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Two miles of road stretched before them as they walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau, in southern Poland, last week. The same two miles had stretched before their predecessors who went to the gas chambers at Birkenau during the Holocaust. But for thousands of Jewish and Polish teenagers on April 13, this was a March of the Living, not the condemned.

The March of the Living is a two-week commemorative event that began in 1988 as an educational journey for international Jewish youth; but this year, for the first time, non-Jewish Polish people joined the marchers. About 300 Poles walked with young Jews from all over the world. This participation shows the Polish youths’ desire to “improve local awareness of Jewish suffering and to help conquer stereotypes of widespread anti-Semitism in Poland,” according to an April 13 Reuters wire.

Teenagers on the trip spent one week in Poland and the next in Israel. “The visit in Poland coincides with the Jewish holiday in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, Yom Hashoa, and the week in Israel coincides with the country’s independence day, Yom Haatzmaut,” read an Internet site designed to explain the march. During their stay in Poland, marchers visited Warsaw, Crakow and Lublin, as well as the concentration camps at Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“Poland is the unfortunate host as it is here that Germans tried this horrible experiment. It is our duty to teach our children what has happened here,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Auschwitz survivor and former Polish foreign minister, at this year’s march.

As many as 1.5 million people, 90 percent of them Jews, died at Birkenau and Auschwitz during World War II. According to Reuters, only 300,000 of the nearly 3.3 million Jews in Poland before the war lived through the Holocaust.

“The vast majority [of Jews who died in the Holocaust] were from Poland, Russia, Hungary … areas that were occupied by the German army. They didn’t have time to escape, and typically not the resources, either,” said Calvin CAS professor Randall Bytwerk, who has studied German history and propaganda. “When the Nazis began their anti-Semitic activities [in these areas] they found a reservoir of anti-Semitism and therefore they had quite a few willing helpers. There was an ancient tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe.”

Professor Barbara Carvill, of the German department, grew up in communist East Germany after World War II.

“There was enough anti-Semitism in [East] European countries to weaken the resistance to the extermination of the Jews,” she said. “The process of assessing one’s own contribution [to not stopping the Holocaust] was much more advanced in the West than in the East bloc. During communism, in the Cold War, basically they put all the evil on the Western side. When I went to school in East Germany, we didn’t know anything about it. When I was 11, we escaped to West Germany, and there we slowly learned what happened in the Holocaust.”

Carvill remembered leading a Calvin College Interim trip to Germany while communism was still the law of the land.

“It was interesting, at the concentration camps that you could visit, that the exhibits were shown in a way that would incite hatred of the Western capitalist Germany, that the evils were heaped on the West Germans and the East Germans got off scot-free. After the [Berlin] Wall fell, all these sites were reinterpreted. [You can] see this participation of the Polish in the March in a bigger context, how the countries of the East bloc have dealt with their past,” Carvill explained.

Adam Osinski, a 23-year-old Polish March participant, said, “I am here to try to comprehend what happened and to try to change some of the conceptions we have of each other. There are contacts between Jewish and German youth, so why can’t there be closer ties between Polish and Jewish groups?”

However, not all anti-Semitism has vanished from the Polish people. Bytwerk did not find it unusual that this is only the first year that Polish marchers joined Jewish youth.

“It doesn’t surprise me in principle,” he said, “because there really was a lot of anti-Semitism in Poland, too.” Bytwerk then mentioned an ongoing incident outside Auschwitz, reported in Reuters’ March of the Living coverage.

“A radical Polish Catholic has staged a near year-long sit-in to prevent authorities from removing [from the soil of Auschwitz] a large cross associated with Polish-born Pope John Paul,” said the wire report. “Fringe rightist groups and fundamentalist Catholics have backed his stand by setting up hundred of other crosses in a campaign condemned at home and abroad as anti-Jewish. Saturday, Poland’s parliament passed a bill to set up protection zones around all former Nazi concentration camps on its soil, giving the government power to remove the crosses.”

Remarks from a speaker at the 1996 March of the Living at Auschwitz exemplify the response of the March participants when faced with anti-Jewish attitudes. “We march the march of the living. And we pray for a day when the words ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ are no longer part of our vocabulary, for a world where no one is oppressed or killed because of his or her religion, race or ideology, and for a time when all the children of Israel can live in peace.”