One Day in Auschwitz

Leaving the beautiful Polish city of Krakow behind, the taxi takes me on this early Thursday morning toward Auschwitz-Birkenau. A row of tall trees passes by the car window. My head feels empty and heavy at the same time. I look into the quiet, blue sky and try to mentally prepare myself for this day—a day for which one cannot truly prepare.

I tightly clutch the small green book I brought with me, hoping to have something to hold on to. My heart tightens strangely, and I think of the lines I just read from Lily Brett’s timeless work Auschwitz Poems:

Nothing made sense / Everything was unpredictable / An endless train / Of people / Was chased through the chimney / Others burned / The earth / And clogged the rivers / Nothing made sense

 It is my first time visiting Auschwitz and taking part in the March of the Living—a commemorative event that brings together thousands of people from around the world on this day: Holocaust survivors, hostages freed from Hamas captivity, and relatives of those still held in the hell of Gaza.

I stand in front of the gate bearing the words “Arbeit macht frei.” The square is crowded with people; many have draped the Israeli flag over their shoulders. The familiar white and blue around me gives me strength and support—almost as if the flag of Israel itself had the power, even in this place, to give Jewish people a sense of safety and strength.

In front of the gas chamber barracks stand rows of young people speaking Hebrew. A young man puts his arm around the shoulders of an older gentleman whose tear- filled gaze drifts toward the gate. Only in my thoughts do I want to ask him: What memories come to you as you stand here? What horrors did you see with your own eyes at this place where all humanity failed?

What else do I see in this place I’ve feared visiting for so many years? A Holocaust survivor clutching a rolled-up photo of a hostage to his chest. He bows his head, closes his eyes, gently rocks back and forth in silent prayer. When he opens his eyes again, he looks up at the gate and sends a prayer to the heavens—a prayer that only he can hear.

A Holocaust survivor clings to a picture of a hostage in Auschwitz. Credit: Sarah Maria Sander

Then comes the reunion with Gita Koifman—a warm-hearted, petite woman we’ve been friends with for a long time. She was still a child when she lost her mother while fleeing the Nazis. And yet to this day, 80 years later, she speaks about her with so much love that it moves and pains me every time. She hugs me tightly, warmly, and says: “How wonderful to see you, Sarah!” A hug and words that are infinitely precious to me at this silent memorial site of horror.

But perhaps no moment has etched itself so deeply into my memory as the look in Eli Sharabi’s eyes—his pitch-black eyes, as he stands in front of a gas chamber and says: “That we are here today is a triumph of life, a victory of the Jewish spirit.” When he speaks into the microphone, his words are clear and powerful. But as he steps aside, his gaze betrays the immeasurable suffering that has been placed on one human being.

Eli Sharabi standing next to the grandparents of Bar Kupershtein in Auschwitz. Credit: Sarah Maria Sander

He survived 500 days in Hamas’s catacombs—days full of torment, hunger, and torture that we cannot begin to imagine. And it was only upon his release that he learned his entire family—his wife, his two daughters, and his brother—had been murdered. A man returns from the cruelest captivity, taken hostage because he is Jewish—and must come to grips with the fact that his family was wiped out, also because they were Jewish.

October 7th was only one single, destructive day. But in Hamas’s genocidal intentions—born from deep-rooted antisemitism, from an obsession with destruction and hatred of the Jewish people—we recognize a bridge to the generational trauma that the Shoah represents for Jewish people.

Standing next to Eli Sharabi are the grandparents of Bar Kupershtein, Faina and Michael. They survived the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel in the 1970s—and now they stand here, in the very place that once tried to leave nothing of the Jewish people but ash and smoke. And now they ask, they plead: Free our beloved grandson. How absurd it all is. So much pain. So much that makes no sense. None of this should be. And never again.

“One wants to scream ‘Enough’”—against the stone walls that were witnesses but did nothing. But what should these lifeless stones have done, where humans failed? These walls that saw hundreds of thousands of Jewish people collapse in agony, gas streaming from vents, mouths wide open in pain. These silent walls that saw emaciated bodies, reduced to skin and bones, stacked naked upon one another and burned. And this sky—the same sky—absorbed the smell of a million burnt dead.

Lily Brett writes in a poem to her mother:

You earned a degree / in diligent demeanor / at this university of horror / where you / in five years of study / lost all your loved ones / only now, forty years later / can you be affected / can you worry / can you be afraid / can you roar / can you scream / can you show affection and compassion / and I can recognize / that you love me / mother.

How much pain can a human being endure?

Maybe—if the pain is carried by an entire nation—it doesn’t become lighter, but it becomes survivable. Is that the reason why the Jewish people, since the beginning of time, have endured all challenges, traumas, and the annihilation madness of others—strong, resilient, able to go on living where others might have broken under the weight of unimaginable suffering? Because the pain was carried by all souls, on all shoulders, together? Is that it?

It makes no sense when I look into the faces of those who are here today: Survivors of the Shoah. People like Agam Berger, Keith Siegel, and Eli Sharabi, who experienced and endured things in the tunnels of Gaza that will never be erased from their innermost being.

And yet—you are here.

You walk with heads held high past the barracks where people collapsed to the ground from hunger, where children—innocent souls—breathed their last breath. Past the tracks to the gates of Birkenau, which once led nearly 960,000 Jewish women and men to certain death.

Enough! I want to scream. But around me, there are no faces twisted in agony or apathy. Not even those whose hearts are filled with endless, anxious worry for their loved ones in Gaza collapse. They all walk—step by step, side by side. With survivors. With young and old. With thousands who have come to show solidarity and compassion.

We do not walk alone. And we walk with a strength that comes from another place

—a place many here believe in. And even those who do not believe, feel it: This strength that rests deep within a people who could survive everything—because they have already survived everything.

And so we hear, amidst the thousands on the 3.5-kilometer path between the two extermination camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau II, again and again from full, strong voices: “Am Yisrael Chai!” It echoes through this Polish place: The people of Israel live—in defiance of all those who thought they could destroy them. Am Yisrael Chai. Three words, like a prayer, like a mantra, like an anchor. A promise and a commitment to all generations who were and will be: Am Yisrael Chai.

Credit: Chen Schimmel, March of the Living

As we walk on foot through the gates of Birkenau, suddenly a strong rain begins— so heavy as I have rarely experienced. It is not just rain, it is a storm breaking over us. The gray sky does not feel heavy or oppressive, but liberating. And then finally

—they come: the tears that would not come. The emotions that were blocked. Here I cry—and laugh. I look with love at the people around me as our shoes fill with water and the royal blue rain jackets we received from the “March of the Living” turn the rows into a glowing blue.

Credit: Chen Schimmel, March of the Living

Those who were not there that day might accuse me of exaggeration. But between the lightning in the sky and the rays of sun fighting through the cloud cover, we see a large stage before us: There, Agam Berger plays on a 120-year-old violin that survived the Holocaust—from Schindler’s List. She is accompanied by Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, who lost both his parents on October 7.

Then, IDF cantor Shai Abramson and Holocaust survivor Sarah Weinstein take the stage together and sing: Oyfn Pripetshik. The storm lashes our faces.

And then—we all join in, together, in the midst of Birkenau: Hatikvah.

Because there is not only unimaginable horror. There is also unimaginable resilience. Unimaginable hope. Unimaginable will to live. Unimaginable—because it

cannot be put into words unless you have felt it yourself, in this paradoxical place where death and life, pain and hope, the darkest side of human history and the brightest hope for life shake hands—perhaps like nowhere else in the world.

“As long as in the heart, a Jewish soul still dwells, our hope is not lost.”

Credit: Yossi Zeliger, March of the Living