Participants prepare to start March of the Living at Auschwitz

OSWIECIM, Poland — A largely young, diverse crowd of some 12,000 gather to participate in this year’s March of the Living at the Auschwitz-Birkenau site to commemorate the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazis on Israel’s Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Surrounded by barbed wire fences, teenagers, some with piercings and pink hair, sit patiently on the grass next to military school students in camouflage uniforms as they waited to set out on the 3.2-kilometer (2 mile) trek from the Auschwitz concentration camp to its sister camp, Birkenau.

A number of elderly Holocaust survivors are among the marchers.

Dozens of countries, entities, and organizations are represented, waiting in the sunshine next to the red brick barracks that once housed Auschwitz’s prisoners. The march will take them from Auschwitz, where the prisoners lived, to the neighboring Birkenau, where the bulk of the murders took place.

Separate groups will march together under their own flags, including the United States, Israel, Argentina, Japan, and Morocco. A number of the delegations have few, if any, Jewish participants.

— Yaakov Schwartz