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May 13, 2005/Iyar 4 5765, Volume 57, No. 37
Thousands take part in March of Living
CHANAN TIGAY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WARSAW, Poland - Nazis murdered Mary Karaso's entire family at Birkenau. Her mother, father and three siblings all died at the notorious death camp.
And yet, sitting in a wheelchair just a few feet from the train tracks on which cattle cars herded her relatives into the camp - and looking out at row after row of the red-brick barracks that likely were her loved ones' last home - Karaso was content.
"I very much wanted to be here, to see this place, to make a Kaddish here before I die," the 85-year-old survivor, keeping warm in a black Persian lamb coat, said May 5. "Now I am peaceful and satisfied."
Karaso was part of a Greek delegation to the March of the Living, an annual event that in previous years has brought Jewish teenagers to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day to march from the concentration camp at Auschwitz to the death camp at nearby Birkenau. That is followed by a trip to Israel to mark the Jewish state's Memorial Day and Independence Day.
Because this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Allied defeat of the Nazis, march organizers opened the trip to groups that have not previously been included: adults, multicultural groups, university students and young professionals.
They came from Russia and Romania, Panama and Poland, Ukraine and the United States - and from some 50 other nations - to remember and to honor, to mourn and to warn.
There were financial planners from New York and policemen from Austria, representing groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League to the Polish Jewish Student Union to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
There also were some 130 Catholic educators from the United States, including several from the Phoenix area - led by Paul Wieser, the new director of ADL's Braun Holocaust Institute, a national program.
Upon his return to Phoenix, Wieser said he was most moved by the fact that "we were able to take so many people through an experience that changed them."
He explained that during the flight home "everyone was talking about the march, what it meant and how they planned to use the experience" in their work.
"It was an experience I will never forget," said Mary Beth Mueller, superintendent for Catholic Schools in the Phoenix Diocese.
"To bear witness to those who have gone before us and all that they dealt with - just the inhumane treatment ... (it's) almost too difficult to describe what it meant."
Mueller told Jewish News the Holocaust has always been a part of the curriculum in Catholic schools in the Phoenix Diocese - starting with the seventh grade.
According to Mueller, approximately 30 teachers have gone through "Bearing Witness," an ongoing four-stage program to learn how to teach the Holocaust.
She said the students are "very receptive" to the mandatory program.
The thousands who were in Poland marched through a chilly rain along the 1.8 miles of bucolic roadway linking the two camps that comprised the killing center where the largest number of Jews were gassed, shot, beaten, starved and burned to death during World War II.
The marchers May 5 passed through the gates at Birkenau and moved into the area where the Nazis' infamous selection process was carried out. From there, they circled behind yard after yard of barbed wire and onto a large field for what march organizers said was the largest-ever Holocaust memorial ceremony.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hustled into the ceremony under a tight security cordon, asked those in attendance to "remember those who were sacrificed, and remember the murderers," adding, "Remember the silence of the world."
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel delivered the event's keynote address.
"Here in this place, one could have thought that this was the end of Jewish history. ... (But) Jewish history has not ended here. It was wounded and remained alive, filled with renewed creative energy."
Also attending the ceremony were 30 members of the German Parliament; education ministers from some 35 countries; more than a dozen members of Knesset; Marek Belka, the prime minister of Poland; the U.S. and British ambassadors to Poland; and Edward O'Donnell, the American special envoy for Holocaust issues.
"The Holocaust is not about the past only, it's about what happens" now, O'Donnell told JTA. "It's about the lessons."
Groups from around the world dispersed throughout Krakow and Warsaw on May 4 to tour sites central to the once-thriving Polish Jewish community and to the Jews who lived there under German occupation.
They visited synagogues and cemeteries in Krakow's old Jewish district; the factory in which Righteous Gentile Oskar Schindler saved dozens of Jewish lives, and a remnant of the brick wall that surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto.
In a stirring Yom Hashoah address May 4 just outside the main synagogue of Krakow's pre-war Jewish community, Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director and himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, told some 5,000 people that the ground on which they stood, where Polish Jewry had blossomed, was "holy ground."
"I say to myself, 'How many more times can one live through it?'" said Foxman, who also lit a memorial torch at a May 5 ceremony at Birkenau. "You ask yourself, 'Can I cry again?' And the answer is yes."
Walking alone through the first floor of a dank building that once was a barracks housing Jewish prisoners, just a short distance from the building in which Nazi doctors performed sometimes-deadly sterilization experiments on Jewish women, Lt. Col Yitzhak, 48, marveled at "how important it is that Israel exists."
"The opportunity to come and stand here as an Israeli air force man, in uniform, is a very big honor," said Yitzhak, who was not allowed to give his family name for security reasons. "Today, it wouldn't be a simple matter to do this to us again."
The ceremony also included a performance of the Yiddish song "My Yiddishe Mama" by Israeli cantor and Broadway star Dudu Fisher, along with the chanting of El Malei Rachamim, a traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, and the recitation of Kaddish.
And so, after 60 years, Karaso of Greece - along with 18,000 others - at long last was able to recite Kaddish for the family she lost at the site of their deaths.
As the ceremony drew to a close with the singing of "Hatikvah," Israel's national anthem, hundreds of blue and white flags blew in the wind.
Chanan Tigay traveled to Poland as a guest of the Anti-Defamation League. Contributing Editor Hank Neyer contributed to this report.
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