Vatican Radio archives: Pope Benedict’s horror and hopes at Auschwitz
(Vatican Radio) Back in May 2006, just a year after his election, Pope Benedict XVI
chose to conclude his first pilgrimage to Poland with prayers at Auschwitz Birkenau.
Upon his return to Rome, he described his visit there to faithful gathered for the
customary Wednesday General audience:
“At the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and in
similar camps, Hitler had more than 6 million Jews exterminated. At Auschwitz-Birkenau
approximately 150,000 Poles and tens of thousands of men and women of other nationalities
also died.”
“May modern humanity not forget Auschwitz and the other "factories
of death" where the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate God in order to take his place.
May it not give in to the temptation of racial hatred, which is the origin of the
worst forms of anti-Semitism. May people recognize that God is the father of all and
calls us in Christ to build together a world of justice, truth and peace.”
Holocaust
memorial day is now marked across Europe and beyond on Jan 27th – its goal is to remember
all victims of Nazi persecution, as well as to promote more democratic and tolerant
societies, free from all forms of prejudice and racism.
That message was at
the heart of Pope Benedict’s 2006 discourse in Auschwitz: so that none shall forget
the horrors that some have been capable of. His visit to the Nazi death camp was
obviously a moving moment for the German born Pope.
In this program drawn
from Vatican Radio archives, we listen to excerpts from the Holy Father’s speech at
Auschwitz…
Listen to this program by Tracey McClure:
The following
is the full text of Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in
May 2006:
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 28 May 2006 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. 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? In silence, then,
we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death
here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a
plea to the living God never to let this happen again. Twenty-seven years ago,
on 7 June 1979, Pope John Paul II stood in this place. He said: “I come here today
as a pilgrim. As you know, I have been here many times. So many times! And many
times I have gone down to Maximilian Kolbe’s death cell, paused before the wall of
death, and walked amid the ruins of the Birkenau ovens. It was impossible for me
not to come here as Pope.” Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which,
along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout
the war. “Six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War: a fifth
of the nation”, he reminded us. Here too he solemnly called for respect for human
rights and the rights of nations, as his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI had done
before him, and added: “The one who speaks these words is ... the son of a nation
which in its history has suffered greatly from others. He says this, not to accuse,
but to remember. He speaks in the name of all those nations whose rights are being
violated and disregarded ...”. Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish
people. I come here today as a son of the German people. 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, a duty before God,
for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German
people - a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false
promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and
prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people
was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power. Yes,
I could not fail to come here. On 7 June 1979 I came as the Archbishop of Munich-Freising,
along with many other Bishops who accompanied the Pope, listened to his words and
joined in his prayer. In 1980 I came back to this dreadful place with a delegation
of German Bishops, appalled by its evil, yet grateful for the fact that above its
dark clouds the star of reconciliation had emerged. This is the same reason why I
have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation - first of all from God,
who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here,
and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history,
are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns. How
many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God
in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this
triumph of evil? The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes:
“You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness ...
because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why
do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink
down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem
us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:19, 22-26). This cry of anguish,
which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also
the cry for help raised by all those who in every age - yesterday, today and tomorrow
- suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are,
even in our own day! We cannot peer into God’s mysterious plan - we see only piecemeal,
and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would
not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No - when all is said
and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself!
Do not forget mankind, your creature! And our cry to God must also be a cry that
pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence - so that
his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within
us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism. Let us
cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall
us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether
it is the abuse of God’s name as a means of justifying senseless violence against
innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith
in him. Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help
them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -
a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser. The God in whom
we believe is a God of reason - a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold
mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our
prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the
recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats
arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason. The place where
we are standing is a place of memory, it is the place of the Shoah. The past is never
simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take
and the paths not to take. Like John Paul II, I have walked alongside the inscriptions
in various languages erected in memory of those who died here: inscriptions in Belarusian,
Czech, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Croatian, Italian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Dutch,
Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Romani, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Ukrainian, Judaeo-Spanish
and English. All these inscriptions speak of human grief, they give us a glimpse
of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects, and
failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God. Some inscriptions are pointed
reminders. There is one in Hebrew. 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.
Thus the words of the Psalm: “We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter”
were fulfilled in a terrifying way. Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping
out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and
laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally
valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke
to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had
to belong to man alone - to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves
masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by 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: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful. Then there is
the inscription in Polish. First and foremost they wanted to eliminate the cultural
elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous historical subject and reducing
it, to the extent that it continued to exist, to slavery. Another inscription offering
a pointed reminder is the one written in the language of the Sinti and Roma people.
Here too, the plan was to wipe out a whole people which lives by migrating among other
peoples. They were seen as part of the refuse of world history, in an ideology which
valued only the empirically useful; everything else, according to this view, was to
be written off as lebensunwertes Leben - life unworthy of being lived. There is also
the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured
by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription
also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold effect: they set the peoples
free from one dictatorship, but the same peoples were thereby subjected to a new one,
that of Stalin and the Communist system. The other inscriptions, written in Europe’s
many languages, also speak to us of the sufferings of men and women from the whole
continent. They would stir our hearts profoundly if we remembered the victims not
merely in general, but rather saw the faces of the individual persons who ended up
here in this abyss of terror. I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before
the inscription in German. It evokes the face of : a woman, Jewish and German, who
disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration
camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them.
The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were
considered as Abschaum der Nation - the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully
hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were
not eclipsed. We are grateful to them, because they did not submit to the power of
evil, and now they stand before us like lights shining in a dark night. With profound
respect and gratitude, then, let us bow our heads before all those who, like the three
young men in Babylon facing death in the fiery furnace, could respond: “Only our God
can deliver us. But even if he does not, be it known to you, O King, that we will
not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up”
(cf. Dan 3:17ff.). Yes, behind these inscriptions is hidden the fate of countless
human beings. They jar our memory, they touch our hearts. They have no desire to
instil hatred in us: instead, they show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their
desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire is
to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil. They want to make us
feel the sentiments expressed in the words that Sophocles placed on the lips of Antigone,
as she contemplated the horror all around her: my nature is not to join in hate but
to join in love. By God’s grace, together with the purification of memory demanded
by this place of horror, a number of initiatives have sprung up with the aim of imposing
a limit upon evil and confirming goodness. Just now I was able to bless the Centre
for Dialogue and Prayer. In the immediate neighbourhood the Carmelite nuns carry
on their life of hiddenness, knowing that they are united in a special way to the
mystery of Christ’s Cross and reminding us of the faith of Christians, which declares
that God himself descended into the hell of suffering and suffers with us. In Oświęcim
is the Centre of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and the International Centre for Education
about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. There is also the International House for Meetings
of Young people. Near one of the old Prayer Houses is the Jewish Centre. Finally
the Academy for Human Rights is presently being established. So there is hope that
this place of horror will gradually become a place for constructive thinking, and
that remembrance will foster resistance to evil and the triumph of love. At Auschwitz-Birkenau
humanity walked through a “valley of darkness”. And so, here in this place, I would
like to end with a prayer of trust - with one of the Psalms of Israel which is also
a prayer of Christians: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie
down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He
leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff
- they comfort me ... I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long” (Ps
23:1-4, 6).