Pope Francis visits to Birkenau’s former Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, July 29, 2016.
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The Chief Rabbi of Buenos Aires says Pope Francis’s visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau Friday is meant to stress the importance of remembering the horrors of the former Nazi death camps, where more than a million people were killed, a lot of them Jews.
Invited by the Vatican to join the delegation was Rabbi David Rosen, International Director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, who said the way the pope embraced the survivors was unprecedented for a papal visit.
The Pope walked beneath the gates marked with the words arbeit macht frei – work sets you free – before sitting alone on a bench at the extermination site in quiet contemplation.
He later sat in silent prayer. Pope Francis greeted each survivor individually, gently grabbing their hands and kissing their cheeks.
Francis met with them one by one and presented each one with a gift in a small red box.
At the dark underground prison cell that once housed St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish friar who sacrificed his life to save that of a fellow prisoner who had a family, Francis prayed again.
Francis is the third consecutive pope to make the pilgrimage to the camp in Poland where as many as 1.5 million people were killed, most of whom were Jewish. Francis slowly observed each of the memorial plaques in the 23 languages used by the inmates.
More than 100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and anti-Nazi partisans were also killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
The pope travelled to Auschwitz, located some 70 km from the southern city of Kraków, on Friday morning.
Francis listened silently as Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, sang from Psalm 130 and a priest read its words in Polish, just metres (yards) away from the end of the infamous single rail track where cattle cars brought hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the camp. Later in the day Francis will visit a children’s hospital in Krakow and take part in a Way of the Cross with the young people.
He then was driven into a small vehicle along a path lined by barracks, and is to pray at the site of executions and meet with camp survivors.
He became the third consecutive pontiff to make the pilgrimage to the place where Adolf Hitler’s forces killed more than one million people, a lot of them Jews.
He said he was tattooed at Auschwitz to signify he had been “purchased” by the camp.
But Francis is the first pope to visit who has no personal connection to the site.
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It is Pope Francis’s first visit to eastern Europe, with Poland the home of the late Pope John Paul II. Francis said before the trip that he had decided to make no statement as silence was the best way to honour the dead.
