March of the Living

March of the Living
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Holidays

Earlier this week, thousands of High School Men and Women joined Holocaust Survivors for the March of the Living, an annual pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau -- the notorious concentration camps in Poland.

My Mother was one of the Holocaust Survivors who went on the March of the Living. It was in April of 1998 and I want to share an entry from a diary I found after her death. She was in Birkenau where she had been imprisoned in 1944.

"I kept thinking where are the barracks where I stayed. I saw some at a distance but they were made of brick. I remember my barracks was made of wood. The children kept asking, "Esther, do you remember where you were?"........

Avi and two girls were walking with me when Avi said "Esther, over there are the wooden barracks." We raced toward them!

The first was not the one I remembered. The second one was also different and finally we came to the third barracks. And this was the one where I spent six weeks...the windows on the top, the brick stove in the middle....."

It was the last entry in the diary. I'm not sure why she wrote no more. Earlier in the diary, when she recounted being on the spot where the selections were made before Mengele - motioning left or right, she wrote that she "had no tears left at the moment". Perhaps that's why she stopped writing two pages later.

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