March of the Living: Remembrance at Auschwitz
“Work sets you free”: the phrase above Main Camp No. 1 (Stammlager I) of Auschwitz, the massive concentration camp built by the Nazis during World War II, couldn’t be more cynical.
Here, prisoners were stripped of their private belongings and their hair was cut. Not only were they forced to wear camping clothes, but they were given numbers that were actually tattooed on their bodies. In short: they were dehumanized.
At first, it was mainly Polish resistance fighters, intellectuals, Soviet POWs and other people detested by the National Socialists who perished or were shot in this German concentration camp located in occupied Polish territory.
Many died of starvation, disease and the miserable conditions of forced labor. However, from 1942 onwards, systematic mass murder began in the extended section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
About 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, most of them Jews.
Keeping the memory alive
Since 1988, surviving concentration camp prisoners, their children and grandchildren, and especially young Jews from around the world, have gathered in Auschwitz on Yom HaShoa, Israel’s national Holocaust Day, for the March of the Living. The name recalls the death march in the dissolution of the largest concentration camp in 1945.
Given the displacement of the front in the east and the advance of the allies, the prisoners had to leave the field. In the freezing cold, they were driven west on foot, harassed by Schutzstaffel soldiers who shot exhausted prisoners when they could go no further.
Source: DW
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