Thousands march at Auschwitz ahead of 80th anniversary of Warsaw uprising
WARSAW — Thousands of people gathered Tuesday at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp for the March of the Living, a yearly Holocaust remembrance march that falls this year on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
President Sergio Mattarella of Italy spoke, warning that the ideas of the 1930s were reappearing “at a time when Russia’s inhuman aggression against Ukraine is still raging.” He called the memory of the Holocaust “an eternal warning that cannot be ignored.”
“Hate, prejudice, racism, extremism, antisemitism, indifference, delusion, and hunger for power lurk, constantly challenging the consciences of individuals and nations,” Mattarella said.
Participants included Holocaust survivors who lived through imprisonment at Auschwitz or one of the other death camps where the Nazi regime sought to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.
Some attendees came face to face for the first time with something that has long been a part of their psyche: the watchtowers, the remains of gas chambers, and the huge piles of shoes, suitcases, and other objects that the victims brought with them on their final journey.
Among those Americans was Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. Kraft led a delegation from Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, a group he started in 2019 to address hate against Jews.
German forces established Auschwitz after they invaded and occupied Poland during World War II, and killed more than 1.1 million people there, most of them Jews but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. In all, about 6 million European Jews died during the Holocaust.