March of the Living

Hope, pride and belonging

Twenty-three students from Metro Vancouver joined more than 10,000 other students in this year’s March of the Living. They are pictured here with Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver board chair Karen James, far left, and trip chaperones Susan Siklos, standing to James’ left, and Charlotte Katzen, standing fourth from the right. (photo by Jennifer Freedman)

Twenty-three Grade 11 and 12 students from Metro Vancouver headed to Poland and Israel on the annual March of the Living last month, and nine of those were students from public schools. In the past, Vancouver has sent about 14 students every couple of years. The increased numbers this year were the result of outreach by a volunteer committee headed by Charlotte Katzen.

“March of the Living is a life transforming experience,” she told the Independent. “Every participant will tell you that. It strengthens students’ Jewish identity, their understanding of who they are as Jews in the world today and their commitment to Israel.”

Katzen helped assemble a video in which march alumni, their parents and Holocaust survivors talked about their experience, the impact of the journey on young people and how important it is for them to become a witness. The committee showed the video in open houses at King David High School and at Jewish afterschool programs and other Jewish venues.

“When march alumni tell their friends, ‘You have no idea how impactful this journey is,’ it’s a powerful message and they want to join,” said Katzen about the video.

March of the Living is not an inexpensive venture, so Katzen worked with Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver to help secure funding for students who couldn’t afford the trip.

“Federation really came through,” she said. “We’ve not yet reached the point of having sufficient funding, but, this year, Federation made a commitment that no child would be turned away. That commitment enabled us to say, during our outreach, ‘Don’t worry about your financial situation. If you want to go, you will go.’”

Federation offset the cost of the trip by $2,000 for each participant using funds raised by the annual campaign. Scholarships were also offered to families that needed them.

Noa Platner, a Grade 12 student at King David, was one of the participants. She described her time in Poland as “very hard, intense in a way I didn’t expect. We’d go to the camps and hear the story of a specific family, which helped us feel really connected,” she reflected. “But it was very hard, and it crushes you on the inside. I realized all the people who went through the Holocaust had their own individual stories. You always hear the number of people, but you don’t think of the emotions they felt.”

For Trevin Kiel, a Grade 11 student at Hugh Boyd Secondary School in Richmond, the march, which was attended by more than 10,000 Jewish students worldwide this year, was an opportunity to get a sense of the scale of the Holocaust. “I wanted to see what 10,000 Jews looked like, to compare it to six million,” he said. The stories of Nazi brutality were hard to absorb, he admitted, “but we debriefed every night as a group, and it felt reassuring to share our feelings with others and know they were feeling the same way.”

Kiel had visited Israel previously with his family, but said this time was much different. “It was the best trip I’ve ever been on, it was just so much fun and such an eye-opening experience.”

The group was in Israel for Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut.

“I didn’t expect it would be an emotional time but I was more emotional in Israel than at the camps in Poland,” Platner said. “After all we Jews have been through already, to realize we’re still fighting and innocent people are dying was very crushing. But one of our guides told us we should feel proud that we’re still standing, strong enough to fight this time and do the best we can.”

Katzen helped prepare the students before they left Vancouver and participated in the march as well, co-chaperoning this year’s trip with Susan Siklos; Federation board chair Karen James was also part of the group.

“The students bond with each other and become so close by the end of the trip,” Katzen observed. “We grieve and celebrate collectively and we become one big, beautiful, coherent family. This trip changes them profoundly and makes them stronger, more tolerant of others and of each other.”

Being in Israel for Yom Hazikaron was no minor detail of the itinerary. “They realize, on Yom Hazikaron, that having a homeland comes at a very high cost,” said Katzen. “We can celebrate but we have to be aware that our homeland also has very tragic stories.”

A guide on the trip shared with Vancouver students the story of a friend who was ambushed and killed while serving in the military. “It’s one story of thousands,” Katzen said, “but the kids understood how difficult it is for families to put their own children’s lives at such high risk in order for the country to exist. They got it.”

