At Auschwitz, Pope Invokes a 'Heartfelt Cry'

In Poignant Visit, Pontiff Prays In German at Nazi Death Camp

OSWIECIM, Poland, May 28 -- Pope Benedict XVI, a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth and the German army as a teenager, walked through the gate of the death camp at Auschwitz on Sunday and somberly confronted the sites where his countrymen killed an estimated 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews.

Dressed wholly in white, the 79-year-old pope strode slowly past a boulevard of brick barracks as his entourage of dark-suited bishops and security agents walked several steps behind. He passed under the infamous iron gate wrought with the Nazis' mocking slogan, "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes You Free."

He paused to light a candle and pray silently in front of a stone wall where the Nazis executed thousands of prisoners with bullets. Then he entered a cellblock and descended the stairs to inspect an underground dungeon where a Polish Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, was left to starve after he offered his life to the Nazis if they would spare a fellow prisoner. Kolbe was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1982.

Later, Benedict spoke and prayed at a ceremony in front of a slate-gray victims' monument in the Birkenau section of the camp, near remains of the crematoria and gas chambers where most of the Nazis' victims were killed.

"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 in an address delivered in Italian.

"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence -- a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

Benedict also gave a brief prayer in German at the camp, the only time during his trip to Poland when he spoke in his native language.

It was the third visit to Auschwitz for Benedict, but the first since he became pope in April 2005. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, he accompanied John Paul on a historic visit to the camp in 1979 and returned a year later with a group of German bishops. On Sunday, he recalled those moments.

"Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people," Benedict said. "For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here. I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here."

The ceremony began in a misty drizzle, but the sun broke out and a bright rainbow shone on the horizon in time for Benedict's address.

Unlike German political leaders who have visited Auschwitz over the decades, Benedict did not explicitly apologize on behalf of his country or articulate a notion of German collective responsibility for the Holocaust. Instead, he lay the blame squarely on Germany's Nazi rulers.

In that vein, he described himself as "a son of people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people were used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."