Holocaust Victims Remembered

Warning against attempts to deny the horrors of the Holocaust, the presidents of Israel and Poland led about 6,000 people on a solemn march Tuesday, retracing the path prisoners once took to the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Holocaust survivors joined thousands of students from Israel, Poland and other countries for the annual March of the Living, intended to spread awareness of the World War II tragedy.

The procession followed the two-mile path from the Auschwitz camp to its gas chambers at Birkenau. Marchers placed wooden tablets bearing victims’ names on nearby railroad tracks, on which cattle wagons packed with doomed deportees once rolled in from all over Europe. The Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews at Birkenau between 1940 and 1945 while occupying Poland.

In an emotional speech in Hebrew, Israeli President Ezer Weizman, standing near the ruins of the gas chambers, stressed the need to keep the victims in memory as a warning to future generations.

He and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski led marchers through the main Auschwitz gate, on which is inscribed Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Will Set You Free.”

“I share your pain and reflection,” Kwasniewski said. “We are here together to make sure that nobody, neither people nor nations, are ever again threatened with annihilation.”

About 800 of this year’s participants were not Jewish--mostly from Poland, but also from Germany and the United States, said march spokesman Joram Dori. Organizers hope to “increase the awareness of the Holocaust among non-Jews at a time when the Holocaust gets denied even by historians,” Dori said.

Last month, a Polish professor lost his job after publishing a book questioning the Holocaust. And in a high-profile case, British historian David Irving, who has written that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated, lost a libel suit he brought against an American scholar who criticized his work.

In Israel, meanwhile, people stopped in their tracks Tuesday when sirens went off at 10 a.m. for Holocaust Remembrance Day, offering a silent, two-minute tribute to the 6 million Holocaust victims.

In the Red Sea resort of Eilat, Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators interrupted peace treaty talks and stood in silence. The chief Israeli negotiator, Oded Eran, said he appreciated the gesture of his Palestinian colleagues.

In Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, however, residents went about their daily routines as usual.