Emotional Pope meets death camp survivors
THE Pope made an emotional visit to Auschwitz yesterday, walking alone beneath the haunting slogan above the gates Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Sets You Free.
Before his visit, the pontiff had said: “I would like to go to that place of horror without speeches, without crowds – only the few people necessary.
“Alone, enter, pray. And may the Lord give me the grace to cry.”
After sitting on a chair in front of camp buildings and praying, he met survivors of the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland, which claimed more than a million victims, shaking their hands and kissing them on the cheeks.
Pray
The survivors included 101-year-old violinist Helena Dunicz Niwinska, who played in the Auschwitz orchestra as a prisoner.
Another survivor, 100-year-old Alojzy Fros, said of the Pope’s visit: “This is a huge thing for me.”
Pope Francis carried a large white candle to the so-called death wall, where many of the camp’s prisoners were executed by firing squad.
He also stopped to pray for a few minutes in the underground prison cell where Polish Catholic friar Maximilian Kolbe, who has since been declared a saint, was starved to death.
His visit to the former camp in Poland, now a museum, came on the 75th anniversary of the day the friar was sentenced to die after volunteering to take the place of another condemned prisoner. Most of those killed at the camp during the Second World War were Jewish but 140,000 Polish Christians died there too.
Before leaving, the Pope was driven the short distance to neighbouring Birkenau, where exterminations were carried out, along the tracks laid to ferry prisoners to their deaths in gas chambers.
The Pope, 79, on a five-day visit to Poland, is the third consecutive pontiff to visit Auschwitz.
As he left he wrote in the book of visitors’ comments: “Lord, have pity on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty.”