In Auschwitz visit, pope decries ‘so much cruelty’

OSWIECIM, POLAND — Choosing silence to convey his sorrow, Pope Francis visited the former Nazi death factory at Auschwitz and Birkenau on Friday, meeting with concentration camp survivors as well as aging saviors who helped Jews escape certain doom. In a guest book entry he made an anguished plea: “Lord, forgiveness for so much cruelty!”

Wearing unadorned white robes, Francis entered Auschwitz on foot, passing through the gate that bears the cynical words “Arbeit Macht Frei” — Work Sets you Free.

One by one, he greeted 11 survivors, among them 101-year-old Helena Dunicz Niwinska, who played the violin in a death camp orchestra, and two other centenarians. One survivor, Valentina Nikodem, helped deliver babies born to Auschwitz inmates.

Elzbieta Sobczynska, who was 10 when she was brought to Auschwitz in 1944 from the Warsaw ghetto, said that in his silence, Francis spoke volumes.

“You don’t need words. Prayer was enough,” Sobczynska said.

Francis, she said, “came here with humility, he came here to find the shadows of those who were stripped of the most precious thing — life.”

The pope then traveled to nearby Birkenau, a sprawling complex where people were murdered in factory-like fashion in its gas chambers.

There he greeted 25 Holocaust rescuers, including Anna Bando, who as a child helped her mother smuggle bread hidden in their handbags to Jews forced by Nazi occupiers to stay in Warsaw’s ghetto.

Francis’ visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Adolf Hitler’s forces put to death more than 1 million people, most of them Jews, came on the third day of a five-day trip to Poland that included meetings with young Catholic pilgrims gathering in Krakow for World Youth Day.

Except for the brief exchange with the survivors and rescuers, Francis spent his nearly two hours at the death camps in quiet prayer and reflection.

Later, however, Francis spoke with passion about his Auschwitz visit to a crowd of young people gathered outside the archbishop’s residence.

“How much pain! How much cruelty! Is it possible that we humans created in God’s image are capable of doing these things?” the pontiff said.

CZAREK SOKOLOWSKI / ASSOCIATED PRESS Pope Francis walks through the gate of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp Friday in Oswiecim, Poland. The pope later visited the gas chambers of nearby Birkenau. More than 1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.