The Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March and the Globalization of the ‘Moral Witness’

In January 1963, four Japanese men marched in front of a long procession from the Auschwitz main camp to the site of the death camp at Birkenau. This marked the eighteenth anniversary of the camp's liberation and was the highlight of a 10-month journey through numerous sites of death and suffering during World War II in dozens of countries. The Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March episode serves to illuminate the different ways the war and its horrors were remembered, used and abused in places as disparate as Hiroshima, Israel, Singapore and Poland. This march, however, was also a unique point of convergence between multiple national narratives of victimization. What was common between these different war memories was the figure of the survivor-witness. The Peace March illustrates the emergence of a shared discourse following the Eichmann trial and others, which agents like the marchers facilitated and which emerged from multiple Western and non-Western sources.