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Words fail me, says Pope at Auschwitz

Daniel McLaughlin

Auschwitz (POLaND): With slow steps, Pope Benedict XVI walked silently through the gates of the Auschwitz death camp on Sunday, to pray for the 1.5 million people murdered there by his countrymen during World War II. After passing beneath the iron arch emblazoned with the lie ``work brings freedom'', the man who was unwillingly enrolled into the Hitler Youth and the Nazi army said he bowed before the victims as ``a son of the German people''. ``To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible, and particularly difficult for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany,'' he told camp survivors and religious leaders. ``In a place like this, words fail. There is only a stupefied silence and a cry to God.'' He insisted: ``I had to come here as a duty to truth and to those that suffered.'' But, speaking in Italian, he also asked that ordinary Germans not be condemned for the crimes of Adolf Hitler and his ``group of criminals''.

At Auschwitz, the white-robed Pope led a phalanx of black and purple-clad senior clergymen as he walked with hands clasped into the camp, occasionally lifting his eyes to the bells tolling above what is regarded as the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.

Once inside, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other political and Church officials watched him pray alone at the wall where thousands of Jews were shot, before turning to meet a group of 32 Auschwitz survivors. One to kiss the Papal ring was Henryk Mandelbaum, who as a teenager was forced by his Nazi guards to empty the gas chambers of the bodies of his fellow Jews.

After talking to the survivors, Pope Benedict descended into the cell into which the Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe was thrown after offering his life to save another inmate. Kolbe was eventually killed in 1941 and Pope John Paul II made him a saint in 1982.

Kolbe was one of hundreds of thousands of Poles, and hundreds of Catholic priests and intellectuals, who were killed at Auschwitz, along with 1.1 million Jews from around Europe. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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