oswiecim, poland | As always, this sort of silence was deafening.

Shimon Peres led thousands of marchers, mostly students, on Tuesday, April 25 in the annual March of the Living, a silent, two-mile trek from Auschwitz to the larger, neighboring camp at Birkenau, which housed most of the killing complex's gas chambers.

But the 82-year-old former Israeli prime minister and Nobel peace laureate predicated the silent trek with some choice words for Israel's new public enemy No. 1: Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Speaking at Auschwitz on Yom HaShoah before the march began, Peres said, "The Iranian president said there was never a Holocaust. I would hope that he could come here and see the human hair, the eyeglasses, and the eyes that were behind them, and to ask: 'Why, why did this happen?'

"We need to defend ourselves and we are able to do so. We must understand there are crazy forces in the world. We must identify them and stop them before it is too late."

Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies and others, died in this Nazi camp's gas chambers or from starvation, disease and forced labor before Soviet troops liberated it on Jan. 27, 1945. Pre-World War II Poland had a Jewish population of 3.5 million, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Today, about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.

After a solemn reading of the names of children who died at the camp, a shofar sounded the march's start, and Peres led the column with its white-and-blue Israeli flags through the camp gate bearing the infamous inscription "Arbeit macht frei" — "Work makes you free" — on the path to Birkenau.

Among the marchers was Shmuel Blumenfeld, an Auschwitz survivor who made the trip from his home in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, Israel.

With a worn white cloth and Star of David bearing No. 108,006 pinned to his jacket, Blumenfeld recalled his trip to Birkenau in 1943 among some 2,000 prisoners from the Krakow ghetto.

"They dumped us at Birkenau, and we thought it was a factory, we had no idea it was a death camp," he said. Blumenfeld, who was 16 at the time, carried dead bodies for a month before being sent to work in a nearby coal mine.

"I was with Polish and German miners, and some of them helped me," he said. "I survived by pure luck, but also thanks to the help of civilians who sometimes gave me some food."

After the war, he married and moved to Israel. He joined the army and later worked as a prison guard, keeping watch over Adolf Eichmann before his execution in 1962.

"There are still people in the world who deny that there ever was the Holocaust, so it is my duty to come here and tell the young people what really happened, what I saw with my own eyes, what I went through," Blumenfeld said.

Israel's Education Ministry initiated the marches in 1988 to be held every other year, but since 1996 a march has been held every year, coinciding with Yom HaShoah.

Among others taking part were Diana Katz, a 23-year-old history teacher from Jerusalem, whose grandmother, Lubia Tanenbaum, survived the camp after arriving as a 14-year-old from Hungary.

"I am here with my son to show the evil people in the world that we are here, that we are alive, that we want to live and we want future generations to live," Katz said as she pushed the baby carriage holding her 3-month old son, Joseph. "We will not forget, and we have won."