At Auschwitz, pope confronts the past

OSWIECIM, Poland -- Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as ``a son of the German people" yesterday and asked why God remained silent during the ``unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust.

Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp.

``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 later.

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

Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II, visited the camp as a Pole in 1979, he came as ``a son of the German people."

``The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.

``By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."

Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim -- called Auschwitz in German. Others who died there included Poles; Soviet prisoners of war; Roma, or gypsies; and political opponents of the Nazis.

Benedict did not refer to collective guilt by the German people but instead focused on the Nazi regime. He said he was ``a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."

Earlier, Benedict walked alone under the camp gate containing the notorious words: ``Arbeit Macht Frei," or ``Work Sets You Free."

He stopped for a full minute before the Wall of Death, where the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners. He was handed a lighted candle, which he placed before the wall.

At the Wall of Death, a line of 32 elderly camp survivors awaited Benedict, most of them Catholic. He moved slowly down the line, stopping to talk with each, taking one woman's face in his hands and kissing one of the men on both cheeks.

Benedict then visited the dark cell in the basement of one of the buildings, the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, was executed after voluntarily taking the place of a condemned prisoner with a large family in 1941. Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.

Benedict stopped to pray again in the cell, standing before a candle placed there by John Paul during his 1979 visit.

The visit is heavy with significance for Roman Catholic-Jewish relations, a favorite theme for Benedict and John Paul.

This was the third time Benedict has visited Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau. The first was in 1979, when he accompanied John Paul, and in 1980, when he came with a group of German bishops while he was archbishop of Munich.

The visit to Auschwitz was the last stop on a four-day trip to Poland, during which Benedict has urged Poles to serve as a beacon of faith in a mostly secular Europe.

Earlier, he urged 900,000 Poles gathered in a rain-soaked field to share their faith with other countries, saying it was the best way to honor their beloved John Paul.

The enormous, exuberant crowd chanted ``Benedetto! Benedetto!" and sang ``Sto Lat," or ``A Hundred Years," wishing him a long life.

``I ask you, finally, to share with the other peoples of Europe and the world the treasure of your faith, not least as a way of honoring the memory of your countryman, who, as the successor of St. Peter, did this with extraordinary power and effectiveness," Benedict said as he concluded his homily during the Mass in the Blonia meadow.

``I ask you to stand firm in your faith! Stand firm in your hope! Stand firm in your love! Amen!" he concluded, speaking in Polish on the last day of his trip.