Page 83 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, large numbers of students and Holocaust survivors have returned to the kill- ing fields of Eastern Europe to encounter the Holocaust and other WWII genocides in the very places where these tragic events transpired.
These young people and their aging mentors come thousands of miles from their homes and, with their own two feet, tread upon the very earth where so many of their ancestors prayed, loved – and perished. This act of traveling to these former places of life and learning, destruction and martyrdom, is in itself a cry of protest over the injustices of the past. It is an act of sacred memorialization, a statement to the entire world – and perhaps even to those who have perished – that the martyrdom of so many millions will never be forgotten.
The students who participate are not just learning about history, but, with their physical presence, they also are touching and indeed entering history. They make a statement with their entire being, in the present, about the past. Sally Wasserman, a Holocaust survivor and hidden child, from Poland, recalled one moment from all her March of the Living trips that still stands out for her. She and her students had visited a lovely town called Tykocin, a shtetl right out of Fiddler on the Roof. The synagogue in the village square, dating back to 1642, had been lovingly restored and was a reminder of the traditional way of life that once thrived there. The group then left the idyllic town and traveled to the nearby Lupochowa forest, where the Jews of the town were marched into the forest in August 1941, ordered to dig pits, then shot en masse into the graves they had been forced to prepare for them- selves. Silence engulfed the students standing at this somber site of grievous carnage. “I’m not a religious person,” Sally recalled, “but I couldn’t help myself. I shouted, ‘Please, please, someone say a Kaddish.’” (Jewish memorial prayer for the dead.) The prayer was recited in the middle of the lush green forest that hid this terrible crime. And
everyone answered “Amen.”
Why do we return? We come to say, “We are here, and with all our might and all our strength, we proclaim on
this very ground, with our bodies and our souls: We remember, we shall always remember.” And to answer Amen when a prayer is recited in the memory of so many martyrs.
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