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Pope visits Auschwitz
28/05/2006 17:52 - (SA)
Oswiecim - Pope Benedict visited
the Auschwitz death camp as "a son of Germany" on Sunday to meet
former inmates and view an execution wall and starvation cells
where some of the 1.5 million victims died.
The Pontiff, 79, walked under the entry gate's infamous
motto "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) to tour the main
Auschwitz camp, the nerve centre for a huge complex serving
Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of wiping out European Jewry.
Benedict began the last of his four days in Poland with a
huge mass in Krakow, but it was marred by news of an attack on
Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich in Warsaw on Saturday by
a young man shouting: "Poland for the Poles!"
Benedict's visit evoked complex issues of Catholic-Jewish
and Polish-German relations, the mystery of evil and German
guilt for the deaths of 1.5 million people, mostly Jews.
The symbolism was heightened by the fact that Benedict was
involuntarily enrolled in the Hitler Youth organisation and then
drafted into an anti-aircraft unit at the end of World War Two.
Benedict, who visited Auschwitz with John Paul in 1979 and
with other German bishops in 1980, has said he saw slave
labourers during his short army service. The brutality of the
Nazi regime helped him decide to be a priest.
Earlier on Sunday, Benedict said mass for more than 900 000
people in a field in Krakow where John Paul traditionally held
huge gatherings with his countrymen before returning to Rome.
Before leaving Krakow, Benedict bade farewell to a cheering
crowd with the words: "See you in Rome and, if God allows it,
also back in Krakow."
- Reuters
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