OSWIECIM, Poland: Pope Benedict visited the Auschwitz death camp as “a son of Germany” yesterday to meet former inmates and view an execution wall and starvation cells where some of the 1.5mn 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!”
Schudrich was due to pray with Benedict later yesterday. “This incident is very nasty but let’s not let it undermine the great importance of today’s event,” he told Reuters.
Recalling Benedict’s Polish predecessor had visited the camp in 1979, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told reporters on Saturday: “John Paul went to Auschwitz as a son of the Polish people and Benedict is going as the son of the German people.”
After the main camp, he was due to visit a nearby centre for dialogue among Poles, Germans and Jews and then pray at the Birkenau section of the camp, where Jews were led from trains straight to their deaths in gas chambers.
Benedict’s visit evoked complex issues of Catholic-Jewish and Polish-German relations, the mystery of evil and German guilt for the deaths of 1.5mn 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 II.
Benedict, who visited Auschwitz with John Paul II in 1979 and with other German bishops in 1980, has said that he saw slave labourers during his short army service. The brutality of the Nazi regime helped him decide to be a priest.
The Interior Ministry said it was looking for a 25-year-old man who may have attacked the New York-born Schudrich, 50, and added that Saturday’s incident might be a “provocation aimed at creating an image of Poland as an anti-Semitic country”.
Earlier yesterday, 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.
In his sermon, Benedict urged Poland, which has one of the world’s most active Christian communities, to “share with the other people of the world the treasure of your faith” as a fitting and lasting tribute to John Paul.
Many in the crowd were moved to tears.
“After John Paul’s death, I thought that such a miracle for a pope to come to Poland would not repeat itself,” said Danuta Latowska, 27. “And here my dreams and prayers have been fulfilled.”
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.”
Navarro-Valls said Benedict had insisted on visiting Auschwitz during his four-day trip to Poland, which ended yesterday after a sentimental journey to the cities and shrines that were central to his predecessor’s life and spirituality.
Benedict has avoided speaking his native tongue during his tour, to avoid hurting Polish and Jewish sensitivities. – Reuters |
