Helen Farkas of Burlingame can easily recall sleeping head to toe with 16 others, on wooden planks. She can also recall how the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele sent her parents to death upon arrival at Auschwitz, while she, at 19, was sent in the other direction, to do hard labor.
But next week, Farkas, 84, and her husband, Joe, are boarding a plane to Poland to join the March of the Living, where she will revisit the site of the horrors she remembers so clearly — for the second time.
Since 1988, the march has brought Jewish teenagers to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day to march from Auschwitz to nearby Birkenau, where prisoners actually were gassed, followed quickly by a trip to Israel to mark the Jewish state’s Memorial Day and Independence Day.
Because this year marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, some 18,000 people will be taking part, more than twice as many as last year’s 8,000. Organizers say the program will be the largest-ever Holocaust memorial ceremony.
In addition, this year’s trip has been opened to groups that have not been included before. Adults, multicultural groups, university students and young professionals are among the new participants.
The Bay Area’s delegation of 20 people — with the exception of Helen and Joe Farkas and Linda Breder of San Francisco, another survivor of Auschwitz — are all between the ages of 20 and 45.
The local contingent was organized on a volunteer basis by Mariana Roytman Schiffner, marketing and public relations associate of the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education.
“I went on the March of the Living as a high school senior in 1996 and the trip completely transformed me and my perspective on the world,” she said, describing how, afterwards, when she arrived at UCLA, she joined Hillel and chaired Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Each bus travels with a Holocaust survivor, and the one who was on my bus, Sigi Hart, became family to me,” she said. “Till this day, we are extremely close.” He even served as a witness at her wedding and signed her ketubah.
“As I stood with him in Auschwitz I knew that it was now my responsibility to educate people about the Holocaust. The survivors are quickly disappearing, and we are the last firsthand witnesses of their stories.”
For this trip, Schiffner spoke to some friends who had never gone on the march in high school, and decided to organize a group.
Television reporter Dan Ashley and Randy Davis, a cameraman, will do a documentary on the local survivors.
Participants in the march will be coming from around the world, everywhere from Argentina to Uzbekistan.
Among many groups attending will be the Anti-Defamation League, Dor Chadash and a contingent of Catholic educators. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is expected to be there, as are the presidents of Poland and Hungary, the chief rabbis of Israel, the Canadian justice minister, legislators from France, Germany and Israel and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.
As a young soldier in the field artillery unit of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, Harry Katz entered Dachau just behind the American artillery, shortly after the camp was liberated in late April of 1945.
“We saw the crematoria and the barracks and the buildings and the firing-squad walls,” recalls Katz, who is now 80. “It was difficult, emotional. What can I tell you?”
Because he spoke fluent Yiddish — he’d studied in a Brooklyn yeshiva before the war — Katz soon was posted as a translator working on interrogating German POWs.
“It was an experience questioning them, hearing their stories, trying to weed out those who were really part of the SS or the SA,” Nazi storm troopers, he says.
Katz will be going to Poland with the march, along with his son, Joel, and his 18-year-old granddaughter, Lauren.
“I feel it’s important to me to pass on the feelings and the expressions to my children and my grand-daughter and her peers and friends,” Katz says. “Hopefully they will remember and be aware what in humanity went on, and what man can do to man. We hope to God it won’t happen again.”
David Machlis, March of the Living’s vice chairman, says the effort to bring such a large contingent to Poland this year stems from three sources: the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, a rise in worldwide anti-Semitism and the aging of the survivor population.
“Bearing witness through the eyes of the survivor has a great impact,” he says. “It is incumbent on us to expose as many people as possible to a Holocaust education experience” while the survivors “are still available, still strong enough.”
Joanna Smith of San Francisco feels that way as well. Smith, 24, said she felt it was a privilege to be able to experience the march along with other members of the Jewish community.
“I think it’s an absolute social imperative to do something like this to remember, to know what’s come before us and recognize that this is still going on throughout the world,” she said. “Especially now, to go and be with survivors. This is not something that’s going to last.”
Because Auschwitz cannot now accommodate the large number of buses it would require to bring all 18,000 participants to the site, some will arrive by train — along a portion of the same tracks used by the Nazis to ship inmates to their deaths. The difference this time is that participants will be riding out of the camp on the same tracks.
Farkas returned to Auschwitz for the first time two years ago, with a group of people from the Peninsula. She took her daughter and granddaughter, and found it incredibly emotional, especially seeing the broken chimneys of the crematoria lying on the ground.
When told that she would be with 18,000 people there this time around, Farkas, 84, responded, “that means a great deal. It means that we are here, that we live, that Hitler did not achieve what he set out to do.
“We have multiplied and we have a country of our own. To live this long and achieve what we have achieved is monumental. Thank God we are here.”
Alexandra J. Wall is a staff writer at j. weekly. Chanan Tigay is a staff writer at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in New York.