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Polish president to join March of the Living

28.04.2022 07:30
Polish President Andrzej Duda is on Thursday expected to take part in the annual March of the Living, which brings thousands of young Jews and their Polish peers to the site of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.
Entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) sign.
Entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp with the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) sign. Photo: PAP/Andrzej Grygiel

This year's event will be held after a two–year break caused by the COVID–19 pandemic. It will be taking place in the shadow of Russia's war on Ukraine.

In 2018, Duda took part in the March of the Living together with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

They both walked the three-kilometre route from Auschwitz's infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free) gate to the crematoria of the nearby Birkenau site along with some 12,000 young people from around the world.

"We are coming together to bear witness … to the memory of the extermination of the Jewish people … to say, or even to call out ‘never again’ … to anti-Semitism, never again to genocide, never again to the Holocaust,” Duda said at the time.

Launched in 1988, the March of the Living is as an international educational project that pays tribute to Holocaust victims.

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.

(gs)

Source: IAR, PAP, jpost.com