March Of The Living

By Jos van Westing, Christians for Israel International

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day 24 April 2017

In April this year, Christians for Israel International participated in the Jewish event, “The March of the Living”, a memorial march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.

Together with 10,000 students from 52 different nations, carrying thousands of Israeli flags, we made a clear statement to the world - “NEVER AGAIN!”

Any Christians for Israel member around the world can join our 4-day Auschwitz Programme in Poland. They come back a different person due to the life-changing experience and understand the suffering the Jewish people endured.

If you want to visit Europe between April and June, you can expand your stay with this Auschwitz Program.

This year our group consisted of 24 Dutch participants. One of them was a second generation Holocaust survivor who lost (as far as he was able to find out) over 120 relatives in Auschwitz. He was living every single day with the past of the Nazi atrocities affecting himself and his family. While I was pushing him in a wheelchair, he told me, “All my parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives went through this gate (of Birkenau), just as I do today, but I am the only one of my entire family who will get out alive!” It struck me like lightning to hear him say that, but sadly, it was also very true.

In the Auschwitz “museum”, (I would rather call it a place of remaining evidence), our hearts were breaking; Suitcases left behind, names written on them with white chalk, still waiting for their owners. Elegant high heeled shoes, which may have been worn to dance. 2000kg of human hair left behind by the weaving-loom used to produce clothes for the Germans. Artificial arms and legs, and metal corsets for children, never to be used again. Rusty train rails ending at the selection point - the last station for millions of people. Unnamed ashes that could not speak, but still told the most sinister stories of history. A single word was too much, a thousand words too little.

The participants of our group didn’t consider what they saw to be irrelevant anymore or that it was a long time ago. They had a difficult time, but they do not deter from it! Many sought every opportunity to beg for forgiveness from the survivors of the Shoah on behalf of their country and forefathers; here at Auschwitz, and in Israel.

This reconciliation helps to heal deep wounds; they embrace the elderly traumatised victims who have no future, just their past. There is compassion and mutual love as tears from both flows.

Once more, we see that the Jewish people do not hate or seek revenge, but deign in majestic forgiveness.

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