A march commemorating the victims of the Holocaust was held on Thursday at the site of the former Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of the participants, Olga, a Ukrainian refugee in Poland, fears that history is repeating itself today.
In front of the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” gate (“Work makes you free”, editor’s note), she waited, with three thousand other people from several countries, mainly Israel, for the sound of the shofar, a traditional horn, which gave the starting signal for the “March of the Living”, the first since the Covid. Three kilometers long, this march connects the Auschwitz camp to that of Birkenau, the main extermination site.
Between 1940 and the beginning of 1945, Nazi Germany had exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau about 1.1 million people, including one million Jews from various European countries. This camp, where some 80,000 non-Jewish Poles, 25,000 Roma and 20,000 Soviet soldiers also died, was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945.
“What happened years ago (the Holocaust) and that we wanted to forget is happening today in Ukraine,” said Olga, in her thirties, who has found refuge with a dozen of people who fled the city of Vinnitsa in western Ukraine, in the town of Oswiecim, near Auschwitz.
Lessons from the Holocaust
Anna, another refugee, came to the march with her four-year-old son Mischa, who proudly held up a large blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. “We are not Jewish but we came here to pay homage to the victims of the Holocaust”, she explains, “we would not want history to repeat itself with the Ukrainian nation”.
For Agnes Kaposi, 89, one of eight Holocaust survivors participating in the march, the war in Ukraine is something “deeply sad”. “It brings back memories that I didn’t even think I had,” she told AFP.
“When I read about what happens to these people, I suddenly remember things that happened to me and the people I loved and it’s terrible.” “I find it desperately sad that the world has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust,” she adds.
No to hate
This year, Polish President Andrzej Duda walked the path between Auschwitz and Birkenau at the start of the march. “Although this march is always accompanied by meditation and mourning, it is nonetheless an event of life, it is an event of the victory of life,” he said, paying tribute to the Holocaust victims during a speech in Birkenau.
“We are here to show that every nation has a sacred right to life, to cultivate its traditions, to develop,” he said. “We cry out loud and clear: no to hatred, no to anti-Semitism, no to anti-Ukrainian sentiment, no to anti-Polish sentiment, no to hatred,” he said.
Not comparable
Galit Hamam, 20, places on the rails leading to the Birkenau gas chambers a small wooden sign with several names inscribed on it to commemorate the deaths of his family members in the Holocaust. “I think we all have to remember that and let people know what happened here, what happened there,” in Ukraine.
Originally from Leeds in the United Kingdom, she accompanies her grandfather, Arek Hersh, survivor of Auschwitz, during the walk. For him, one cannot compare what is happening in Ukraine to the Holocaust. “Nothing can be compared to the concentration camps, nothing,” he says.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp