By Howie Silbiger
Every year, students get on planes and go to Poland for the March of the Living. At this point, it’s just built in. Schools talk about it early, parents expect it, students sign up because it’s what you do. They walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, stand in places they’ve heard about since they were little, and come home saying it was powerful, meaningful, something they’ll never forget. That’s the line. And most people are perfectly comfortable leaving it there.
It didn’t always need to be packaged like that. There was a time when the trip carried itself. Survivors were there, not as guest speakers brought in for a few hours, but as part of the experience from beginning to end. They were on the buses, sitting next to students, walking with them through the camps. They didn’t need to build emotion into the program because they were the emotion. You listened differently when someone wasn’t telling you what happened, but where it happened to them. There was no distance. No effort required to make it feel real. It was real, sitting right beside you.
That’s been slipping for years, and now it’s basically gone. The survivors are in their late eighties and nineties. Fewer can travel every year, and this year, with everything going on, most simply aren’t there. The March itself is still happening in 2026. Students will still make the same trip, walk the same route in April, stand in the same places. But it’s not the same experience, and everyone knows it, even if nobody really wants to say it out loud.
So what fills that space?
Programs try. Schools prepare students, educators do what they can to build meaning into every step of the trip, but there’s a ceiling to that. You can explain everything perfectly, you can stand in the exact location where it happened, and there’s still a gap you can’t close. For a lot of students, the trip hits hard while they’re there. It’s emotional, intense, overwhelming at times. And then they come home, and it settles. Not disappears, but settles. Not because they don’t care, but because what they’re being asked to connect to is no longer something they can actually touch through another person.
And at the same time, something else has changed, and it has nothing to do with the trip itself.
The world outside has shifted. You feel it. The tone, the language, what people are suddenly comfortable saying out loud, it’s different now. Things that used to sit on the edges are sitting right in the middle. You see it on campuses, in public spaces, online, in conversations that not that long ago would’ve been shut down immediately. It’s not subtle. And it’s not rare.
That changes what the March represents, whether anyone updates the messaging or not.
For a long time, the focus was on looking back, on trying to bring students as close as possible to something that happened eighty years ago. That made sense when there were still people there who could bridge that gap. Without them, the trip doesn’t lose its meaning, but the meaning shifts. It becomes less about recreating the past and more about understanding how something like that actually happens.
That part was always harder to teach. It doesn’t come with the same emotional punch. It’s easier to focus on the end point, on what the Holocaust became, than on how it got there. But the beginning wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t start with camps. It started with a shift. What people were willing to say. What they were willing to accept. What they were willing to ignore. It built slowly, step by step, in ways that didn’t always feel urgent at the time.
That’s not abstract anymore.
Students walking through Auschwitz this year aren’t just looking at something that happened in another time. They’re coming from a world where they’re already watching how quickly lines can move, how easily things that used to be unacceptable become normal. They don’t need it explained the same way. They’re already seeing it.
The absence of survivors this year takes away the part of the trip that used to carry the weight for everyone else. There’s no one there to make it immediate for them. What’s left is quieter, less guided, and honestly, more uncomfortable. It forces a different kind of understanding, one that doesn’t rely on standing next to someone who lived it, but on recognizing what happens when the conditions that allowed it start creeping back.
For years, the March of the Living was treated as a way to preserve memory. That worked when memory was still alive in the people leading it. What’s left now is something else. Not weaker, not less important. Just different. And maybe, in a way people don’t want to admit, a little closer than it should be.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
