The Book – First Edition [2015]

Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations is a powerful, visually rich volume first published in 2015 and inspired by a 2014 United Nations exhibition that paired reflections from Holocaust survivors with the reactions of students who travelled on March of the Living educational trips to Poland. The book’s core mission is to educate new generations about the atrocities of the Holocaust by directly connecting them with the firsthand experiences of survivors and the emotional responses of youth encountering these histories at the sites where they occurred.

Compiled by Holocaust educator Eli Rubenstein in partnership with the International March of the Living and the USC Shoah Foundation, the book combines striking photography from the March of the Living with poetry, historical context, and personal testimony to illuminate both the historical events of World War II and the contemporary importance of remembrance. Readers learn not only about the horrors inflicted by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek, but also about resistance, liberation, and the ongoing responsibility of “bearing witness.”

Witness serves as both historical documentation and a call to action, urging readers, especially young people, to carry forward the memory of the Holocaust and to commit to building a world rooted in tolerance, justice, and empathy. Messages from internationally recognized figures, including Pope Francis, Barack Obama and Elie Wiesel, emphasizing the universal duty to remember and educate, are also included in the volume.

Liberation Edition [2020]

The 2020 edition was revised, expanded and published in cooperation with Liberation75 and coincided with the 75^th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny. The Liberation edition includes additional content related to liberation stories of Holocaust survivors, an afterword by Steven Spielberg and a preface with reflections from Pope John Paul II on the importance of the March of the Living.

Digimarc Interactive Content

In both editions of Witness, interactive content has been built in using embedded digital watermarks in select images throughout the book marked with a symbol, allowing readers with smartphone cameras extra access to images and video testimony from survivors, liberators, and rescuers preserved by the March of the Living Digital Archive Project and USC Shoah Foundation. The stories of the survivors, liberators, and rescuers are brought to life on the screen or with images, through an expanded visual encounter with their testimony, often in the places their stories unfolded.