Hraedi soldiers visit Nazi death camp
Hraedi soldiers visit Nazi death campPaul Stecura

Dozens of graduates of the IDF's haredi tracks embarked on a special trip earlier this week to Poland as part of the "Eternal Witnesses" program of the "Netzach Yehuda" organization. This is the second trip that has taken place in the past year.

The journey began with singing at the memorial at the location where Jewish prisoners from the Warsaw Ghetto were gathered to be transported to the Nazi death camps. The haredi soldiers then visited the Majdanek concentration camp, where they stood hand in hand and sang the song 'Ani Ma'amim' (I believe), a protestation of faith in the face the worst of human brutality.

In the last day of their trip, the soldiers visited the "Children's Forest" in the town of Tarnow, where they recited Psalms and sang songs of revival in front of the mass graves of 800 Jewish children who were murdered in one of the most heinous acts of the Holocaust.

The last stop for the group was the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. For long hours the soldiers toured between the blocks inside the camp and surveyed the pieces of history that contained the blood of over a million Jews. Not a single eye remained dry.

Rabbi Yitzchak Deutsch, one of the rabbis of the Netzach Yehuda organization, who led the trip, said: "Precisely in this place, on the soil soaked in the blood of our grandparents, we walked together, and a group of powerful people who give their lives for the Land of Israel say sharply and clearly: Never again. It is this group specifically which represents most of all this message. A message that the people of Israel is strong, powerful and united."