Hello everybody. I would like to thank you all for reading this blog post. I am writing this from Ben Gurion Airport after a life-altering journey that is the March of the Living. It is somewhat difficult to reflect on an experience that I am still processing, but I will do my best.
Let me start by saying that these past two weeks have been some of the best and most impactful ones of my life. I have lived, learned, and loved with 24 of my peers, all of whom I now consider my best friends. We have shared an unbelievable journey and we will be returning as people with a responsibility, a duty. This responsibility is to carry the stories of the six million Jews with us for the rest of our lives, because now that we have seen the places where the atrocities were committed against our people with our own eyes, we must keep their memories alive in our hearts and with our stories, and we must not do anything less. We are now in the select group upon whom this responsibility falls, and while it may take us a while to process everything we have experienced in these past weeks, we will uphold our duty. It is a burden we gladly now bear. I feel honored to be one of these few.
I am so thankful for everybody and everything that made this journey possible for me. This experience has given me an entirely new perspective on life, death, human resilience, and miracles. I plan to apply the lessons I have learned on this journey to my life, and I am very grateful for them. I currently find myself at a loss of words to express how much the March has meant to me, and I think that says something in itself for the impact it has had on every participant. I am also now realizing how long I’ve been droning on for, so I’ll try to wrap this up. The March of the Living has changed my life in the best and most meaningful ways possible, and I recommend it to everybody. Am Yisrael Chai.
-Avi Dave, Walnut Hills High School
