Two hundred Jewish students from Britain marked their visit to Auschwitz Sunday by placing photos of the almost 200 remaining hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza on the train tracks outside the death camp.
The students, of the JFS school in London, visited Auschwitz as part of their Poland trip run by JRoots, a Jewish heritage education organization.
"Auschwitz is the ultimate symbol of the age-old phenomena of Jews being targeted and murdered for the simple fact that they were Jews," said Zak Jeffay of JRoots. "It should serve as a wake-up call to the world today, as it has over the past 78 years, that the lives of Jews wherever they are cannot be disregarded.
"The Jews [being] murdered and kidnapped from their homes in 2023 happened against the backdrop of centuries of antisemitism. Placing these pictures in front of Auschwitz allows people to see more clearly the context in which the crimes of today are taking place."
Comparisons between October 7 and the Holocaust
Many parallels have been drawn between the atrocities of October 7 and those of the Holocaust, from the graphic similarity of some of the details to the brazen denial of Hamas's crimes by so many despite overwhelming evidence of their reality. The massacre also saw the most Jews killed on a single day in the 78 years since the Holocaust.