Kiel and Platner both agreed that their participation in March of the Living has changed them in ways they’re only beginning to understand.

“My Jewish identity has changed,” Platner said. “I feel a stronger sense of purpose to follow the traditions and be a part of my community in honour of those who died and are still dying for our nation.”

Kiel said, prior to the march, if non-Jewish friends at school made jokes about Jews or about the Holocaust he would get angry or frustrated. “Now I feel like I can educate people on why it’s wrong to make jokes like that, and make sure they never tell a joke like that again,” he said. “If they knew the scale of the Holocaust, they wouldn’t make jokes.”

He’s returned with a stronger Jewish identity, he added. “I’ve started to wrap tefillin two to three times a week now. It reminds me of the trip and the memories I made there.”

He said, “I know there are lots of other trips that go to Poland, but not like this one.”

Platner agreed. “March of the Living gave me a sense of hope, pride and belonging.”

For information on joining a future March of the Living trip, contact Federation or visit marchoftheliving.org.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.

Journey is a crucial experience

The Coast-to-Coast March of the Living group, as well as a few Israeli youth, in Israel. (photo from Talya Katzen)

This past spring, I took part in the March of the Living 2015 program – a two-week trip to Poland and Israel, where people from 45 different countries are brought together to learn about the Holocaust and the current state of Judaism in Israel.

The trip was the most emotional and heartbreaking two weeks of my life. I never could have anticipated the kind of life-changing journey I was about to embark on.

photo - Participants in March of the Living stand together in front of the ashes of those murdered in the concentration camp, Majdanek — Participants in March of the Living stand together in front of the ashes of those murdered in the concentration camp, Majdanek. (photo from Talya Katzen)

The week in Poland was extremely draining, and I came to many realizations. I felt so strongly about things I simply cannot put into words. Our pre-trip informational sessions came nowhere near to preparing me for what I was going to witness. How can anything prepare you for walking through a gas chamber where, just 70 years ago, thousands of innocent lives were erased each day? Pictures may speak louder than words, but physically being there is like a blood-curdling scream right in your face.

Each day’s event was a new brick dropped on my shoulders and, as the bricks piled up, I came to appreciate more and more the wonderful life I have been blessed with. The weather in Poland was cold and windy, spitting rain into our eyes as we walked through extermination camps, cemeteries and ghettos in our warm down coats and hats. Our complaints about the cold were no match to the below-zero temperatures that those starving prisoners in the thousands of concentration camps across Europe had to face day in and day out.

The tour of Majdanek concentration camp was truly an experience that will be with me for the rest of my life. The defining moment of the journey was visiting the monument that holds the ashes of the victims of the camp. A recording of the prisoners, just liberated from Bergen-Belsen, singing “Hatikvah” began to play as we all stood hand-in-hand. My mind was blank and completely full at the same time. The mutual sorrow all we marchers felt was overpowering. A connection to one another that I doubt will ever be broken.

photo - Left to right, Talya Katzen, Hayley Kardash, Shauna Miller and Alyssa Diamond participate in Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations in Israel — Left to right, Talya Katzen, Hayley Kardash, Shauna Miller and Alyssa Diamond participate in Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations in Israel. *(photo from Talya Katzen)*

This feeling of grief was flipped on its back upon our arrival in the beautiful state of Israel, a country that is now home to Jews who have survived some of the worst events in history – and prospered. I was fortunate to be there during the festival that celebrates Israeli Independence Day. Israelis gather together to celebrate community and overcoming many hardships. Having just experienced the height of grief in Poland, I could not have been more grateful for Israel, and the promise it holds for the Jewish people. Of course, our celebrations of freedom were constantly overshadowed by the memory of those who perished in Europe, who never had the chance to visit our homeland. It made me realize how absolutely crucial it is for young Jewish people of the world to experience this journey so that we may never forget.

