Pope Francis at 'Yad Vashem'

(Vatican Radio) The  visit of Pope Francis to the Holocaust Memorial of 'Yad Vashem' on May 26, during the last day of his Apostolic journey to the Holy Land formed the centrepiece of his morning in Jerusalem, following on from a meeting with Muslim leaders inside the Dome of the Rock in the heart of the old city centre. Philippa Hitchen filed this report: 

Listen to Philippa Hitchen's report:

 

Though I’ve visited Jerusalem on several occasions before, I’d never managed to see the modern, glass and concrete Yad Vashem museum and its memorial hall for the six million victims of the Nazi regime, seeking to eliminate Jewish culture and people from the face of the earth. But I had seen on television the moving ceremonies that took place there during the previous two papal visits, and I’d imagined the powerful effect this place would have on me when I stepped inside and saw with my own eyes the names of the 22 death camps inscribed in white on its bare stone floor.
Yet when I walked into the empty hall a couple of days ahead of the Pope’s arrival, it was a surprisingly ordinary and uneventful moment. Yes, I saw the eternally burning flame which the Pope would be invited to rekindle and the flat stone slab on the floor where he’d lay a wreath on top of the ashes of so many victims scattered just underneath.
As visitors milled around the museum and the Garden of the Righteous, honouring those who saved Jewish lives during the Shoah, I talked to one of the organisers of visit there about the six Holocaust survivors that Pope Francis would meet. A man from Belarus who escaped from 3 different death camps, a woman from Serbia who found safety in a convent of sisters in Budapest, a Polish man who was taken in, at great risk by Catholic parents who cared for him like their own child.
But it wasn’t until Pope Francis was standing inside the memorial hall this morning that the terrible truth of those stories came to life for me. As the Pope stood between President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu, listening to the haunting lament of a cantor singing a special prayer for the dead, watching the flickering flame reflected in the faces of those who’d been in those death camps, I felt an emotional connection to these people that simply wasn’t there a couple of days before. I saw Francis bend down to gently kiss the hand of each elderly Holocaust survivor. I heard his sombre and visibly moved voice offering a deeply personal reflection on the depth of evil to which humans can descend if they shut God out of their lives. “Grant us the grace to be ashamed of what we men have done,” the Pope prayed, adding emphaticallyy “Never again, Lord, never again!”
And as his voice echoed around the silent room, I realised the importance of the work of Yad Vashem to educate young people, to help them understand what really happened in those death camps. Above all, I understand now the mission of this place to put faces and names to each individual victim, to show that beyond the shocking facts and figures there are men and women, adults and children, people just like you and me, whose lives are remembered there in that Holocaust memorial hall.