This past Wednesday, the day before Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I stood in Tarnow, Poland, in the very town square where my wife Tamar’s great-grandparents were killed. On a surreal trip back in time, we also managed to track down and see the home in Oswiecim where Tamar’s grandfather was born and raised, and her father frequently visited as a boy.

Ghosts of the past are everywhere in a country that was once home to more than 3 million Jews and now has an estimated Jewish population of 7,000. But we had come back to show that despite these tragic losses the Jewish people are still very much alive today.

Yesterday, on Yom HaShoah, I was joined by our President Alisa Doctoroff to represent UJA-Federation of New York at the March of the Living — an inversion of the notorious death marches. Thousands of us, Jews from all over the world, made the trek from Auschwitz to Birkenau. As far as the eye could see, there were young people joined by survivors, draped in and defiantly waving Israeli flags, walking along the same railroad tracks that brought millions to their deaths. In the celebrated words of Polish-born Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, we were “praying with our feet.”

Our march, haunting and inspiring, culminated in the singing of Hatikvah on the site of the Birkenau concentration camp.

I will never forget yesterday’s sights and sounds, including the raw personal testimony of Edward Mosberg, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor who, burning with rage, recounted the murder of his mother and nine-year-old brother-in-law in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and the death of 16 other family members at the Belzec extermination camp.

But too few among us will actually visit the concentration camps and crematoria, or hear from those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. And so our challenge today, particularly as the survivor community rapidly ages, is to care for those who still live and find meaningful ways to transmit memories of the Shoah to younger generations.

UJA is proud to partner with Selfhelp Community Services, a beneficiary agency founded by and for survivors, on both fronts. Together, we care for some of the tens of thousands of survivors in New York, half living below the poverty line. And together, we support programs like Witness Theater, where teens have profound interactions with survivors and stage their heartrending stories. The program, first developed and implemented in Israel by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, another beneficiary agency, leaves an indelible mark on survivors and young people alike. I wrote about the power of this initiative in an op-ed in the Daily News because the need for this kind of programming grows more pressing with every passing year.

Going forward, as fewer and fewer hear the stories of loss and pain from those who experienced it firsthand, it is imperative we think of ways to transmit the memory and lessons of the Holocaust in ways that will resonate for the next generations.

It’s our sacred duty to carry these stories forward — and bear witness for those who can’t.

Wishing you all a Shabbat shalom from Poland…

Eric