Today was the “March of the Living,” the march of 8,000 Jews and non-Jews out of the gates of Auschwitz and into Birkenau. The best way to describe today is through the words of our participants, which you can read below…

When I walked into Birkenau, what Sigi, a Holocaust survivor called the “Gates of Hell,” I was wordless. I wasn’t sure what or how I was supposed to feel—everything just appeared surreal. I’ve learned about the Shoah my entire life and now, in this moment, I see Auschwitz-Birkenau—in color and not in black and white photographs or what I read in books. It’s real, everything is. This is the start of a life-changing experience. Before landing, I stared at a plane full of teens from Los Angeles, familiar and unfamiliar faces, but all here with the same purpose and one intention. We will never forget.

-Maayan Kachlon

What struck me the most was the irony of it all: The brilliant green fields surrounding the black and white photographs, the stories of the living next to the graves of the dead, the thriving industrial cities neighboring the slaughter houses of the century. It is precisely these contradictions, however, that make the March worth it: that we can walk out of the gas chambers alive and breathing, the fact that we have strength in numbers as we walk through the valleys of oppression. With other nations by our side we became the reality the Nazi’s once feared so vigorously. Perhaps that’s the point: to simply exist in the face of adversity. This is our act of defiance, this is our act of hope, this is our act of strength. And in these moments, these times of unity, we are victorious. So as I sit on the bus after a day of feeling so very alive, I think of the dead and honor them by simply living and never forgetting their stories. After walking out of the crematoria we concluded the day by singing Hatikva: death next to life, dark next to light. This contradiction, by its very nature speaks to our sense of purpose and meaning to our society; at least it does for me.

-Aviv Gilboa

I do not get it and realistically I am never really going to get it. I slowly walked into the gas chamber at Auschwitz and it started to hit me. Thousands of people suffocated in the room that I was standing in. THOUSANDS. I put my hand on the wall to steady myself only to make an even more horrifying realization: scratch marks on the wall. A complete stranger put her arm around me as I stood there sobbing, gasping for air. And that is one of the beautiful aspects of the March of the Living- it brings people together. So we walked around Auschwitz with our arms around each other. Together we walked into the room with 800,000 shoes. And then together 8,000 pairs of shoes walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau. I sat next to one of the amazing Holocaust survivors on the way home. As she showed me her tattoo, she looked at me and said, “You know Arielle I was really there as a victim and even I do not understand it.”

-Arielle Gabai