When I joined Panama’s delegation to the 2026 March of the Living, I expected the journey to deepen my understanding of Holocaust history. I did not expect it to change the way I saw my family, my community and my own responsibility as a young Jew.
They say people don't change, but the transformation I experienced was proof enough that our lives can change forever. This April, I went to Poland with the 2026 Panamanian delegation, carrying with me the sole expectation of learning history. Instead, I returned having experienced something that changed how I see my own life. Countless unforgettable moments came together to transform not one person, but an entire generation.
Before I could understand the weight of those moments, I spent months with my classmates learning dates, names, and numbers too large to fully comprehend, along with my own family's history and its relationship with our community. When I was five, my mother became a quadruple amputee after a sudden illness that caught us all by surprise. It changed us overnight, but one thing remained constant: our community showed up for us with meals, rides, and their presence, all without being asked. From then on, I grew up looking for ways to give that support back. I didn't fully understand why that instinct ran so deep in me until I stood on the same ground where our people had once been abandoned, with no one there to help them.
That understanding started to take shape in a forest during an activity in which our delegation participated. Months before, back in Panama, we had each drawn a picture, a child’s drawing, the kind you might see stuck on a fridge as a memory of those innocent years. What we didn’t know was that we would place the small drawings in the ground to honor the children who didn’t get to grow up. I didn’t know exactly what shifted inside me at that moment, but something changed. I immediately thought of my little sister and briefly imagined her not getting to grow up and achieve her dreams. In that moment, I made a small promise to myself. My sister has always had sweaty hands, something I couldn’t stand, so I refused to hug her. We always saw it as a joke: she would chase me, trying to hug me, and I would run away, yelling at her not to touch me. But right there, kneeling beside a mass grave where children were buried, I imagined never being able to hug her again. That thought was enough to make me vow to value every hug and every small touch, no matter how insignificant it might seem.
That same instinct, to hold tight to those I love, followed me to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where I entered a room full of prosthetic limbs taken from people before they were murdered and discarded as though their lives had no value. My thoughts turned to my mother, her prosthetic arms and legs, and how she relies on them every day. To others, these limbs might seem like simple objects, but to those who wore them, they made it possible to reach for a hug, walk toward a family member, or drive their children to school. Seeing how people were stripped of their lives and dignity brought what I had read in books to life and made it unbearably personal.
It was with all those heavy thoughts that I joined the march itself, a 3.5-kilometer walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau alongside thousands of people in blue jackets. Delegations from around the world moved together across the same ground where the Nazis had tried to erase our ancestors and, with them, us. There, I finally understood what it meant to answer absence with presence. We sang Vehi She'amda, our voices joining in the promise that in every generation someone rises against us, and in every generation we survive stronger than before. We sang Hatikvah, the anthem of a country that did not exist when the people who walked this path before us were killed. Months later, I can still hear it, and I think I always will: our steps on the gravel and our voices overlapping in the cold air as we walked forward on legs that were never taken from us, in memory of those whose legs were taken away.
Nesse Godin’s words gave voice to what the march had made me feel: “We cannot change what was, but we can change what is and what will be.” I cannot undo what happened in that forest, in those camps, or on that ground. None of us can. But we can decide what to do with what we now carry. I can show up for my community, not because it is what’s expected of me, but because I understand now, more than ever, that the reason my community showed up for my family is the same reason we need to show up for others. That is how memory survives and how “never again” becomes truth instead of just words.
I did not leave Poland as the same person who arrived. I left having made a promise to my sister, having understood my mother’s strength in a way I never had before, and having heard songs that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They say people don’t change. I know now that they can, and that sometimes it takes standing on the same ground where history’s most painful moments occurred to understand who you are meant to become. We are not tourists visiting a place in history; we are witnesses, obligated to remember those the Nazis tried to make us forget, because forgetting a victim of the Holocaust is like killing them all over again.
For more information about the 2027 March of the Living: https://motl.org/delegations/
Written in collaboration with March of the Living