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March of the Living: Why Today, Why Now?

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KRAKOW, Poland – Organizers say the March of the Living at Auschwitz, the most notorious Nazi death camp, is the largest and most successful international Holocaust education program for Jewish youth.
 
Since 1988, more than 220,000 Jews and non-Jews from 52 nations have joined the 1.8 mile (3 kilometer) walk from the Auschwitz to the Birkenau death camps in Poland.
 
This year, some 10,000 young adults are taking part in the march on Thursday March 5.
 
Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, chairman of March of the Living International, told CBN News why it's important to remember what took place there many decades later.
 
"Why 71 years after and why not to say, 'Okay, it's a part of the Jewish history, forget about it.  It's enough.' We already served four generations," Rosenman asked and then answered.

"Why? Because one-third of the Jewish nation was completely destroyed," he said. "How come a human being, very, very intellectual and cultured, could find a path of killing [another] nation, other human beings. Why the Nuremberg laws came about."
 
"We decided to take the 'whys' from the classroom and to confront what happened – we're talking about camps; we're talking about marches, marches of death," he continued. "We're taking the entire years of the Holocaust and to try to take young people to understand what happened," he said.

Rosenman noted that those who survived the Holocaust may only be around another 10 years or so before their lives become just a matter of history.

"And when history versus history, I don't know who is the winner," he added.

Watch this year's March of the Living below.

 

 

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About The Author

Julie Stahl
Julie
Stahl

Julie Stahl is a correspondent for CBN News in the Middle East. A Hebrew speaker, she has been covering news in Israel full-time for more than 20 years. Julie’s life as a journalist has been intertwined with CBN – first as a graduate student in Journalism, then as a journalist with Middle East Television (METV) when it was owned by CBN from 1989-91, and now with the Middle East Bureau of CBN News in Jerusalem since 2009. As a correspondent for CBN News, Julie has covered Israel’s wars with Gaza, rocket attacks on Israeli communities, stories on the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and the