March of the Living taught me that I have family all over the world who are just as passionate about keeping Judaism alive as I am, and that it is completely up to us to carry the torch from generation to generation, to keep the flame of the Jewish people burning forever. I am a third-generation survivor and it is my duty to be a witness, to live out the lives of those who never had the chance to see their 10th or 18th or 85th birthday simply because of who they were. Hitler and the Nazis may have been successful in murdering millions of people who didn’t fit their blueprint of the ideal race, but they failed miserably in taking away our Jewish identity. I am a person, I am a witness, I am a Jew, and no one can take that away from me.

Talya Katzen originally wrote this article as a Lord Byng Secondary school assignment. Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver offsets the cost of March of the Living by $2,000 for each local participant. The funds for this are generated through the Federation annual campaign, and are distributed to participants through the Israel and Overseas Connections fund. Jewish Federation also provides support through staff resources, program leader training and participant education.

Life-changing March for survivor

Teens on this year’s March of the Living helped Lillian Boraks-Nemetz face down haunting memories. (photo by Adele Lewin Photography)

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a Vancouver poet and author who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, initially declined the offer of a trip to her Polish homeland. She had been there, and written books and poems about her experiences as a child and as a returning adult. She didn’t know that an invitation to go again would lead to an emotional and psychological closure for which she had waited seven decades.

When first invited to participate in last spring’s Canadian contingent of March of the Living, Boraks-Nemetz demurred. March of the Living is a program that brings Jewish young people from around the world to the sites of Nazi atrocities in Europe and then to the Jewish homeland of Israel, marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust memorial day, and traveling to Israel in time for Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s remembrance day for fallen soldiers, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli independence day. March of the Living’s teenage participants are accompanied by Holocaust survivors.

“I thought, how am I going to keep up with a bunch of 16-, 17-year-olds?” Boraks-Nemetz said in a recent interview. But she was assured that survivors are well taken care of on the trips and she was convinced to go.

“There were difficulties, but I rose to the occasion,” she said, laughing. On the extremely long day traveling from Canada to Poland, which then continued immediately with more travel and programming, Boraks-Nemetz was aided by one of the young participants. “One of the girls had chocolate that had extra caffeine in it, so she gave it to me,” she explained.

Boraks-Nemetz was accompanied by another survivor, chaperones and young people from Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa, as well as eight Jewish teens from Vancouver. In all, there were 78 people on the trip. (Young people from Ontario and Quebec made up their own contingents and traveled on different buses.)

The program was intensive. The week in Poland involved stays in Krakow and Warsaw, where they visited the Museum of Polish Jews, and they went to the extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.

“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything. You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”

“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything,” she said. “You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”

In Warsaw, they also went to the orphanage that had been run by Janusz Korczak. A Polish Jew who was a respected published author, Korczak was offered multiple opportunities to save himself from the advancing Final Solution. When the Warsaw Ghetto was created, Korczak’s orphanage, its staff and nearly 200 young charges were forced to move into the ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, in 1942, Korczak was again offered immunity, but instead stayed with his orphaned children as they were deported to Treblinka.

In Lodz, the group visited the cemetery and the place where the second-largest Nazi-enforced Jewish ghetto had been. (More than 200,000 Jews were held in Lodz Ghetto during its existence. About 10,000 of those were alive in 1945.) There, the Canadians boarded one of the rail cars that had transported Jews to the camps.

“It was dark and there were many of us,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “It was tight. It was scary. We got the feel of it. Of course, the fear wasn’t there, but there was something foreboding about it.”

At the camps, the participants said prayers and sang mournful songs.

“There was a lot of poetry,” she said. “I brought my book Ghost Children, which was written after one of my trips there. And, whenever we went to a certain place, I would read a poem and it really got to them.”

An unexpected insight came during conversations with young Polish Jews during an arranged dinner at the hotel in Warsaw.

“They sat down, one at each table of students, so they were able to talk,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “At the end of the dinner, I saw the five or six of them standing in the lobby of the hotel, the Polish Jews, and so I went to talk to them. We went to the side and it was really interesting what they told me. They’re quite modern. They’re a little bit shy. They’re a big change from the Israeli youth,” she said, laughing.

