At Auschwitz, Pope Invokes a 'Heartfelt Cry'
In Poignant Visit, Pontiff Prays In German at Nazi Death Camp

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 29, 2006

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."

The symbolism of the Auschwitz visit -- intended to promote reconciliation between Christians and Jews, as well as Germans and Poles -- was undercut by an assault Saturday on the chief rabbi of Poland.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich, a native of New York, said he was punched and pepper-sprayed in Warsaw by a young man shouting "Poland for the Poles!" Authorities with the Polish Interior Ministry said they were looking for a 25-year-old suspect and called the attack a "provocation aimed at creating an image of Poland as an anti-Semitic country."

Schudrich participated in Sunday's ceremony at Auschwitz and chanted the kaddish , or Jewish prayer for the dead, before Benedict's speech. Schudrich called the altercation in Warsaw a reflection of worsening anti-Semitism in Poland but said he did not want it to overshadow the pope's visit. "Ultra-rightists who felt somehow constrained in their behavior now feel they can do whatever they want," he told the Associated Press.

John Paul was credited by many during his 26-year reign for his emphasis on improving relations between Christians and Jews. He was the first pope to visit a synagogue, and he established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel. He visited Jerusalem in 2000 and deplored "the terrible tragedy" of the Holocaust.

Some Jewish leaders in Poland spoke favorably of Benedict's work to continue those efforts, noting that he also visited a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, last August during his first trip outside Italy as pope.

"If the present pope follows the path shown by John Paul II, then we can only be grateful and very proud about it," Tadeusz Jakubowicz, the leader of the Jewish community in Krakow, said in an interview. "It doesn't matter what origins or nation he represents. He will be the pope of all of us."

For centuries, Krakow -- about 40 miles from Auschwitz -- had a thriving Jewish population, numbering about 70,000 before World War II. Today, there are about 200.

Jakubowicz, 67, was imprisoned by the Nazis in the nearby Plaszow concentration camp as a child. He said 31 of his relatives were killed during the Holocaust. It was both remarkable and proper, he said, for Benedict to make Auschwitz the symbolic climax of his visit to Poland.

"The very fact that a German pope is coming to the concentration camp at Auschwitz and praying, isn't it a gesture of asking for forgiveness?" he said. "I'm almost certain that John Paul knew that Ratzinger was destined to become pope, and I think he knew what he was doing in helping to make that happen."

Benedict's stop at Auschwitz capped a four-day tour of Poland in which the pope honored his popular predecessor, John Paul, at nearly every public event.

Earlier Sunday, Benedict led Mass for an estimated 900,000 people in a field in Krakow, a place where John Paul regularly greeted huge crowds during his papacy and his years as archbishop of the city.