Walking through history: inside the March of the Living

Every year in mid-April, thousands of people walk the short distance from what was once the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz I to the death camp of Auschwitz II–Birkenau. They commemorate the victims of the Holocaust through the "March of the Living", waving flags, singing songs, and praying, showing that there are still people who care. Nowadays one walks along a newly constructed main road, with the surroundings almost completely empty and police stationed on every corner. Politicians and delegations from all over the world march at the front, flown in just that morning, escorted by security details, posing for pictures and laying flowers.

Close to the end of this procession you find me, working as a guide for this year’s Austrian “Morah” initiative, scolding students who do not behave appropriately. Some groups are loud, almost in a party mood, but the ones toward the end, especially those from countries once integral parts of the Nazi state, are expected to show their regret and to approach this as a quiet, ceremonial act.

Morah, also known as the March of Remembrance and Hope, is an international initiative focused on educating young adults through memorial trips to Poland, specifically to Auschwitz, and participation in the march. Each year, dozens of schools from Germany and Austria take part, each sending around forty to fifty 17-year-olds along with two teachers and one or two specialized tour guides to Kraków. Together with my partner, we serve as those guides, being there for the students, always up to date on the agenda, and always ready to listen and help.

These remembrance trips have developed into a central component of historical and civic learning in many countries. At an international level, Holocaust education emerged more clearly in public and academic discourse in the final decades of the 20th century. International frameworks, such as the IHRA Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust, provide practical guidance for educators. In Germany and Austria, a key moment in this development was the broadcast of the American television series Holocaust in the late 1970s. Although fictional and sometimes criticized for its melodramatic style, the series had a significant cultural impact. After 1945, Austria built its identity on the idea that it had been “the first victim” of Nazi Germany. This has been described as the "victim myth". The school system played a key role in spreading this idea. In the years after the war, education focused strongly on constructing a new Austrian identity far removed from Nazi ideology. Since then, Holocaust education in countries like Austria, where I grew up, has become institutionalized within formal education systems and is closely linked to visits to memorial sites, study trips, and encounters with historical locations such as Auschwitz. The problem with this educational model is that every country, region, and even school has, to some extent, varying levels of knowledge about Holocaust memory and even more so about Jewish culture itself. Cultural and societal context, as well as biases in remembrance, are rarely acknowledged in formal education.

Even I went on such a trip during my school time, not through an organization but solely organized by a teacher who happened to be Polish. In my class, most people were of Austrian origin. Anyone with a migration background was rare. My mother fled Poland in the 1980s and raised me by herself, in a very traditional Polish household. Officially no one in my family is Jewish but both my great grandmothers were sent to Auschwitz. I was the only one in my group who had any kind of history or ties to Poland and its Jewish history. This led to a quite complicated situation. On one hand, everyone kept asking me every few minutes while visiting Auschwitz if I was okay. On the other, no one cared to actually talk about their feelings before and after, especially not with me, since they were too guilty about what their ancestors had done.

The second time I visited was years later together with my partner, who is Jewish. Oświęcim, the town adjacent to the camp complex, had changed quite a bit. A shopping centre was being built and there are noisy streets, as well as several adverts for Oświęcim as a new, attractive place to move. The group joining us on the tour had almost no knowledge of the Holocaust. They posed with selfie sticks on the train tracks in Birkenau, while my partner squeezed my hand ever so tightly.

This year we were supposed to travel as educators, stepping in at the last minute as a favour to our friend. Both of us were more than qualified: I am the only guide who is a Polish speaker and has researched and studied the region for years, and my partner is a certified antisemitism coach. Early in the morning, we got on the bus and were taken directly to the Auschwitz memorial site, without stopping at the hotel and with no workshop to prepare our group for the visit. We try our best to talk to the students on the bus, but most of them are, understandably, more interested in treating the ride as any other school trip.

At a petrol station, a local man asks curiously where we were headed. I explain that this is a school trip to Auschwitz and he responds: “Auschwitz? Only Jews go there… are you guys Jewish?” I let out a nervous laugh and say of course not. He nods and adds, “Good, because only Jewish people belong there.”

