In an emotional moment, US President Joe Biden knelt before two Holocaust survivors whilst on a visit to Yad Vashem.
At the ceremony, Biden rekindled the eternal flame, laying a wreath at the spot where the ashes of concentration camp victims are interred, while a choir sang the song ‘A Walk to Caesarea’ written by Hungarian Jewish WWII resistance fighter Hannah Szenes.
The president then got down on one knee to speak to Holocaust survivors Rena Quint and Dr Gita Cycowicz, urging them to stay seated as he approached.
Quint was born in 1935 in Poland. At the age of six, she was deported with her father to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she pretended to be a boy in order to survive.
Cycowicz was born in 1927 in Czechoslovakia. In 1944, she endured five months in Birkenau concentration camp with her sister, before being transferred to a forced labour camp in one of the subcamps of Gross-Rosen.
After the ceremony, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan remarked, “[Biden] had a warm and emotional conversation with the two Holocaust survivors in attendance. He was extremely interested in both of their stories and even shared his own personal pain which he experienced during his life. The President admired and identified with their choice to rebuild their lives in spite of what they experienced and lost”.
Diplomatic advisor Yair Zivan tweeted, “An incredibly powerful moment at the end of the memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem as Biden gest down on one knee to speak to two Holocaust survivors”.
Biden attended the memorial with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
