Seventy-three years ago this week Irving Roth, 88, was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp. He and his brother had been imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp, but as Allied troops approached, the boys were sent on a death march to Buchenwald – where his brother died.
On Thursday, Mr Roth, of Long Island, New York, returned to Auschwitz – now a memorial and museum – for the “seventh or eighth” time since his liberation. He was one of 70 Holocaust survivors who participated in this year’s March of the Living, a 30-year-old international educational Holocaust program that begins with a week of study and visits to Jewish and Holocaust sites and culminates with a two-mile march from Auschwitz to Birkenau and an emotion-filled ceremony of remembrance.
Mr Roth’s grandparents were murdered here.
Although each visit to the barracks where he nearly froze to death, and the crematoria where his grandparents perished, causes Mr Roth distress, he decided to return once again “because 70-plus years later, there are still hundreds of millions of people who want the Jewish people to disappear, just as they wanted them to disappear during the Holocaust,” Mr Roth said.
Read the article by Michele Chabin in Sight Magazine.