For Magda Bader of Aventura, the 2014 Leo Martin March of the Living will provide an poignant opportunity to share her Holocaust experiences with her daughter and granddaughter.
A Holocaust survivor, Magda rarely spoke with her family about her experiences at Auschwitz concentration camp. When she travels to Poland on April 23, she will take daughter Anne Bader Martin and granddaughter Naomi Martin to the site where she was separated from her parents who were put to death, along with two of her 10 sisters and a niece.
“My mother never talked much about her life during the Holocaust,” said Anne. “She’d say to others, ‘I was in Europe during the war.’ That was her code. It was very hard for her to talk about it.”
When Magda travels this year with 140 other Miami participants, it will mark her third trip to Poland with the March of the Living, but the first time with family members. She began to discuss her Holocaust era experiences several years ago with local public school students as a speaker for the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center. Then a fellow survivor encouraged her to become a docent on the March.
“When I was younger, I wanted to blend in and it was emotionally difficult for me to relive my past,” Magda said. “What I’ve discovered is that it is important to educate the kids to see what hatred did. They should know to be involved and to do for others. It does matter what you do.”
In 1944, Magda was 13 when she and her family were rounded up by the Nazis in Munkach, Hungary (now Ukraine), and were transferred to a ghetto for a few months before being sent to Auschwitz in Poland. She remembers coming to the camp and being separated from her parents by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.
“I started to cry when we were taken from our parents,” she said. “Dr. Mengele said, ‘Don’t cry. You’ll see them again.’ None of us knew what was waiting for us.”
Although Magda previously traveled to Hungary with family members to visit her hometown, the 2014 March of the Living will be the first time she, her daughter and granddaughter will face the awful memories of Auschwitz together. Anne, an attorney who represents traumatized children and families, will travel from Boston, and Naomi, a young newspaper reporter, will fly from New Orleans to link up with Magda in Poland.
“It will give us a real understanding of what she’s been through,” Anne said. “There is healing in the telling. My mother is an amazing person and each year she becomes more amazing.”
Leaving April 23 and returning on May 7, the March of the Living is a two-week international experience where teens from around the world come together each year and bear witness to the destruction of the Holocaust in Poland and then travel to Israel to rejoice in the Jewish Homeland.
The program commemorates Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau, and celebrates Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, in the streets of Jerusalem.
The March of the Living is a transformative event that leaves participants with a Jewish experience unlike any other. For more information on the Leo Martin March of the Living, contact 305.576.4030, ext. 144 or email aleysheer@caje-miami.org.
