The March of the Living

Miriam, a member of Harry Kay Leadership Institute’s Cohort 11, reflects on her experience in Poland.

I. Two things can be true at the same time
There are certain practicalities involved in moving large numbers of people through a space. There are lines, and waiting, and wondering where to go and when we can eat and how to navigate transportation. It’s true at the theater, and sporting events, at amusement parks, and, it turns out, it’s true when thousands of people voluntarily arrive at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living. The fact that these logistical realities provide a distorted echo of Auschwitz’s past is, I think, a feature and not a bug. Pressed among a throng of strangers shuffling slowly toward the only exit gate after the event, surrounded by barbed wire fences, it’s impossible not to imagine the same movement of people crossing this same ground over 80 years ago, with their added feelings of confusion, fear, rage, and despair.

I experienced this twinned perception multiple times today, the simultaneous then-and-now of the present in dialogue with the past. A trio of Israeli teenagers danced and sang “Vehaikar lo lefached klal” in front of one of the brick buildings at Auschwitz that served as a barracks for prisoners who would never have been allowed to dance and sing, and who were certainly afraid. (Did they secretly hum to each other in the dark?) I sat and ate an apple from my lunch leaning against another building whose inhabitants never had enough food. These actions in other contexts (even yesterday when we visited to learn about the site) might seem disrespectful or sacrilegious; today they are defiant and joyful, an enthusiastic middle finger to the past. But as we slowly started the March, standing among other groups from all over the world (I noted at least France, Argentina, Canada, the U.K., and Israel along with multiple U.S. groups), a helicopter flew overhead and a couple of us noted that although we knew it was just a news crew, it made us a little nervous. “We are sitting ducks,” someone said. The threat is still real, reverberating across decades and centuries. We are here today because the Nazis failed to eliminate us, we dance on the trampled dust of their death camp to reclaim the space for ourselves, and still we know we’re not entirely safe. Both things are true.

II. Rain
We are told that in the 37 years of the March, they’ve never had such a downpour. The weather was breezy and dry for the entire morning as we walked to the Kraków ghetto, saw Oskar Schindler’s factory, rode the bus to Auschwitz I, and lined up for the March. Clouds started to gather as we walked the route of the March, about a mile from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II/Birkenau. Weather predictions had been vacillating all day, and for a while we thought the thunderstorms might pass all around and miss us, like a meteorological parting of the Red Sea. But the rain started almost as soon as we got through the gates and started the long walk toward the plaza at the far end of the camp, the stark gash of railroad tracks bisecting the length of the huge field between two symmetrical expanses of ruined wooden barracks marked only by their brick chimneys. Touring one of the reconstructed barracks yesterday, we were told that these chimneys were originally used to warm the buildings when they were horse stables, but never for the human prisoners. On the stone plaza where the ceremony was held, there were hundreds of folding chairs, huge screens, and a stage set up for the March of the Living program. If you didn’t know, you’d never guess that there were the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria on either side of us. (This was where some of the most efficient killing took place.) 

The March organizers had thoughtfully provided jackets and ponchos for everyone, and a forest of umbrellas sprang up as the rain started in earnest, but there was so much that everyone was quickly drenched anyway. The lightning seemed safely distant, and we were treated to an abbreviated program celebrating Survivors, a few dozen of whom had come to join us from around the world. Our group cheered loudly when Sara Weinstein, the Survivor who graciously shared her story with us yesterday, came to the stage to sing “Oyfn Pripetshik,” a Yiddish song for teaching children the alphabet. Finally, the whole crowd recited Kaddish and sang Hatikvah together. “Our hope is our strength,” the MC reminded us. 

Our guide Benzi told us about a Survivor he knows who likes to just walk in and out of the gates of the camp when she visits, back and forth multiple times just because she can. I felt great camaraderie with her and the entire crowd as we squelched our way through the mud of the field and back out the gates, knowing we all had a warm, dry dinner waiting for us wherever we wanted to go.

III. Imagination
I’ve read a few things recently about how the capacity for imagination seems to be what makes humans different from other animal species, many of whom may have similar capacities for intelligence and empathy. We can not only remember and learn from the past,  but we can also speculate about possible futures and alternate realities. And we can share these ideas with others: we can dream skyscrapers, novels, whole new systems of society into existence where none existed before.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the double-edged sword of our brilliant human capacity for telling each other stories. We can conjure up symphonies for emotion and comic books for defining heroism and microscope lenses to explain the mysteries of life; but we also have the ability to imagine the lie that there are some humans who are less worthy than ourselves. And when many people believe that story, or simply fail to call out the lie, it leads to disaster and death.

Today I realized that I had been telling myself a different lie, or maybe just not a full story. I had thought of the March of the Living as a celebration of survival and a commemoration of the dead and all the horrors of the Holocaust. It is those things, of course, but now it seems obvious to me that it is also an act of resistance against the very present threat of fascism. It is a reminder for us and others that their story is wrong, that we are all equally worthy. We survived when they tried to eradicate us. Though so many were killed, we Jews, Roma, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people — every group the Nazis targeted has persisted and thrived somewhere. But we’re not finished; we are not free to desist from the work. 

Speaking of the power to imagine new realities, one group I was particularly pleased to see at the March with us was Atidna. They are a nonprofit Arab-Jewish partnership, “based on mutual respect and full civil equality in the State of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state.” They brought a delegation of 60 Arab Israelis, mostly Muslim, and leader Suleiman spoke eloquently to us about the process of dream building and the importance of understanding the past as part of working together to make something new.

As we left the ceremony in the rain, I imagined what it would be like if the clouds parted and a rainbow appeared at that moment. What wonderful, symbolic timing that would have been! But nature doesn’t always cooperate with the stories we want to tell, and the rain briefly shifted to hail instead.
The rainbow came as we were driving away.