06/05/2026
Light and Life in a Death Camp by Jacob Gormley
It was a beautiful day.
That is what unsettled me most.
The sun fell softly over Auschwitz-Birkenau. Warmth in a place that knew none. Around me, there was life. Young people singing, laughing, holding each other.
At first, it felt wrong. Then it felt necessary.
I am 23 years old. I grew up in Western Sydney, in Penrith, with a Greek, Egyptian and Scottish background. I am not Jewish. This is not my family’s history.
And yet, I was there.
I travelled to Poland as part of the March of the Living, a global program that brings thousands of young people to Holocaust sites to confront history and carry its lessons forward. I was selected as part of a Young Leaders group, representing non-Jewish participants.
Because this story does not belong to one community alone. It belongs to all of us.
The program was meant to continue to Israel. We were meant to mark Yom Ha'atzmaut in a place defined by survival.
But that part of the journey was cancelled because of the war.
That absence stayed with me.
It made something clear. The past is not finished. It echoes into the present and demands something of us.
Once you stand in a place like that, it changes you.
Because the ground remembers.
At Auschwitz, the silence is not empty. It presses on you. Over a million people were murdered there. Across Europe, six million Jews were killed. Even that number feels incomplete.
Only about 4.5 million names have been recorded. The rest are missing from history, but not from the earth beneath your feet.
That reality deepens at Majdanek. You walk through barracks that still stand, fences that still cut across the landscape. It feels as though it could operate again tomorrow.
Then you stand before the ashes.
Real human remains. Lives reduced to dust and held in a mound that does not move, but says everything.
From there, the journey moves beyond camps and into places with no structures to guide you. In Lopuchowo Forest, there are no gates. Just trees and earth.
Places like this where around 1.5 million Jews were murdered. Shot into mass graves. Buried where they fell. Many without names.
We walked back from that forest in silence.
And yet, that silence did not break us. It strengthened us.
At the end of the program, I stood in front of 2,000 young people. They had seen the camps, the ashes, the forests.
And still, they chose life.
They sang. They embraced. They refused to let the story end in darkness.
That is resilience.
I did not leave Poland the same as I arrived.
I saw that resilience most clearly in Hannah Abesidon.
Hannah was at Bondi Beach on December 14 when a Hanukkah gathering turned into horror. Fifteen people were killed, including her father, Tibor Weitzen. She was there with her
parents, her pregnant daughter, and her granddaughter.
In that moment, her instinct was not fear. It was protection.
She got her grandchild to safety. Then she went back.
Back into chaos. Back to find her parents.
Four months later, she stood and spoke.
Her story sat alongside the history we had just walked through. Different time. Same hatred.
And yet, the same response.
Strength out of strength.
The Jewish community did not retreat. It came together. It carried grief, but it did not surrender to it.
We often point to figures like Adolf Eichmann as if evil is confined to history. But the truth is more confronting.
As Primo Levi wrote,
“More dangerous are the common men.” And as Elie Wiesel warned, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”
That is what allows hatred to survive.
As a non-Jew, I cannot walk away thinking this is someone else’s fight.
Back in Australia, that responsibility is real.
It means having uncomfortable conversations. It means calling out antisemitism, bigotry and
hatred when you hear it, even when it is easier to stay silent. It means challenging it in our homes, in our communities, and among our friends.
Because that is where it starts.
Silence is not neutral. It is permission.
Hannah said something on the trip:
“It starts with the Jews, but it doesn’t end with the Jews.”
That is the warning. And it is one we ignore at our own risk.
Yes, it felt strange to see laughter at Auschwitz.
But maybe that discomfort is the point.
We expect grief to be silent.
But resilience is not always quiet.
Sometimes it sings.
The ground remembers.
The question is whether we will.
Jacob Gormley is a 23-year-old PhD student from western Sydney who attended the March of the Living 2026 as a non-Jewish Young Leader.
