“THE TIME after Kristallnacht was filled with fear and humiliation. I was forbidden to borrow books from the library I loved so much. Children stopped playing with me, and my favorite teacher started wearing a swastika. About a month later, my parents made the most painful decision: to send us on a ‘Kindertransport’ to the Netherlands. Imagine, a 10-year-old girl who was forced to separate from her parents and take care of her six-year-old brother. We were sent to a government-donated manor home in The Hague, and in October 1939, my brother, Walter, and I boarded a ship to the US, and there we reunited with our parents.” Zimbler has a clear message: “We must support each other and ensure that we learn the message of the Holocaust. We must motivate people to apply the lyrics to the song, ‘If there could only be peace on Earth, and peace will begin within me.’ We cannot remain bystanders. We must take a stand. It is important to tell the story, a story of injustice of the worst kind. We cannot let injustices happen, and yet they continue to happen. Everything must be done to ensure that these injustices never lead to another Holocaust. I went through this horror, and my life changed forever. I want people to learn to love and support each other.” Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, chairman of the International March of the Living, says, “The preservation of memory should continue to be a central motto in the life of the nation and the world in general, because those who do not know the past will not know how to build its future. It is easy to say that there are external winds blowing like corona, economic and global crises, and say, ‘Let’s wait, and when conditions are easier, we will return to our activities to preserve the memories.’” Under normal circumstances, the March of the Living is an educational journey that takes place every year in Poland and Israel, in which thousands of teenagers and adults tour the Nazi death camps in Poland, the ghettos and towns emptied of their Jewish communities, and Holocaust commemorative sites in Israel. The highlight of the trip in Poland is the three-kilometer march held at the railway between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps on Holocaust Remembrance Day, along the very same path that tens of thousands of Jews were forced to march to their deaths by the Nazis and their helpers.

Let there be light

The message of Kristallnacht after 82 years

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