 |
| Francis greeted 12 of the camp’s former prisoners one by one. |
By JOANNA
BERENDT JULY
29, 2016
Francis visited the former
concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz on Friday during a trip to
Poland. While there, he said a silent prayer and met with survivors of the
camp.
By REUTERS
KRAKOW, Poland — Pope Francis walked in the footsteps of his two
predecessors on Friday as he visited the former extermination camp at Auschwitz,
where he paid silent homage to the more than one million victims, mostly Jews,
who perished there during the Holocaust.
Right before his visit, Francis said he “would like to go to that place
of horror without speeches, without crowds.” He said he intended to go “alone,
enter, pray,” adding, “And may the Lord give me the grace to cry.”
The pope began his visit to Auschwitz — in what is now the Polish town
known as Oswiecim, about 30 miles west of Krakow — by meeting 12 survivors of
the camp. He greeted them one by one, mostly in silence, expressing his sorrow
and respect by clutching their hands, looking into their eyes and kissing them
tenderly, once on each cheek.
Francis was the third pope to visit Auschwitz. Pope John Paul II visited on June 7,
1979, declaring “No more war!” and “Only peace!” Pope Benedict XVI, who as a
young man was inducted unwillingly into the Hitler Youth and the German
Army, went on May 28, 2006,
and asked: “Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate this?”
Francis made his way to the infamous Block 11, an inconspicuous brick
building where Nazi guards had tortured prisoners.
The pope entered the basement, which housed 28 dark cells. He stopped in
a cell that had once housed the Rev. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish
Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in 1941 and was
canonized in 1982. Francis sat in a chair in the middle of the cell, bent his
head and prayed for some time.
Leaving the cell of Father Kolbe, Francis, 79, the first pope from Latin
America, signed the Auschwitz guest book, writing in Spanish: “Lord, have mercy
on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty.”
Francis then left his companions and walked alone beneath the notorious
gate that carries the cruel motto “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Sets You Free.”
“This site bore witness to the most systematic, industrialized atrocity
in the history of humanity,” Rabbi David Rosen, who is
the international director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish
Committee and accompanied the pope, said in a phone interview. “In such a
place, words are inadequate, and it’s silence that becomes the ultimate
expression of solidarity with the victims.”
The poignant silence was punctuated with the recitation of a Hebrew
psalm.
“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord!” the chief rabbi of
Poland, Michael J. Schudrich, recited. “Lord, hear my voice.”
Hours later in Krakow, the pope said that “cruelty did not end in
Auschwitz,” citing war, atrocities in war zones and the torture of prisoners,
The Associated Press reported.
Unlike his predecessors, Francis, born in Buenos Aires in 1936, did not
have personal links to the wartime destruction of Europe. As a seminarian
during the war, John Paul helped save a Jewish girl; Benedict, after deserting
the German Army, was briefly interned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Francis met with a group of Polish Catholics who had been recognized by Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, as “righteous
among the nations” for having risked their lives to save Jews during the
Holocaust. He has urged Catholics to help people of other faiths who are
seeking refuge, and he appealed this week for Europeans to offer protection to
Muslims who had poured into the Continent from places like Syria.
More than 1.7 million people visited the memorial
complex at Auschwitz last year. But for many years after World War II, the town played a complex role in the fraught
history of Christian-Jewish relations in Poland.
For about a decade, a controversy persisted over a convent of Carmelite
nuns in Oswiecim, just outside the death camp. The dispute at times seemed to
spill over into claims about who had suffered the most. Poland was invaded by
Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939; its prewar Jewish population of about
three million, the largest in Europe on the eve of the war, was nearly wiped
out. John Paul ordered the nuns to leave the convent in
1993.
Rabbi Rosen credited the pope’s predecessors for paving the path to
reconciliation, saying that Francis had become “the embodiment and epitome of
overcoming differences between Jews and Christians.”
Rabbi Rosen added: “Francis has been saying all
along that it is impossible to be a Christian and an anti-Semite. His visit in
Auschwitz is an enormous message of solidarity with the victims and affirmation
of his unequivocal reprehension of anti-Semitism and all other forms of racism.”
RELATED
POSTS:
Unbelievable!
Pope Francis
Compares
Jesus’ Disciples
to ISIS
Killers
Finally! The
Pope Agrees
With Muslims “Jesus Did
Not Die At The Cross”
..
The Roman Catholic Popes Evil Behavior
Follow
Joanna Berendt on Twitter @JoannaBerendt.
A version
of this article appears in print on July 30, 2016, on page A4 of the New
York edition with the headline: Pope Visits Auschwitz, Pleading With God
to Give Him ‘the Grace to Cry’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/world/europe/pope-francis-auschwitz.html
No comments:
Post a Comment