we are here today and Hitler did not kill all the Jews. That night, I could not help thinking of the million people that were killed in the same spot I walked today.
The next day, we visited the Lodz Ghetto and cemetery. Once home to Europe’s second largest Jewish community (after Warsaw), with 230,000 Jews living there. This cemetery was established in 1892 and was once the largest Jewish cemetery in Poland and one of the largest in the world. The cemetery contains from 180,000 to 230,000 marked graves,
as well as mass graves of victims of the Ghetto and the Holocaust. Standing in the location showed me how many lives were taken in a small area. The cemetery continues to function as a Jewish burial site. Today the Lodz Jewish community numbers approximately 300 and includes some survivors.
Visiting the Polin Museum in Warsaw was very eye opening about the history of Jews in Poland. On the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, we saw an exhibition dedicated to Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and about their postwar experiences. It is a story about people who tried to rebuild their lives on the ruins of the old world. There were few of them, as 90% of the Polish Jewish community perished at the hands of Nazi perpetrators. Deprived of nearly everything—their nearest and dearest, their community and their home—they faced a dramatic choice: to stay or to leave?
The next death camp we went to, Majdanek, located near the city of Lublin, covered an area of 667 acres. Double barbed-wire fence connected to a high voltage line surrounded it; 19 watchtowers, each 26.5 feet high, were equipped with mobile searchlights. Until September 1943, when a large crematorium with five furnaces was added, the camp had only one small crematorium to its seven gas chambers. While the total number of Poles, Russians, and Jews murdered in Majdanek is debated, an estimated 60,000-80,000 were Jews.
We spent the last day with three Holocaust survivors and 60 high school students traveling to the site of Treblinka. The Nazis selected the location of the death camp in northeast Poland 62 miles from Warsaw for its secure location in a sparsely populated heavily wooded area near the railway station. On July 22, 1942, the first transports of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto arrived. Between August and October, 10 additional gas chambers were added. The total number of Jews murdered at Treblinka is 874,000. There is now a memorial featuring a menorah. Over an area of 22,000 square meters, concrete covers the ashes of the victims and supports 17,000 granite shards of various sizes. Resembling tombstones, they represent destroyed communities.
One of the stones – the only individual memorial – commemorates Janusz Korczak and the children from his orphanage. The entire memorial structure and plain gray concrete and granite references the ashes of the more than 800,000 people murdered here.
The trip ended visiting the Tykocin synagogue, built in 1642, and still stands today. This is near the Lopuchowo Forest where 2000 men, women, and children were murdered. A somber memorial now occupies the site.
It was very eye opening after a week of going to death camps, ghetto’s, museums, and memorials. Some other takeaways, we always had security with us and told to not wear our MOL shirts, except the day of the March, so that we would not draw attention. Love your family and friends as so many were taken away. I am very grateful for this opportunity of a lifetime and hope to get more people from Tallahassee to go next year. Contact me if you have any questions.