After years of silence, 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Mark Schonwetter embarks on his first March of the Living to honor his fallen family: “We must participate to reinforce the fact that we survived and are not going anywhere.”
At 91 years old, Holocaust Survivor Mark Schonwetter is preparing for his first March of the Living, a journey that will take him back to the soil where his childhood was stolen—but where his resilience was forged.
Mark was born in Brzostek, Poland, where his family lived on a farm. His father, a respected leader in the Jewish community, provided for their family, and Mark enjoyed the innocence of childhood—until the war changed everything.
When the Germans invaded, Mark’s family was forced out of their home and eventually Mark along with mother and younger sister walked 15 miles in one night to the Debica Ghetto where they thought they would be safer. After several months, they learned of its impending liquidation. A kind Polish neighbor from Brzostek—who had already helped them before—returned to rescue them again. In the dead of night, Mark’s mother threw him and his sister over a barbed wire fence before climbing over herself.
For the next few years, survival meant constant movement. They hid in an attic and below the floor boards of pig styes, during the harsh winters and took shelter in the forests in the summer. When the dangers became too great, they sought refuge with Polish families, pretending to be refugees fleeing the front lines. By February 1945, Soviet soldiers arrived and Mark and his family were free.
But freedom came at an unbearable cost. His father was murdered in a mass grave in 1942. Most of his extended family perished, except for a few relatives who had managed to flee to America before the war.
After liberation, they returned home, hoping to find survivors. None came back. Their house was damaged, forcing them to live in the basement for weeks before moving to Tarnow. In 1957, they were granted visas to leave Poland for Israel. Mark lived there for four years before immigrating to the United States in 1961, where he finally built the stable life that had been stolen from him as a child.
A Legacy of Survival and Remembrance
Mark has never participated in the March of the Living—until now. “We must participate to reinforce the fact that we survived and are not going anywhere.”
His greatest fear is the erasure of history. As he watches Holocaust denial and rising antisemitism, he worries that younger generations are not being taught the truth.
“As far as worrying about future generations, the lack of education (in the world but in particular in the US) starting in middle school and up to the universities, most of the students don’t know what happened during the Second World War, the history is omitted. How can we be secure if the states and federal government does nothing to promote the knowledge of what happened during WWII? It is our goal—we have to teach the new generation of people so that we may be successful for these atrocities to never, never happen again.”
The horrors of October 7, 2023, reopened wounds Mark thought had healed.
“When the Germans took us, and.. gathered us in the center of town – at one point…the Gestapo… went to a woman with an infant child. He grabbed her, took the child away…and went to an electric pole and hit the baby against the pole. Of course my mom put her hands on my eyes, and that was the time I saw how a person can kill another child.”
“When Hamas invaded Israel and they went and took infants, burned them, cut them, killed them, I couldn’t believe that I am going through another Holocaust again, and here we have no Nazis—we have some other people doing exactly the same thing.”
Yet, despite his pain, he refuses to let hatred win. His message to world leaders is clear: “I want all the leaders of all the faiths to get together and work together to stop all the hatred. It does not matter what religion we are, what color our skin is, we are all human beings.”
Walking for Those Who Cannot
Next month, Mark will step onto the soil of Poland once more—not as a child fleeing in the night, but as a survivor standing tall. He will march in memory of his father, his lost family, and the six million Jewish souls who were taken.
