March of the Living commemorates Auschwitz victims
Thousands of people were expected at the site of the Auschwitz death camp today to remember the victims of the Holocaust with a solemn annual march.
Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and a Nobel peace laureate, is to lead some 8,000 people, mostly students, in the March of the Living, a two-mile trek from Auschwitz to the larger neighbouring camp at Birkenau, which housed most of the killing complex’s gas chambers.
Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies and others, died in the camp’s gas chambers but also from starvation, disease and forced labour before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
Israel’s Education Ministry initiated the marches in 1988 as a biannual event, but since 1996 it has been held every year, marking Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.
Pre-Second World War Poland had a Jewish population of 3.5 million, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Today, about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.
At last year’s march, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on participants to “remember how millions of Jews were led to their deaths and the world remained silent”.
