Great-grandson of Dwight Eisenhower joins Holocaust survivors at March of the Living

Merrill Eisenhower, the great-grandson of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the US president who, as an army general, had led the Allied forces that liberated the camps, joins Holocaust survivors at Auschwitz ahead of the March of the Living, which officially begins this evening.

It’s his second time at the concentration camp, according to Eisenhower, who lives in Kansas with his wife and four children. He says spending time at Auschwitz is necessary to remember “what happened here.”

“This can never happen again. Generations must be educated,” says Eisenhower. “My great-grandfather spent his whole life dedicated to peace.”

Survivor Naftali Furst, who remembers seeing General Eisenhower around the time that he and his brother were saved from the death march, gives his great-grandson a framed sketch of himself and his older brother standing under the Auschwitz gate.

Furst, his brother and their parents all survived the camps and came to Israel several years later, settling on a kibbutz.

Other survivors also tell their personal stories of survival, thanking Eisenhower for his great-grandfather’s acts.

“We’re alive because of the sacrifices made,” says Martin Stern, a survivor from England who was hidden by other families as a child in the Netherlands.