Israeli President Isaac Herzog will lead the 8,000 participants from 40 countries as they walk from Birkenau to Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living, marking Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“We have 80 survivors this year, it’s very symbolic, as it’s 80 years since World War II,” said March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman. “It will probably be their last time in this godforsaken place, Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

Among those marching is released hostage Agam Berger, the Israeli soldier whose hair-braiding in Hamas captivity sparked a global solidarity movement before her January release; Keith Siegel, an American-Israeli freed in February; and Eli Sharabi, who emerged from 491 days of captivity only to face the devastating news that Hamas had murdered his wife and teenage daughters on October 7.

This year’s march has taken on added urgency following a recent report that half of Holocaust survivors alive today will die within six years. Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, who was freed from Buchenwald as a child and later served as Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, is among the approximately 80 survivors participating. He will be walking alongside Eisenhower Atwater, great-grandson of General Dwight D. Eisenhower who led the Allied forces that liberated the camps.

Preparations for today’s march began yesterday when families of hostages toured the concentration camp, gathering inside one of the crematoriums to pray and sing together while wrapped in Israeli flags. Daniel Weiss, who lost his father defending Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 while his mother was murdered in Hamas captivity, led songs under Auschwitz’s infamous “Arbeit macht frei” gate.”