On September 20-23, 2012 1,500 young people, university and high school students from Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Czech Republic, gathered at the congress in Krakow at the initiative of the Community of Sant'Egidio. There were about 500 participants from various cities in Ukraine.
On the first day of the congress, the youth met with witnesses of genocide committed by the Nazis against the Jewish population and the Roma during the Second World War. Among them was Béla Varga, a Hungarian Jew, who survived deportation during World War II. “The flames of the crematorium were extinguished, but perhaps you have still felt its heat. We are gathered in Krakow and Auschwitz because racism, evil, hatred still burn. Jews, Roma, other minorities continue to be threatened. We do not want to allow these embers to outbreak another fire. To avoid this we ask help from you, young people. Help, help, help.” He appealed to the youth.
Mukachevo-born Tibi Zeev Ram, a Jew who survived the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, testified that even during the inhumanity of Nazism it was possible to save humanity: “I saw a lot of suffering and I suffered a lot,” he said with emotion. “But I do not know the word the word hate or revenge. In persons I see the human being, without judging or despising. You are young people who have to build a better society. Your turn has come to build a more humane world.”
On Friday, September 21, the youth visited the Auschwitz concentration camp museum, after which there was solemn procession. Around 1,500 people marched for nearly an hour in silence before the plaque in memory of the victims of the “Twentieth-Century Golgotha.” Members of congress laid flowers at the memorial to the Jewish, Roma, and Sinti victims.
The procession passed along the railways, which was the last station for many men and women, the elderly, children and the sick who during World War II crossed the whole of Europe in cattle cars to meet death at a concentration camp. The same path that young people from Hungary and the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia came to Auschwitz seventy years ago, the youth of today traveled.
On the third day of the congress there was the final assembly and torch procession of memory.
The participants signed an appeal for peace, in which is written that the Shoah, “Calamity” for the Jewish people, or Porraomos, “The Devouring” for Roma and Sinti, makes us cautious about hatred, which can arise even today in our cities. This hatred is manifested in indifference, feeds on the ignorance of others, becomes contempt and then inflicts pain; eventually it turns into violence, against Gypsies, foreigners, refugees or migrants seeking a better future, against Jews, who are still being watched with hostility or suspicion. Violence does not spare those who are the weakest among us: the elderly, people with disabilities, the homeless. We want to build together a world without violence. From Auschwitz rises a new horizon of humanity for our countries! From the city begins a movement of hearts, seeking to infect other young people like us to make our countries more humane!