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December 15. 2005
March of the Living Participants Express The Inexpressible
by - Wendy Schneider

For the five Hamilton adults who participated in this year's March of the Living, the experience can only be described as transformative. This year's March, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation from Auschwitz, was open to adults as well as students. As a result, the March, which normally attracts 6,000, attracted over 18,000 participants (21,000 by some counts), 1000 of them from Canada. Among the Canadians were five Hamiltonians, including Lorne and Michele Finkelstein, Willy and Sylvie Steen and Larry Kahn.

Asked to describe the experience, Michele Finkelstein, whose two sons are past March of the Living participants, said that although both she and her husband felt they had a deep understanding of the Holocaust, nothing could compare with seeing it for themselves. "There's no question when you're there it gives you a whole different perspective", she said, "it's something you have to experience and that you can't get by stories. I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to do it."

The March of the Living is a two-week trip, including a week in Poland, whose highlight is a 3-kilometer walk from Birkenau to Auschwitz on Yom HaShoah, followed by a week in Israel, timed to coincide with Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day. Michele said that during their week in Poland, the weather was appropriately miserable, damp, rainy and cold the entire time.

"When the day of the March arrived, it was teeming rain. We had to take a train to Auschwitz, which in itself was significant. When we arrived at the Warsaw train station, there was a sea of blue jackets and Israeli flags, with hundreds of people boarding trains for Auschwitz. One unforgettable moment occurred when a train arrived from Moscow, carrying students from a Jewish school. The kids were waving out the windows and started singing 'David Melech Yisrael' and the whole train station erupted in song. After a train ride of four and a half hours, they reached Birkenau. It's incomprehensible and bigger than you could ever imagine."

Now that she is home, Michele finds that it is almost impossible to describe her experience. "No matter how much we try to describe it, words can never describe how you feel being there, together with 20,000 other people", she said.

Lorne Finkelstein, who was also deeply affected by the experience, is unequivocal that a trip such as this is essential, not only for Jews, but for people from all religions. "No matter what we know about the history, when you see the detailed organization required to carry this out it's a lesson for all of us. Each of us must be proactive in stopping similar acts from being perpetrated anywhere in the world."

For Willy Steen, who lost several family members in the Holocaust, and whose father was imprisoned at several satellite camps in addition to Auschwitz, taking part in the March gave him an opportunity to bear witness to the experience of his family members and the six million who perished. The week in Poland, which included a side trip to a small town where his father had been a slave labourer, and where Steen discovered that its citizens had participated in a pogrom following the war, has had an empowering effect. He plans to write a report for Yad Vashem about the incident. "I now realize that to be a witness is not enough. I have to be a witness with a voice. It's not enough to have seen it. I have a duty to tell it - to my children, and to people everywhere."

As they were leaving Poland, Steen recounts, "the heavens opened up, with a sudden downpour of rain. I looked up and imagined all the martyred souls looking at us and crying that we were leaving them."

Initially, Sylvie Steen did not want to go on the March. "I don't have direct connections to the Holocaust and I thought it was going to be too hard emotionally on Willy." She reluctantly agreed to go, however, to support her husband whom she knew would not go without her.

The experience was transformative, and like so many other participants, Sylvie said that the imagination simply couldn't conceive of the enormity of what they witnessed. Some things will never be the same. Like the song, Am Yisrael Chai, for instance, which March participants spontaneously began to sing when they were gathered at Auschwitz. "When I came from Romania as a teenager it was just a song. There was a moment when the Israelis were singing and everyone joined in and all of a sudden the meaning was so clear."

Sylvie never imagined that she would be telling her children and friends that this is a trip that must be experienced. Nor did she imagine that after the trip, she'd be thanking her husband for taking her.