The young Polish Jews told her that things were pretty good for them. Some go abroad – to France or elsewhere – to study, but jobs are hard to find and the standard of living isn’t great. They had a question about March of the Living.

“They said, ‘Why do you always come here looking for what’s dead?’ And I explained to them that this is an educational trip,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “But they said, ‘You know, there are some of us here, there is beauty here too, we are alive and there is a Jewish community – small, but there is a Jewish community. And I could see that that was maybe something to address.”

From Poland, the group flew El-Al to Israel.

“It’s like walking in from the shadow into light,” she said. “The Jerusalem of Gold! And we went straight to Masada off the plane.”

There, the other survivor on the trip, Max Iland, an octogenarian from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., celebrated his bar mitzvah, a few decades late.

“The students were singing and he and I were dancing, it was really fantastic,” said Boraks-Nemetz.

The entire experience, she said, was life-altering for the participants.

“They felt that their Jewishness was strengthened, that they are a part of history,” she said. “They cherish their homes and their families after finding out what happened to Jews over there. And, above all … they were becoming witnesses to my story. That’s what one of them said. She felt she was a witness to it. I did speak to them about the legacy that we, survivors who were on our way out, are leaving them.”

Boraks-Nemetz found especially notable the connection of young Canadian Jews to those who had given their lives in defence of the Jewish state.

“What I didn’t realize was how strongly they feel about the fallen soldiers who fought for Israel,” she said. “They read poetry again to the fallen soldiers.”

When the national moment of silence came, the experience was transfixing.

“We’re standing on [Tel Aviv’s central street] Ben Yehuda and the sirens sounded and, all of a sudden, it was like everyone was made of wax figures. That was an incredible thing.”

For Boraks-Nemetz, the trip provided an unexpected closure to the darkest chapter of her life.

photo - Lillian Boraks-Nemetz — Lillian Boraks-Nemetz accompanied teens on this year’s March of the Living. *(photo by Adele Lewin Photography)*

For her, the climactic moments of the March of the Living took place in the small Polish village of Zalesie. It was here that young Lillian survived the Holocaust in hiding. After spending two years in the Warsaw Ghetto, she was smuggled out by her father before the ghetto was liquidated and its residents – more than a quarter million Jews – were sent to Treblinka and other death camps. Outside the ghetto, she was met by a Christian woman who transported her to a little white home in Zalesie, where her grandmother was in hiding, posing as the wife of the Polish man who lived there.

Boraks-Nemetz has written about that time in her poetry and in her book for young adults, The Old Brown Suitcase. As an adult, she has returned to the little house at Spokojna Street, Number 16. But this visit was different.

“These two buses went down this dusty road, and there were all these [people in] houses wondering what was going on,” she said. “Nobody bothered us. We filed out and we went into the garden. We all stood in the garden and I told them the story of hiding.”

There was one part of the story she hadn’t intended to tell, but she had developed closeness and trust with the participants accompanying her. She felt confident and compelled to share more than she ever had before, which led to an unprecedented emotional catharsis after almost seven decades.

“I told them something about the man with whom we were in hiding. He was both good and bad,” Boraks-Nemetz said. “How does a child of eight take that? That, on the one hand, he saved us, our lives, and, on the other hand, he was a drunk who could have given us away and didn’t, and, thirdly, he abused me when my grandmother wasn’t there. This is life and that’s how it was.”

In small groups of six or eight, the young people accompanied Boraks-Nemetz into the home.

“When we went into the house, I explained where I slept and where I stood by the window and watched for my parents to come, the road, the garden, the whole thing,” she said. “They were very moved, and a funny thing happened. Each time a group would come out, I would come out with them onto the little porch and they would all hug me. Every one of them. And I think what happened to me was probably, for the first time in my life, I was able to face what happened there. That was an awesome experience for me. I had been there before many times but I always blocked it out. I never faced it properly. And, this time, because of the kids … I just couldn’t believe how it opened me up, this experience with the kids.”

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.