For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, marchers will walk the 3-kilometre route from the Auschwitz death camp's infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free) gate to the crematoria of the nearby Birkenau site.
They will be led by a group of 40 Holocaust survivors from across the world, including Polish-born Israeli writer and translator Halina Birenbaum.
According to the organisers, the central theme of this year’s March of the Living, which coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is to pay tribute to the heroism of Jews during the Holocaust.
Born in Warsaw in 1929, Birenbaum miraculously survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, hidden in a bunker. She was a prisoner of the concentration camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Both of her parents perished in German extermination camps.
The March of the Living has been held annually since 1988. It is primarily an educational project coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah). In 2005, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the event attracted 20,000 people and official delegations from almost 50 countries.
Prominent politicians who have taken part in the March of the Living include Polish and Israeli presidents and prime m inisters, Nobel Prize winners and religious leaders from various denominations.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945. It was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and death camps during World War II.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished there before the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945.
(mk/gs)