What We Witnessed on Federation’s March of the Living

Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ’s Mission to Poland to participate in the annual March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau was both devastatingly sad and also redemptive in some respects.

One week later, I am still processing the experience and probably will always carry with me very mixed and big emotions about the trip. One minute we saw a site of unadulterated cruelty and the next minute we heard stories of hope, humanity, resistance and bravery.

Life in the Warsaw Ghetto presented this paradox.

When the Nazis sealed the ghetto in November 1940, nearly 30% of the population of Warsaw was confined to just 2.4% of the city’s area. Jews were allotted only 181 calories a day. Disease, starvation, and despair were everywhere.

But so too was humanity.

We learned that even in such desperate conditions, Jews found ways to maintain dignity through secret schools, underground newspapers, music, art, and prayer. Most moving to me was how we cared for one another. We built soup kitchens and dispensaries. We comforted the sick. We found ways, however small, to bring compassion into an unimaginably cruel world. In the darkest places, our community created light.

As the child of two Holocaust refugees, these stories feel heartbreakingly familiar. In my family, the decade from 1936 to 1946 is spoken of in fragments—loss, flight, sorrow, and, somehow, survival. My few surviving relatives were scattered to distant corners of the world—America, England, Argentina, Israel. And yet, what has always struck me is how tightly we’ve held onto one another, even across oceans.

Another powerful moment during our journey was the Book of Names. The book’s pages are massive, laminated sheets nearly a yard tall and a foot wide, bound into 70 volumes that stretch nearly nine yards across a black stand, lit softly from below. Each page contains thousands of names. In total: 4.8 million documented Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Each name a life. A story. A family.

In order to find the names of our own family members, we had to physically stand between the pages and run our fingers down the list—name after name after name—until we found the ones we recognized. The physicality of the experience made the loss deeply personal. It felt as though we were meeting our murdered relatives for the first time. And in that moment, the often-quoted number—six million—was no longer a statistic. It was six million individual acts of murder. Six million lives extinguished. And among them, our families.

Today, the Jewish people, a tiny fraction of the world’s population, are dispersed around the world, but I can proudly say that I have seen evidence of how we care for one another as if we were all still living next-door to each other in the same shtetl.

Through Federation, we continue the legacy of Jewish mutual responsibility. We may be separated by geography, language, and culture, but we are still one people.

And we still show up for one another.