March of the Living

Beverly Louis

Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

 

Never again will I utter the word camp and only think of the fun place children spend their summers. From Poland, I would travel to Israel to mark its Memorial Day and Independence Day.

With several thousand people, I took part in the March of the Living. Usually the March of the Living is for teenagers, but this year, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the march was open to all ages.

As I sat in the Columbus airport with my four teenage traveling companions, it began to dawn on me that I was going to put my name in the “book” and let the world know that I had been a witness.

We flew to Kennedy Airport and met up with the rest of our group, mainly teenagers and a few adults from New York, New Jersey, Ohio and various other states.

With 139 of us, we had one thing in common: we were all Jewish and we were about to begin a journey together. That was an amazing bonding experience for the teenagers and adults.

Soon after landing in Krakow we boarded buses and were on our way to Auschwitz. I was taken aback when we entered Auschwitz.

Every picture I had seen was in black and white and here it was in color: red brick buildings, green grass and trees. Just like a lot of college campuses. And that did not seem right.

Our group included Mr. Jerry Stein, a survivor of Auschwitz. It was the first time he had been back in 60 years and he was almost distraught at how pleasant it appeared.

That pleasantness quickly disappeared as we came to the buildings that housed the gas chamber and crematorium.

This was the place where so many of our people took their last breaths. The place where they left their scratches on the gas chamber walls as they tried to claw their way out.

Time and time again our group leader Joel Katz repeated the phrase, man’s inhumanity to man.

One of the most frightening sights was the closeness of the town of Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz). The train station was right in the town and the camp was right next to the town.

We all kept thinking, “How could they not know?”

While in Krakow we toured the ghetto, saw Oskar Schindler’s factory and the hill where Plaszow, the camp depicted in Schindler’s List, had been.

As we stood on that empty, muddy, rainy, cold hill overlooking the city of Krakow, it again struck us how close the killing labor camp was to the city.

After the war, the Polish people destroyed the crematorium. Today there is one grave left.

Albert Brockman, a survivor of Auschwitz, travelled with his grandson. Mr. Brockman was a sweet, white-haired man wearing a Yankees hat.

Elie Wiesel also traveled with us. He was so gracious while posing for pictures with marchers. Other survivors stood for hours telling us their stories with eyes twinkling. Yes, twinkling.

How do your eyes twinkle when they have seen such tragedy?

 

We took the train from Krakow to Auschwitz on the same tracks used to transport our people to their deaths.

We then walked the three miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau: 18,000 of us walking the same walk our people had made during the war. Eighteen thousand people showed that we have survived and are stronger than ever.

On the train ride we were given wooden plaques on which to draw a picture or write our thoughts. We were to leave these as a mark that we had been there.

As we were getting ready to leave Birkenau, I realized that I still had my wooden plaque. It was beside a pond in Birkenau that was filled with human ashes of cremated Jews that I left my mark.

In addition to seeing the remnants of the Warsaw ghetto and Mila 18 we went to Tykochin. The Jews had lived nearly peacefully with their Polish neighbors for about 300 years.

Then on August 25, 1941 after some months of turmoil, approximately 1,400 Jews were selected to march through the town to work in the fields.

Instead, they were lined up by large pits, shot and killed.

Some survived but were turned in by their neighbors and were then executed by the Polish police.

As we walked through Tykochin to visit the cemetery, we did not see one person. The houses were neat. Most were surrounded by fences and had lovely gardens and ferocious sounding dogs.

The cemetery in Tycochin, vandalized in 1951, had been used for hundred of years. Now, there were very few headstones. Most of those were broken and buried in the dirt.

 

It was here in a beautiful dense pine forest that so much killing took place. The memorial at Treblinka is unique. There is a path made of wooden beams representing the railroad tracks, leading to an area where thousands of granite slabs protrude from the earth.

Each slab represents the number of victims from the numerous towns and cities of Poland who were killed in the camp.

Even with hundreds of visitors milling around, it was almost totally silent. For me, this is where the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man presented itself most vividly. How could such a quiet, pretty place witness such horrors?

Shabbat was the first time in a week that any of us felt any joy. What a special Friday evening, celebrating Shabbat with Jews from around the world.

There were services that filled everyone needs, and singing and dancing throughout the meal that spilled into the streets around our hotel.

One of our last stops before leaving Poland was Majdanek, the concentration and extermination camp located near Lublin.

Not much of this camp was destroyed after the war. Today, this huge camp where hundreds of thousands were shot or gassed upon their arrival, could be operational within 48 hours.

As we departed from the gas chamber, we heard laughter across the field. We realized that there was a family having a gathering in their back yard. A back yard that backed up to Majdanek.

 

A lot of us on the trip had been to Israel before. But most of us had come from our comfortable homes in the states not from Poland and the sights of concentration and extermination camps. The teenagers were like animals who had been let out of cages.

One of our first stops was at the Ghetto Fighter’s Kibbutz in the Western Galilee where we had fresh fruit for the first time in a week.

For the first time in a week, we saw smiling faces and felt comfortable in our surroundings. For the first time in a week, we could relax and let our guard down.

We went to a program on Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) in a small town in northern Israel where I met a young man who had spent a few weeks in Dayton last summer.

At 11 a.m. on Yom Hazikaron the sirens sounded and all of Israel became still. At busy intersections, people stopped their cars in the street and stood to observe a few moments of silence in honor of those who had given their lives for their country.

In honor of Independence Day, we would march, this time from Safra Square in Jerusalem to the Kotel (Western Wall). This time, we marched with laughter and chatter instead of sadness and silence.

It would be days and weeks before we could begin to process what we had experienced. It was an amazing journey with amazing young people who showed that the future is in good hands.

I hope that in years to come, teenagers from Dayton will participate on this journey, as they have in the past.

 

© 2005 Beverly Louis