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"Expand the marches of life outside Poland" Israel today

2021-10-28T20:38:16.314Z


There is a growing call for memorial campaigns in other countries: "Memory should not depend on Auschwitz" • Chairman of the "March of Life": "We will march wherever Jews lived and were murdered in the Holocaust"


There are memories that are not erased over time.

Terrible memories and good memories.

When the British soldiers liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration and death camp in West Germany, where about 50,000 people were killed, of those Helfgott-Tribich was 15. She had typhus and was hospitalized in the children's home in the camp.

Last year marked the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation. The British branch of the March of Life organization wanted to convene a meeting between survivors and soldiers who liberated the camp, but the Corona postponed the trip.

This week it went into effect.

Accompanied by dozens of non-Jews, the "March of Life" delegation visited Holocaust sites in Germany: Villa Vanessa in Berlin, where it was decided to carry out the "Final Solution", Pier 17 in the Grunwald district of Berlin from which transports to the Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps began.

Participants in the delegation heard from Males and other survivors what had happened in the camps in Germany.

Virtual Life Parade, Archive

Mala was born in 1930 in the Polish city of Piotrkow-Tribunelsky.

At the beginning of the deportations from the ghetto to the extermination camps, Mala was smuggled to a Christian family, and later returned to her parents in the ghetto.

At the age of 12 she was drafted as a forced laborer, until she was sent left to Ravensbrook, to which she returned this week for the first time since the war.

"Four days we rode the train," she repeated, "with me was also my cousin, the ship, 7. I was in charge of it. We came here and shaved. We looked the same. They took our identity. The cold penetrated our bones. People died next to me from the cold and hunger. I feel that if we do not mention them, they will be forgotten, as if they never lived. "

The entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp, archive, Photo: Moshe Milner / GPO

From Ravensbrook, Ella and her cousin were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in the last weeks of the war.

After her release and recovery from the climb Ella immigrated to the UK and lives to this day in London.

In light of the Polish government's decision to suspend education trips from Israel to extermination camps in its territory, so that the Holocaust is not perceived as something committed by Poles in Poland, it believes those who should expand the memorial trips outside Poland.

"The memory should not depend on Auschwitz. There are other camps as well. Why did they choose to make the marches of life only in Poland? I was in two camps in Germany, and I would not object to there being trips there as well. There is something in the Poles' words "Memory in various places in Europe, including Germany, to get a broad view of what happened. We are used to concentrating only on Poland."

Photographs of the "Wall of Tears" to be unveiled in Babi Yar, Ukraine, Photo: BYHMC

"Continue to educate"

Alfred Garwood, born in the Przemyśl ghetto in Poland, was sent with his family to Bergen-Belsen a year later and rescued by the Americans.

"There is a problem with Poland," explains Garwood, a psychiatrist living in the UK.

"When we returned to Poland after the war to look for relatives, there were fascists and nationalists who searched for Jews and murdered them. But there were also Poles who helped Jews. We must continue to educate about what was then. It is better than ignorance, which always leads to fascism and extremist views."

The March of Life organization is definitely thinking about expanding the memorial trips outside of Poland.

The parade is an international organization that brings thousands of youth from dozens of countries to Poland on Holocaust Day every year.

Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, chairman of the March of Life, explained to Israel Today that before the outbreak of the epidemic, the organization began expanding travel to other sites.

"We marched in Hungary, Latvia and Greece, but the corona stopped everything. The delegation that visited Berlin this week is the first swallow to return to activity in Europe, and this year we plan to march in other countries where entire communities have been destroyed, in addition to the traditional 33-year march in Poland.

"In the last two months we have been marching in Lithuania and Romania, and I estimate we will march in at least four more European countries."

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2021-10-28

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