“Lord, forgive us for so much cruelty!”
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Around 50 hospitalised children as well as their parents gathered to receive blessings and listen to an address by the Pontiff. “And may the Lord give me the grace to cry”.
He said there are no human answers, but the answers lie with God.
“We refuse hospitality to people, who seeking a better life and sometimes just wanting to stay alive, knock on the doors of our countries, churches and houses”, young Catholics said in a statement during a theatrical open-air religious ceremony. There were babies in parents’ arms, connected to medical equipment, small boys and girls, and teenagers. Francis said: “Grazie” (“thank you”).
“Instead of finding hospitality, they find death in the waters off (Italian island) Lampedusa, on the coasts of Greece, in refugee camps”. Also accompanying the pope was Polish president Andrzej Duda and prime minister Beata Szydlo.
The pope arrived July 29 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, an area now blanketed by green fields and empty barracks lined by barbed wire fences, remnants of a horror that remains embedded in history. Francis visited on Friday and met 11 of the camp’s dwindling number of survivors.
She was 2 years old when brought to the camp and was 5 when the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.
Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, their seven children and the Jews they were hiding were all butchered.
Pope Francis made a historic visit to Auschwitz on Friday, writing in the memorial’s guest book in Spanish: “Lord, have pity on your people. Lord, forgiveness for so much cruelty!” “It opens before us the way to eternal life”, the Pope said July 29 to the patients, their families and their caretakers.
Unlike Pope Benedict, who was German and the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis has no personal connection with the notorious concentration camp where the Nazis turned mass murder into an industry. “In such a place, words are inadequate and it’s silence that becomes the ultimate expression of solidarity with the victims”. With most he simply smiled lightly, shook hands and gave each a rosary.
The Argentine-born Jorge Bergoglio, who was a toddler when World War II erupted in Europe, halfway across his world, visited Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau during his first-ever travels in Eastern Europe. The sombre-looking pope kissed each survivor.
Very few of the “Righteous” are still living.
He prayed silently at several locations within the complex, and met former inmates as well as people designated “righteous amongst the nations” for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust.
The prayer was then read in Polish by a priest.
The audience included Auschwitz survivors wearing striped scarves evoking the garb prisoners were forced to wear, and Poles who had helped save Jews.
Pope Francis paid a somber visit in silence to the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Friday where he heard harrowing accounts from survivors and rescuers, in a private meeting organized by Poland’s chief rabbi.
Friday was the 75th anniversary of his death.
Some of the survivors made Francis offerings that were linked to their suffering.
“Pope Francis is one of the closest allies Jews have today in the fight against anti-Semitism, bigotry and hatred”, Lauder said. A few shafts from a tiny window were the only light cast on the pontiff.
Next to ‘Death Wall, ‘ where so many thousands of inmates were executed, he lit a large white candle. He was then transported on a small auto past barracks and brought to a spot in front, where he sat on a bench, his head bent for many long moments in contemplation and prayer.
“I would like to go to that place of horror without speeches, without crowds – only the few people necessary”, Francis said before embarking for the forbidding spot in southern Poland where the German occupiers murdered more than a million people, a lot of them Jews.
The visit was meant to be quiet and somber.
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Hunched on a bench near the gate to the Auschwitz death camp site in Poland, Pope Francis prayed silently on Friday in tribute to 1.5 million people, majority Jews, gassed there by Nazi occupiers during World War Two.
