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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: May 29, 2006 |
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Pope Benedict XVI prayed at the Auschwitz concentration camp and denounced the mass murder of Europe's Jews by his native country's World War II rulers, saying it was hard for "a pope from Germany" even to speak of the Holocaust.
"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 Sunday.
"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence," Benedict said in Italian, "a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"
Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there.
As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow suddenly appeared over the camp.
During his remarks, Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II, had visited "this dreadful place" as a Pole in 1979, he came as "a son of the German people." He mostly avoided his native language, however, speaking in Italian and using German for just one short prayer.
"The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.
"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."
Shoah is the Hebrew term for the killing of six million Jews during by the Nazis during World War II.
As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.
Benedict's stop at Auschwitz -- his last before he left for Rome -- was a somber close to a four-day trip that was otherwise upbeat, with some 900,000 people turning out for his Sunday mass in a meadow in Krakow, the city where John Paul II once served as archbishop.
Paying tribute to John Paul was a major theme of the visit, Benedict's first to Poland as pope.
He visited John Paul's hometown of Wadowice and celebrated an outdoor Mass in a central Warsaw square where a 1979 appearance by John Paul is credited with inspiring the Solidarity trade union opposition to communism.
Benedict arrived first at the Auschwitz part of the complex, walking solemnly with hands clasped through the gate with its infamous words, "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work Sets You Free." He prayed at the Wall of Death, where the Nazis executed thousands, and met 32 camp survivors, most of them Catholics.
The sometimes-reserved Benedict stopped to speak to each one, clasping one woman's face in his hands, and kissing the cheeks of one of the men, Henryk Mandelbaum, the only Jewish survivor in the group.
Benedict did not refer to collective guilt by the German people, but instead focused on the Nazi rulers. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."
He also did not mention the controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who some say did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to concentration camps. The Vatican rejects the accusation.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles, California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Associated Press that's Benedict's presence at the camp, and his remarks, were firm reminders that Holocaust deniers were not speaking the truth.
"He wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth. For him to now go there as the pope and acknowledge the horrors the holocaust visited on the Jewish people and all mankind is important," he said.
Hier said it was a notable contrast to remarks made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad casting doubt on the Holocaust: "Here, you have the leader of a billion Christians ... acknowledging that was this the low point of human kind. In a sense that is a repudiation of the president."
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the most important part of Benedict's message "was his physical presence at Auschwitz" but that some Jews wished he had gone further by directly addressing anti-Semitism.
"It was a very powerful statement and the words that we heard were powerful, but I'm sure some felt a glaring omission ... on the question of anti-Semitism. Jews are very sensitive to that and we are used to hearing the words of John Paul II."
Typically, Benedict did not mention his own personal experiences during the war. Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager against his will and then was drafted into the German army in the last months of the war.
He wrote in his memoirs that he decided to desert in the war's last days in 1945 and returned to his home in Traunstein in Bavaria, risking summary execution by SS fanatics if caught. In the book, he recounted his terror at being briefly stopped by two soldiers.
He was then held for several weeks as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces who occupied his hometown. |
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