The Pope’s five-day visit to Poland marks his first trip to the predominantly Catholic Eastern European country.
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The pope arrived July 29 at the Auschwitz-BirkenauNazi 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.
After Auschwitz he moved to nearby Birkenau, where people were murdered in factory-like fashion in gas chambers.
Pope Francis kisses the hand of a Jewish man at the Hall of Remembrance during his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, May 26, 2014.
Pope Francis also signed a book for Furst before he made his way toward the “death wall” where thousands of prisoners were lined up and shot in the back of the head before their bodies were sent to the crematoriums.
Pope Francis walks through the gate of the former Auschwitz Nazi-German death camp.
Among those killed were St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. “Lord, forgive so much cruelty”.
At block 11, where the Nazis shot thousands, the pope met a dozen survivors of the death camp, where over a million people in total, a lot of them Jews, were murdered by the Germans during World War II. A few shafts of light from a tiny window were the only light cast on the white figure of Francis, who knelt for many minutes as he prayed before he crossed himself and rose to his feet.
Both of his predecessors had a personal historical connection to the site, with the first, John Paul II, coming from Poland and himself a witness to the unspeakable suffering inflicted on his nation during the German occupation. Pope Benedict XVI, who visited in 2006, was a German who served in the Hitler Youth for a time as a teenager.
Invited guests, among them camp survivors and Christian Poles who saved Jews during the war, stood in respect as the pope arrived, his vehicle driving parallel to the rail tracks once used to transport victims to their deaths there. His meetings with survivors demonstrated his longing to recognize one other as brothers and that while words of our prayers are different, our tears and our silence are the same.
During his sermon in Krakow, Francis encouraged those gathered to applaud louder when he mentioned the late pontiff. “May the Lord give me the grace of crying”, the pope added.
Central to his trip is World Youth Day – an event organized by the church that draws young Catholics on pilgrimages from around the world every two or three years.
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Friday is devoted to the theme of suffering and later in the day Francis will visit a children’s hospital in Krakow.
