The names I carry: finding my family at Auschwitz

The only sounds as I walked out of Auschwitz Birkenau were the wind through the trees, my footsteps crunching on the gravel, the eerie creak of abandoned barrack doors and the occasional sweet bird song, the latter jarringly out of place.

Three hours earlier, I had stood at the entrance to the notorious Nazi German concentration camp in Oświęcim, Poland, staring up at the gatehouse guard towers that have become a hideously iconic symbol of the human factory that murdered 1.1 million Jews from across Europe, delivered for death via freight trains.

My 17-year old nephew had visited earlier in the year with school; he’d messaged me that morning, our normal sarcastic banter replaced by “Hey. Just wanted to say that what ur gonna see is difficult, so if u want to call me about it I’m here.”

Standing outside, overwhelmed, I called my brother, the only person I would have wanted by my side, telling him: “I don’t think I can go in.”

“You have to,” he said. “You have to bear witness.”

At the invitation of March of the Living UK, I was here as part of a 200-strong delegation to do just that, to mark its 38th year with a 5-day educational journey and to march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest WWII concentration camp complex, as part of a global group of 7,000 including 40 survivors.

Since its inception in 1998, March of the Living International has become the largest global Shoah remembrance event held on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah).

Seeing it, directly in my line of sight rather than an image in a book, or social media post, the enormity of the camp, the size, the scale, the mechanics – were all unfathomable.

Mass murder, pure evil and the attempted obliteration of an entire people on an industrial scale, the mind, certainly mine, could not process any of it; the rail tracks, the barracks, the ruins of a crematorium, the lone cattle car symbolising the thousands that transported more than 1.3 million people to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The question our group later grappled with: what of the train drivers who delivered them to their deaths? How could they?

Beside those train tracks, Holocaust survivor Jacques Weisser, sitting in his wheelchair, alongside fellow survivor Milly Horowitz, recited Kaddish, breaking down in tears. Both lost a parent at Auschwitz.

That final walk towards the exit gates seemed interminable, the exhale of breath as I left one of relief, the last step representing the transition from black and white into colour.

A short drive to the Auschwitz Museum, a packed car park, an ATM cash machine and tourist shop, both utterly incongruous but highlighting the uncomfortable balance to be had between honouring memory and the commercialisation of horror.

Rooms containing hair shorn from heads, plaits and braids and the textiles they were made into, the thousands of pairs of shoes, 3,800 pieces of luggage, 2,100 of which retain the names of their owners, over 12,000 kitchen utensils and 470 prostheses and orthoses, accompanied by the realisation that any arriving deportees needing them would mostly certainly be directed to the left in the brutal selection process, to immediate death in the gas chambers.

Faced with entering that dark claustrophobic chamber disguised as a shower room where Zyklon B gas was released to deadly effect, the physical instinct to recoil, to avoid it, was so overpowering I asked to hold the hand of MOTL participant, Holocaust educator and member of the second generation Louisa Clein, before doing so. Her eyes were red as we exited. “I always cry,” she said.

The museum’s Book of Names features 4,800,000 Holocaust victims currently documented and included at Yad Vashem. The room holding this vast physical alphabetised archive of oversized lists was full of people searching for their family members.

Heading to the beginning section, for the letter ‘A’, I found my family. ‘Ansher, Aizik, Place of death unknown; Ansher, Ayzer, Orlya, (shtetl, eastern Poland) murdered in Zheludok (ghetto in Belarus); Ansher, Shoshana. Place of death, unknown; Ansher, Shoshka, Orlya, Poland, murdered in Zheludok; Ansher, Yudl, Orlya, murdered in Zheludok.

‘Shoshana’ is my youngest daughter’s Hebrew name, given to her without our knowing its precious history. These were the names my nephew had found in January – for us both I said Kaddish.

Later that evening, the UK group joined delegations from around the world for a ceremony to mark the evening before Yom Hashoah, where a delegation of 130 uniformed law enforcement officials, intelligence agencies and police officers from across the world, received a standing ovation.

Addressing the room, Sylvan Adams,  President of the World Jewish Congress – Israel Region, said: “You are not here only to remember how Jews died.You are here to show how Jews live. We are walking this path not as victims, but as the next chapter of our glorious history. We remember the dead, but we also commemorate how they lived and regret their unfulfilled contributions that the world never got to see.”

Every MOTL is symbolic, but Tuesday April 14 2026 comes against a particularly stark backdrop of global antisemitism, which has surged to unprecedented levels since October 7, echoing the scale seen in the years preceding the Holocaust.

Participants this year included former hostages Agam Berger and Omri Miran, survivors from the 2025 Chanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney and the Yom Kippur terror attack at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, and Sylvan Adams, son of Holocaust survivors and the president of the World Jewish Congress.

Ahead of the event, Scott Saunders, founder and chairman, March of the Living UK and chief executive March of the Living International, said: “There’s trouble in the world, there’s lots of tension, but at the end of the day we’ve still got 7,000 people coming here and we’re still going to march in memory, in unity and in solidarity.”

The March was led by 50 Holocaust survivors from around the world, including Mala Tribich, Jacques Weisser, Barbara Frankiss and Martin Stern, joined by a limited delegation of 10 survivors from Israel, aged 90–100, brought to Poland at the last minute following a ceasefire in the war against the Iranian regime.

The feeling during the day was one of joy and resistance: Jews from across the world, draped in Israel’s flag as well as their own countries, rushing to greet each other, hugging, smiling, laughing: proud to be as one nation, one family in a place that had determined to destroy it all.

Touching a much lighter note, some of the younger people were determined to swap lanyards with Jewish participants from across the globe, bursting into impromptu singing of Hebrew songs, rushing to meet family and friends from across the diaspora.

I was fortunate to witness a touching reunion between a British MOTL delegate and the Miami-based daughter of their close friends from the US, whose father was originally from Manchester and whose aunt, it transpired, I had been on kibbutz with three decades earlier.

The only photograph I took of myself in Poland was directly under the “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free) sign at the entrance of Auschwitz. Unsmiling, staring defiantly at the camera, I vow to keep it as a reminder of survival.

Taken on the day of my eldest daughter’s 20th birthday, a daughter named after her paternal great-grandmother, a daughter who is only here today because, against all rhyme and reason, my Ansher ancestors were the particular Anshers to survive Poland.

There is no telling why that particular branch of the family tree managed to secure passage to London’s East End whilst other offshoots were ripped apart, amputated, and stunted before they had a chance to grow.