For U.S. interfaith group, details drum home enormity of Holocaust

Published: 2005-05-17

JERUSALEM (CNS) -- In the end, it was the shoes that drummed home the enormity of the Nazi Holocaust. Ricardo Hernandez, 19, a member of St. Joan of Arc Parish in Merrillville, Ind., said that the piles of shoes he saw preserved in the barracks at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland made him realize the victims "were real people." "We saw the gas chambers, we walked through them, felt them. I felt a deep emptiness. I kept feeling empty," said Hernandez, a Catholic student at Indiana University. Hernandez was among an interfaith group of 29 students who joined the March of the Living May 5 through an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored program that took them to Poland and Israel May 3-12. This year the annual March of the Living, which retraces the almost two-mile march that countless Jews and others took from the concentration camp at Auschwitz to the gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau, marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

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