As our bus misses the exit on the highway, we arrive almost an hour late and are immediately escorted to our guide, who gives us a shortened tour so we can still make dinner in time at the hotel. During the tour, there is a strong emphasis on Austria’s role as a major contributor to the Nazi regime. It is contrasted with the narrative of a “glorious Polish nation that helped all its Jewish citizens”. It is important to note here that in Poland, Holocaust memory is closely tied to broader debates about national identity, wartime suffering, and moral responsibility. A key feature of Polish Holocaust memory is the tendency to prioritize narratives of Polish national suffering over the specifically Jewish experience of genocide. By merging these experiences into a single narrative of “shared suffering”, public discourse can unintentionally shift attention away from the specificity of the genocide of Jews. As a result, the Holocaust is sometimes remembered mainly as part of the Polish national tragedy, rather than as a separate genocide targeting Jews. This bias was not discussed during the tour.

The next day starts early with a talk between our students and some Jewish teens their own age. The "Likrat" programme is an Israeli youth initiative that brings Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers together for dialogue. It quickly becomes clear that the Austrian students have a lot of knowledge when it comes to the history of the Second World War, but have practically no knowledge of Jewish culture and history. After a long discussion, one of the Jewish students says, after a brief pause, that it would be okay to talk about Israel and Palestine, the conflict in Gaza, and to exchange their thoughts. Although some students the previous day considered not attending the march due to the number of Israeli groups and flags there, the crowd is silent. No one really feels able to talk about this openly, scared to cross boundaries and unsure of what to say exactly.

Afterwards, our group makes its way to Auschwitz again, prepared with jackets, and banners. The atmosphere in the museum is relaxed, the sun is shining and most attendees sit on the grass next to the old buildings, eating, talking, laughing. It has not even been 24 hours since we visited, but the whole vibe has changed; one almost forgets that this is the place we walked through in silence a day earlier.

After hours of waiting, our group finally starts the walk towards Birkenau. Israeli groups hand out badges, stickers, and bracelets, trading them with everyone. The students and guides from Austria smile politely and make small talk but quickly put away any gifts that include the Israeli flag into their pockets. An orthodox Jew spots my partner and asks him to do a prayer and put on the tefillin. It becomes a symbolic moment for both, praying openly and visibly 80 years after the Nazi regime killed millions, including around one million on this soil where they are standing. Afterwards some of our fellow tour guides come up to him and ask what that was about, having no idea how Jewish prayer works.

By the time we arrive in Birkenau the ceremony is nearing its end. Hundreds of people walk the grounds. The usually vast and eerie place is now filled with people, changing its whole atmosphere. During the Kaddish prayer I have tears in my eyes, suddenly deeply touched by all the Jewish grief, but there is no time to digest it, since we are behind schedule yet again.

One student almost jokingly asks about the weirdly shaped buildings on the horizon. I tell them that everything was destroyed to cover up traces but that these were the crematoria used to burn bodies until the very last minute. He stops and remains quiet for the rest of the day. That is the biggest issue on this trip: you forget the weight of the topic due to all the organizational issues, and suddenly it hits you all at once and you are not able to breathe.

Our final day was also packed. A city tour through Kraków’s Jewish district of Kazimierz is followed by a concert in one of the two synagogues still used by the community. There is no time to really visit the city itself or learn about its history in a way that contextualizes everything we had seen and experienced over the last two days. During the concert, the cantor encourages the crowd to sing along, clap and dance. We take students by the hand and dance together in a circle. Chaos and laughter are everywhere. Afterwards, a girl comes up to me, very surprised that Judaism is not only about grief and sadness.

On our way back, we talk to the students’ teachers. One of them has been doing this for over ten years, saying that visits to Auschwitz never get easier, but that he still finds it important to do so. The programme, he tells us, has not changed much since then, but some years are better than others. We share our disappointment, talking about the limited space for reflection and the lack of knowledge about Jewish culture and history.

He asks me if I want to be a guide again next year. I hesitate, because I am dissatisfied with the structure and the educational part of the memorial trip itself, but I also feel responsible to try to make it better, even if it is only by myself and by changing one person’s mind. Ultimately, my experience with the March of the Living exposed a central contradiction: while the programme is intended to foster remembrance and education, its structure often reduces reflection to logistics and symbolism, leaving little space for meaningful engagement with Jewish history, cultural complexity, or the emotional and ethical weight of what is being commemorated. Because Holocaust memory is not something of the past, and in cities like Vienna, Kraków, or Berlin, where I live now, one can feel the remains of Jewish history everywhere, every day.

Viktoria Rybicki is a Berlin-based researcher focusing on populism and memory culture. She now manages the Claims Conference Berlin office, having previously worked as an intern at New Eastern Europe and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków and continues to work as a freelance journalist.