Israel’s Chief of Staff Brigadier General Gadi Eisenkot spoke on Thursday in front of the IDF’s mission to Poland.

“It is very moving to come back to Poland as the Chief of Staff for the Israeli military’s mission one week prior to Israel’s 70th birthday. The thing that is most symbolic and moving for me is the very real message that this mission sends, it is a beacon of life a sign that we have come from the Holocaust and succeeded at surviving in the most literal sense possible.”

Eizenkot continued and said: “I believe that this very mission expresses the power that the State of Israel has given to the Jewish people in helping them rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and to not only survive, but build the tremendous state and military who have given the strongest response and most significant meaning to the words, “Never Again”.

This trip, this meeting expresses the chain of our existence built by the generations before us and our own responsibility as a military, defending the Jewish people and the State of  Israel to continue to strengthen ourselves and the State. Our most important mission is guaranteeing the continuation and survival of the State of Israel for the future.”

The mission included Eisenkot, President Reuven Rivlin, and other heads of Israel’s security services — the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Israel Police — who joined the March of the Living this year. Together with more than 10,000 other people, Eisenkot and the mission marched three kilometers (two miles) between Auschwitz concentration camp and Birkenau. A march that was considered the march of death for prisoners during the Holocaust as Birkenau housed the gassing chambers and crematoria in which millions of Jews met their demise.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)