16 April 2007
Thousands of people, many of them Israeli teenagers, have gathered at the site of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz for the annual “March of the Living”, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. The march – which winds from the brick barracks of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Birkenau – is held to pay tribute to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
The Israeli government was represented by Rafi Eitan, a minister and former Mossad agent who in 1960 helped to capture Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann, considered to be one of the main architects of the campaign to exterminate the Jews. Every year, participants walk the two miles from the gate of the Auschwitz ‘Stammlager’ to the ruins of the gas chambers at Birkenau to mourn those who were massacred and to "bear witness to the undying spirit of the Jewish people."
On Sunday evening, some 3,000 Jewish youths accompanied by Israel's education minister Yuli Tamir, gathered at the Auschwitz camp museum and recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, on the spot where the gas chambers stood.
