Pope Francis visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau former Nazi death camp in Poland, in what the World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said was an “important signal to the world”.
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Pope Francis is due to pray at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
After walking slowly beneath the gate bearing the words “Arbeit Macht Frei”, he met 12 survivors of the death camp.
They were receptive and then they all got down to the business of organizing the meeting, which happened Friday during the pope’s visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Pope Francis prayed in silence, but left a message in the memorial site’s guest book: “Lord, have pity on your people”.
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The Argentine later lead prayers for the 1.1 million people, a lot of them Jewish, who were murdered at the camp as part of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” of genocide against European Jews which claimed six million lives in World War II.
The first pope to visit Auschwitz was Pope John Paul II in 1978.
The pope travelled to Auschwitz, located some 70 km from the southern city of Kraków, on Friday morning.
Also known as “the death block” because the Nazis used it to inflict torture, it houses the cell where St. Maximilian Kolbe spent his final hours, starved and dehydrated before being given a lethal injection of carbolic acid.
Among the cells was that which held the Polish Catholic priest Maximillian Kolbe, who died in 1941 when he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner set to be executed.
There – surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire fences – he bent his head before memorial plaques to the victims written in 23 languages.
Poland’s chief rabbi sang in Hebrew a psalm for the dead watched by an audience including Auschwitz survivors.
The event ended with the pope greeting 25 people honored as “righteous among the nations”, a recognition of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi extermination.
Pope Francis during World Youth Day in Kraków.
It is his third day of a five-day visit to Poland that includes meetings with young pilgrims taking part in World Youth Day, a global youth celebration.
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“And the victims of the culture of waste are those who weakest and most frail, and this is indeed cruel”, he said.
