Ride for the Living 2019
This is the 6th year of Ride for the Living. An educational 4 day experience that includes a full day tour of Auschwitz, a bike ride from Auschwitz to the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) in Krakow, a Shabbat dinner together and the largest Jewish Festival outside of Israel.
Here is the speech that I gave to the group on the day of the bike ride outside of the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau:
My name is Robert Desmond and 6 years ago I set off from London on my bike to try and educate a few friends, my family, and, well anyone who would listen to me talking about the Holocaust and what intolerance can lead to.
I never thought it would turn into an annual event with over 250 people from all around the world, let alone to be riding with Holocaust survivors.
It is our honour to be standing here together with Bernard Offen, who I want to publicly thank for coming back here and supporting this ride, as well as your continued never-ending efforts to educate.
As many of you know, our dear friend Marcel Zielinski, had a bike accident a few weeks ago and sadly cannot be with us here today, but we all have him here in spirit. He is doing OK, but has hurt his hip and needs time to recover. He gave me a letter to read to you all:
“Good morning Riders for the Living!
You are leaving Birkenau now as I left it 74 years ago as a small child, alone and scared, walking toward Krakow. But, you are leaving as free and proud Jews. Riding from this terrible place to celebrate the rebirth of Jewish life in my hometown, Krakow.
Ride for the Living and the JCC Krakow community has become an important part of my life.
Thank you for what you do. Thank you for remembering the past, thank you for helping Krakow’s Jews and thank you most of all for riding for the living.
I promise to see you all next year!”
I would like to ask a question: Why are we here in this place?
Behind me is Auschwitz. The largest death camp set up by the Nazis during World War 2. This has the largest murder count of any place on the planet. This is the worst of humanity.
It is so hard to imagine what happened here. But we have heard from Survivors, we have heard from perpetrators, we have seen the human hair, the piles of shoes, the suitcases and the glasses that were left.
Let me be clear. This is not the only place. The horrors of the Holocaust are not contained to this one place. The Nazi’s set up places like this all across Europe. They tortured and killed people everywhere they could just because of their religion, skin colour, sexual orientation or anything else that didn’t fit the Nazi ideals.
It didn’t happen overnight. They took years to dehumanise Jews through propaganda. It happened gradually. Firstly by not doing business with Jews and then separating them physically into ghettos. Then it was on to work camps and then killing anyone who didn’t help as forced labour.
And that happened here.
But why are we here today?
We are here for two main reasons.
The first is to commemorate and pay our respects to all victims of the Holocaust. That clearly goes without saying and is the primary reason for which we are all here.
But we are also here to celebrate life. We recognise how lucky we are in our lives today and we must come back to our reality today and live our lives now.
We are cycling away from these gates of death to the gates of life at the JCC in Krakow.
This ride is a statement to the world that the Jewish story does not end here. This place has definitely shaped us as a people, but we are still here and we are alive.
We are free today and we are choosing to come back here, free to cycle away from this place.
And this is a message to those racists who tried and to those racists who still try to destroy us that we will not give up.
But there is a third reason as to why we are here, and that is to educate the world.
We have seen that the majority of Americans do not even know what Auschwitz is. We have seen rises in antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
Elie Wiesel said, to hear a witness is to become a witness, and you have all become witnesses here.
We must take what we have learnt and share it with others. Education is the key. We wish it didn’t happen, but it did and we must tell everyone what humankind is capable of so that it doesn’t happen again.
So firstly we are here to memorialise what happened to Jews and non-Jews who were victim to this intolerance.
Secondly we are here to celebrate life.
And thirdly we are here to do something beyond just these few days. The experience does not end here today.
Finally, I want to end on a thought: there are so many people here who have lost family in this place, and far too many entire families wiped out.
But today, we are here together, all 250 of us, to ride together as one large family.
Enjoy your ride and thank you for being here.
