This year, due to Covid-19 Ride For The Living, our annual fundraising ride from Auschwitz-Birkenau to JCC has gone virtual. Well over 1,000 participants from across the world, of all ages, backgrounds, and religions have committed to walk, run and ride the 100km (60 mile) distance between the death camp and JCC Krakow and to symbolically bridge the distance between past and future, between death and life, between tragedy and hope.
They are doing so to commemorate the Holocaust but also to show the world that Jewish life goes on, in Krakow, so close to the center of the killing machine.
Since the start of Ride For The Living in 2014 we have had many notable riders join us. Olympic cyclists and national cycling champions, Chief Rabbis and consuls general and ambassadors, a three time Tour De France winner and a Nobel Prize winner (chemistry). But two cyclists have stood out for me. Two riders who had left Auschwitz 75 years earlier, as young boys, as survivors.
Bernard Offen and Marcel Zielinski, two proud sons of my adopted home town of Krakow are remarkable human beings. Two men who experienced the worst the world had to offer and emerged from hell filled with love and light, and even somehow, hope. These two survivors, in their 80’s and 90’s got on their bikes and led us from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Krakow, a path they had taken for the first time many years before upon their liberation, and had never forgotten.
This year they cannot make that journey but I will make it in their honor, and in honor of all of those who survived that terrible place and also for those who didn’t. I will ride alone but will have Bernard and Marcel, my friends and my heroes at my side. Inspiring me and filling me with strength and hope. As they always do.
Please support my ride and allow the JCC to continue to serve Polish Holocaust survivors, their children, and grandchildren.
Thank you,
Jonathan