Celebrating survival
MORE than 10,000 students, adults and survivors from around the world, including 44 Australians, marched to Auschwitz-Birkenau in silence, as part of the March of the Living (MOTL) program on Yom Hashoah on Monday.
MORE than 10,000 students, adults and survivors from around the world, including 44 Australians, marched to Auschwitz-Birkenau in silence, as part of the March of the Living (MOTL) program on Yom Hashoah on Monday.
Among those walking the three kilometres in silence was businessman and Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy, who gave the keynote address.
As a boy he escaped the Nazis, but his father, Hugo, perished in the Shoah.
Almost 50 years later, his father’s story of faith and resistance was revealed by a man who was on the same train as him to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. According to the man, Hugo endured blow after blow rather than obey an order to give up his prayer bag, which contained his tallit and tefillin. “I wanted to do something, I wanted to honour his memory, I wanted to stand in a place that he faced so that I could do something to feel him. I know that he was also here under the same sky, just like half-a-million other Hungarian Jews,” Lowy said at the Yom Hashoah ceremony.
“I was 13 when I lost my father and now I’m 82 and I still miss him. And to the young people here, I want to say that your mother and father always matter, even when you get to my age. Honouring your parents matters very much while they are alive and also when they are no longer with us.”
The Lowy family located a wagon that had been used to transport Hungarian Jews and in 2009 brought it to Auschwitz-Birkenau where it was dedicated to the memory of Hungary’s half-a-million victims.
Lowy was accompanied by his wife, sons, daughters-in-law and granddaughter at the ceremony.
Chazans of Sydney’s Central Synagogue and Melbourne’s Caulfield Hebrew Congregation, Shimon and Dov Farkas, performed a moving rendition of El Malei Rachamim, as well as other hymns and songs.
Israeli President Shimon Peres recorded a special message that was screened for the audience and Israeli armed forces’ chief of staff, Benny Gantz, son of a Holocaust survivor, also made a speech.
TIMNA JACKS
Participants at March of the Living.
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