Pope begs God to forgive ‘so much cruelty’
Silence, prayer mark Francis’ visit to the Nazi death camp
Pope Francis visits the former Nazi death factory at Auschwitz and Birkenau, meeting with concentration camp survivors and aging saviors who helped Jews escape certain doom.
KRAKOW, Poland — Pope Francis walked in the footsteps of his two predecessors Friday as he visited the former extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he paid silent homage to the more than 1 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.
‘Lord, forgive so much cruelty’
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 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.”
Appeals to provide refuge
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 Germany 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 3 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.
‘Overcoming differences’
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.”
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.”