March of the Living sets out to engage the next generation
THIS WEEK, a delegation of 260 participants from the UK will join around 2,000 people in Poland on the International March of the Living. This will be the first time we will come together since 2019. The UK delegation will be accompanied by seven survivors and we will be travelling around the country visiting their birthplaces, locations where they were imprisoned and places where their families perished. On the last day of the programme — Yom HaShoah — we will march together out of the gates of Auschwitz.
Our gathering will be as sombre as our lessons from the past, yet here in the present we are acutely aware of the situation across the border in Ukraine. The place names are of course familiar, and the needs of the displaced and the importance of helping our neighbour are among those lessons.
The focus of the march will be the importance of passing the responsibility of Holocaust remembrance and education to the next generation — the grandchildren of those who endured the dark days of Nazi oppression and systematic annihilation of more than six million Jewish victims and those committed to remembering the past as a teaching tool for the future.
One of the survivors who will participate in the march this year is Eve Kugler, who was born in Halle, Germany and as a child saw the rise of the Nazis to power. Eve survived the war, but many of her family were murdered in the Holocaust. She has taken part in the March of the Living over the past ten years.
“It is never easy,” she says. “The more I do, the harder it gets. But of course, the difference it makes to have survivors on the march is immeasurable. It inspires us and I know it inspires those who are seeing the history for the first time. So it is our responsibility to be there for as long as we can.”