For 60 years, Yosef Broshi refused to step foot in Poland -- the country where he was born, and the land where he suffered from Nazi atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
But yesterday, 60 years after the end of World War II, Broshi is returning as a proud 82-year-old Israeli accompanied by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his 18-year-old grandson Nimrod, a private in the Israeli army's artillery corps.
Along with the 19 other survivors and their grandchildren, most of them soldiers in the Israeli army, traveling with Sharon, Broshi will again pass under the notorious sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- work liberates -- but this time he can leave when he chooses.
"I didn't want to go back, not even to the town I was born," Broshi said, the number 98882 tattooed on his arm from his year in Auschwitz.
"It's a wonderful feeling ... I was a combat soldier in the war of independence and it's all connected," Broshi said, referring to the 1948 Mideast war that led to the creation of Israel. "We were one of those who created this country ... our message now is we're here, we built this country and we live here as free Jews."
About 18,000 people -- a number chosen to symbolize the Hebrew word for life, "Chai" -- are to participate in this year's March of the Living, the largest group since the event was launched in 1988, according to organizers. At the march, as the remaining survivors rapidly age and die, they will "symbolically pass on the responsibility to remember the Holocaust," organizers said.
The 3km march from Auschwitz to Birkenau -- which make up the largest Nazi camp complex, where about 1.5 million Jews were killed during World War II -- is an annual memorial for all 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
The March of the Living is also a commemoration of the death marches that took place toward the end of World War II, when the Germans began emptying camps and forcing the inmates to walk hundreds of kilometers in freezing weather and with little food. Thousands of people died in the marches.
The march coincided with the annual Holocaust memorial day in Israel. At 10am, sirens wailed throughout Israel for two minutes as the country observed a moment of silence. People stopped whatever they were doing and stood in silence, while traffic came to a standstill.
The annual day of remembrance is observed with official memorial ceremonies, somber music on the radio and historical documentaries and movies on national television.
Speaking Wednesday evening at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial at the opening ceremony for Holocaust memorial day, Sharon said the best response to the atrocities the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis would be the grandchildren -- soldiers in the Israeli army -- joining their survivor grandparents at yesterday's march.
"This is possibly the clearest difference between then, when they marched to death, and today, when they are in the March of the Living," Sharon said.
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