The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar (Yom HaShoah), thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
The March of the Living was founded in 1988, under the leadership of Israeli Likud politician Abraham Hirchson, Shmuel Rosenman, and Israeli attorney Baruch Adler, a child of a Holocaust survivor who was hidden by one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Adler travelled to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1986 to set the groundwork for the first March of the Living, and also to search for his mother’s rescuer (but could not make contact until the fall of Communism, after 1989).
Speaking about the founding of the March of the Living, Adler paid to tribute to values he learned from his mother and her rescuer. “We believe that our children and grandchildren will continue carrying the torch of identification with the values of loyalty, courage, perseverance and faith in life, and hope that goodness will prevail. This message is well understood, perhaps more than anyone else, by the organizers and participants of the March of the Living.”
Since its inception, almost 300,000 participants – including world leaders, educators, Holocaust survivors and students – have taken part in the program.
Writer and journalist Meir Uziel proposed the name “March of the Living” to contrast the death marches that were typical at the end of World War II. When Nazi Germany withdrew its soldiers from forced-labour camps, inmates – most already starving and stricken by oppressive work – were forced to march hundreds of miles farther west, while those who lagged behind or fell were shot or left to freeze to death in the winter climate. The March of the Living, in contrast to the death marches, serves to illustrate the continued existence of the Jewish people despite Nazi attempts at their obliteration. After spending a week in Poland visiting other sites of Nazi Germany’s persecution, such as Majdanek, Treblinka, and the Warsaw Ghetto, and former sites of Jewish life and culture, various Synagogues, many of the participants in the March also travel on to Israel where they observe Yom HaZikaron and celebrate Israel’s Independence Day.
