|
|
 |
|
CNS Story:
|
POLAND-AUSCHWITZ May-29-2006 (930 words) With photos. xxxi
German-born pope visits Nazi death camps as 'duty before God'
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
OSWIECIM, Poland (CNS) -- German-born Pope Benedict XVI stood in silence on the site of the Nazi's Auschwitz death camp.
He walked alone May 28 under the entrance gate sign, "Work will make you free," and joined three dozen survivors before the wall where firing squads shot thousands.
Moving to the nearby Birkenau camp, he walked past the ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of thousands of people died from the fumes of Zyklon B gas and past the chimneys of the crematoriums where the bodies were reduced to ash.
"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man is almost impossible -- and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said, standing at the Holocaust memorial at the end of the railroad tracks inside Birkenau.
Pope Benedict told those gathered at the monument, "I come here today as a son of the German people.
"It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people," Pope Benedict said.
The Nazis came to power when the future Pope Benedict was a boy. School officials enrolled him in the Hitler Youth and, when he was 16, he and his fellow seminarians were conscripted into an anti-aircraft battalion and later into the army.
"I could not fail to come here," the 79-year-old Pope Benedict said. "I had to come."
The service included the recitation of the Jewish kaddish prayer for the dead.
Holocaust survivors, Jewish representatives, diplomats serving in Poland and Oded Ben-Hur, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, participated in the service.
The pope said he came to the camp "to implore the grace of reconciliation -- first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at his hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns."
Auschwitz, he said, is a place where the human heart still cries out to God, asking where he was, why he was silent, why he did not save his people.
"We must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God," the pope said, asking him to save humanity and to help all people actively resist hatred, violence and attacks on the dignity of others.
The heart of the Holocaust memorial at Birkenau consists of 22 stone tablets with inscriptions in different languages.
The pope slowly stood before each of the tablets in prayer, shielded by a white umbrella during a brief rainstorm.
"All these inscriptions speak of human grief; they give us a glimpse of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God," he said.
The Hebrew tablet, he said, is a witness to the fact that the Nazis "wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel them from the register of the peoples of the earth."
While the Nazis targeted Jews first, he said, they wanted "to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid."
In the end, Pope Benedict said, the Nazis wanted to destroy true Christianity as well, replacing it with "a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."
The obligation to remember what happened during the Holocaust and to recognize the depths of hatred of which people are capable should not focus simply on numbers, the pope said.
"The individual persons who ended up here in this abyss of terror" were real people, he said.
The pope made specific mention of St. Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who had become a Carmelite nun.
Acknowledging that she was deported to Auschwitz precisely because of her Jewish identity, the pope said, "as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them."
Pope Benedict said honoring all the victims of the Holocaust means resisting any temptation to hate others.
The victims, he said, "have no desire to instill hatred in us; instead, they show us the terrifying power of hatred."
Between 1940 and 1945, more than 1 million European Jews, 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of other European prisoners were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a complex of extermination and work camps.
Pope Benedict said that in 1979 Pope John Paul paid tribute to the camps' victims as a son of the Polish nation, "that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place."
Several Jewish leaders, while emphasizing the importance of Pope Benedict's visit, were critical of his emphasis on the suffering of Poles in the camps.
"Although we should be aware of Polish sufferings, this place was created to destroy not Poles, but Jews, the whole of my nation," said Rabbi David Baron of Los Angeles, who participated in the ceremony.
"Innocent Poles died here too, including those who helped rescue Jews. But we should remember what the aim was," Rabbi Baron told KAI, the Polish Catholic information agency.
- - -
Contributing to this story was Jonathan Luxmoore in Warsaw.
END
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
CNS · 3211 Fourth St NE · Washington DC 20017 · 202.541.3250
|
|
|
|
