Pope Francis stands under 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign as he visits Auschwitz to reflect on horrors committed at Nazi death camp and 'let his tears flow'
Pope Francis paid a somber visit to the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Friday, becoming the third consecutive pontiff to make the pilgrimage to the place where Adolf Hitler's forces killed more than one million people, most of them Jews, the Daily Mail reports.
Wearing white robe and skullcap, Francis walked slowly beneath the notorious gate at Auschwitz bearing the cynical words 'Arbeit Macht Frei', meaning 'work sets you free'. He was then transported on a small car past barracks and brought to a spot in front, where he sat on a bench, his head bent for many long moments in contemplation and prayer.
The Argentine pontiff lead prayers for the 1.1 million mostly-Jewish victims murdered at the camp and rather than making a speech he stood in silence to reflect on the horrors committed and let his tears flow.
He prayed silently for more than 15 minutes before meeting with several survivors of the camp, greeting them one by one, shaking their hands and kissing them on the cheeks. He then carried a large white candle and placed it at the Death Wall, where prisoners were executed.
The wall is a reconstruction of the original - situated next to the Block 11 torture chamber - where Jewish inmates were forced to collect dead bodies from after prisoners were executed by firing squad.
At the dark underground prison cell that once housed St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic friar who sacrificed his own life during the war to save the life of another man, Francis prayed again.
The visit falls on the 75th anniversary of the day Kolbe was sentenced to death.
A few shafts from a tiny window were the only light cast on the white figure of the pope, who knelt for many minutes before he crossed himself and rose to his feet.
After arriving Wednesday in Poland - the heartland of Nazi Germany's atrocities - the pontiff said the world had been plunged into a piecemeal third world war.
He has repeatedly denounced those committing crimes in the name of religion, after Europe suffered a string of deadly jihadist attacks.
The pontiff, who has forged ever-closer ties between the Catholic Church and Jews since his election in 2013, met 12 former inmates at the site which is now a memorial and museum.
As the morning rain subsided and the sun began to shine, around 200 people gathered by a big screen in Birkenau to await his arrival, among them a group of elderly Poles known as the 'righteous among the nations' who risked their lives to help hide and protects Jews.
Among those who met the pope was a 101-year-old woman violinist called Helena Dunicz Niwinska who played in the Auschwitz orchestra as a prisoner, alongside others who worked at the camp hospital or who were there as children.
During the visit, prayers will be said just a stone's throw from the ruins of one of the crematoriums which was blown up by the Nazis as they evacuated the camp.
As an Argentine he is the first pope to visit who did not himself live himself through the brutality of World War II on Europe's soil.
Both of his predecessors had a personal historical connection to the site, with the first, John Paul II, coming from Poland and himself a witness to the unspeakable suffering inflicted on his nation during the German occupation.
His visit in 1979 made history and was part of the Vatican's historical efforts at reconciliation with Jews. Pope Benedict XVI, who visited in 2006, was a German who served in the Hitler Youth for a time as a teenager.
As a pope hailing from afar, Francis's visit helps to underline the universal importance of a site that in recent years has drawn ever more visitors from around the world.
Vatican and Polish church officials have said he will express his sorrow in silence at the site, mourning the victims in quiet prayer and meditation.
Francis had been scheduled to fly from Krakow to Oswiecim, the small town where the former death camp is located, but due to bad weather traveled the 65 kilometers (40 miles) by car instead.
Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich welcomed the pontiff's intention to remain silent during his visit to the camp, saying 'often people go to Auschwitz... and they are silent (about the horrors) for the rest of their lives'.
'Instead, once we leave Birkenau we must spend the rest of our lives screaming, yelling and fighting all kinds of injustices,' he said on Thursday.
The pope will travelled the two miles (three kilometres) to Birkenau, the main extermination site, and was driven along tracks laid in 1944 to allow trains of prisoners to be transported right to the gas chambers and crematoria.
There, some 25 Christian Poles who risked their lives during the war to help hide and protects Jews - a group recognised by Israel's Yad Vashem as 'Righteous Among the Nations' - will recount their stories to the pope.
Among them will be Maria Augustyn, whose family hid a Jewish couple behind a wardrobe for years, and Anna Bando, who helped rescue an orphan from the Warsaw ghetto and gave several Jews forged 'Aryan' papers.
The Holocaust is an extremely delicate subject in Poland, where locals fuelled by anti-Semitism were accused of butchering Jews or delivering them to the Nazis.
Those who did help sometimes paid the ultimate price.
A Hebrew prayer for the dead will be read aloud in Polish by Stanislaw Ruszala, Catholic parish priest of the town of Markowa, where a family was wiped out after they were discovered to be sheltering Jews.
Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were butchered. Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant at the time, had started giving birth before she was executed, according to the Vatican.
More than 100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and anti-Nazi partisans also died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland. The Soviet Red Army liberated it in 1945.
It is his third day of a five-day visit to Poland that includes meetings with young pilgrims taking part in World Youth Day, a global youth celebration.
Friday is devoted to the theme of suffering. Later in the day Francis will visit a children's hospital in Krakow and take part in a Way of the Cross with the young people.
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