March of the Living symbolises mourning but also life, president says
The March of the Living is a mournful event, but it also symbolises life, Poland's president said on Thursday after participating in the annual event on the memorial site of the World War II Nazi-German Auschwitz death camp in south Poland.
In a post-march address at a memorial to the Auschwitz victims in the camp's female section Birkenau, which was also the main site of the Holocaust, Andrzej Duda said that the march symbolised the prevalence of life even in the harshest conditions.
"Those who take part in this march show that even the worst kind of totalitarianism, such as German Hitlerism, Nazism, which strove to destroy and annihilate the entire Jewish people and other peoples, is unable to overcome the will to live and the will to endure. This march takes place in an atmosphere of reflection and mourning, but it also symbolises life, the victory of life," the president said.
Duda used the occasion to refer to Russia's current invasion of Ukraine, and stressed that the march was also an act of protest against Moscow's aggression.
"We have also gathered here to show that there will be absolutely no agreement to attempts to deprive the Ukrainian people of their freedom, nor to the killing of Ukrainians with impunity, which is currently taking place in the occupied parts of Ukraine," Duda said.
