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Pope Benedict XVI to Poland

a rainbow over Birkenau

By David Dastych
Tuesday, May 30, 2006

a four-day (May 25-28, 2006) pilgrimage of the Pope, Benedict XVI, to Poland was an unexpected, tremendous success. Unexpected, because the Poles — more than 90 per cent Roman Catholics — are still deploring the death of John Paul II, and they identify the Pontiff as "our Polish Pope". Moreover, Benedict XVI (born Josef Ratzinger) is "a son of the German people", as he speaks of himself. In spite of the 61 years passed since the end of World War II, and notwithstanding Poland's good relations and partnership with Germany in the European Union, there is still to be felt in Poland a certain distrust and fear of Germany and the Germans.

But, fortunately, all these Polish resentments vanished in front of a smiling and affable "German Pope", delivering part of his speeches and public greetings in a comprehensible Polish, saying fragments of the Holy Mass in the Polish language, communicating with ease with individuals and crowds of believers in Warsaw, Czestochowa, Wadowice (the birthplace of Karol Wojtyla turned JP II) and specially in Cracow. His apostolic Journey to Poland — much of it in the footsteps of his "Great Predecessor" (as he used to say) — had a prevailing religious character -- its motto, quoted from St Paul's First Letter to the Corintians (1 Cor 16,13) "Stand firm in your faith". The response to his sermons was terrific: loud cries "Benedetto, Benedetto", Polish youth singing popular religious songs, sometimes improvised, including the Pope's name. But also a silent and solemn audience, listening to every word of the Pontiff and applauding each time they liked what he told them. In Warsaw, 300,000 gathered under a heavy rainfall in Pilsudski Square, the same former Victory Square where, in 1979, John Paul II articulated his famous words: "Let your Spirit descend, and renew the face of the earth."  and he added: "The face of this land." The words that pushed out the first stone from under a shabby building of the Communist empire, bound to fall under a crushing force of the rising peoples. Then, in Cracow, the ancient capital of Poland, almost a million people came to meet the "German Pope" and proclaimed him "our pope". and he could say — paraphrasing John Kennedy in Berlin — "Ich bin Krakauer", and "this city is also mine."

"Come back again!" shouted young Poles. and he answered: "If God allows me".

Where words fail…

"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…" Benedict XVI told his silent audience in Birkenau, on the last day of his journey (May 28). at the beginning of his very personal message he stated: "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?.."

His recent visit to the former Nazi concentration camp, auschwitz-Birkenau, located in the southern part of Poland, was not the first one. But this time he came as the Supreme Priest of the Roman Catholic Church, a world-wide religious congregation of more than one billion people. anything he said and did there was to be commented, interpreted, criticized or praised by many people in many countries. auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest death camp of the Holocaust. The number of the Jewish people murdered there is between 950,000 to 1.5 million. The difference in the count is due to the fact that dozens of thousand of the Jews were brought here to be killed instantly in the gas-chambers, and their dead bodies to be burned in huge ovens. They had been never registered in the camp's records.

The pope's tour of the camp was, at first, a silent homage to the victims. He walked in through the main gate, under the infamous sign "arbeit macht frei", to the Wall of Death, where prisoners were executed. He stopped there, praying quietly, his eyes fixed on the concrete slabs with spurs of bullets, his face still and lips tight. Then he turned to over 30 former prisoners, waiting near a brick building, known as Barrack 11, or Death Ward (people to be shot were kept there). He stopped and talked to each of them, to old men and women -- Poles, Gipsies and a Jew, Henryk Mandelbaum. While most of the Catholic survivors kissed the pope's ring (it's a custom), Benedict XVI kissed Mandelbaum on each cheek. From the sun-lit court, the Pontiff descended to the basement of the 11th Barrack to pray in the death cell of Father Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk, who offered himself to be executed in place of a prisoner who had a family (this man survived the camp and the war). Father Kolbe was then made a saint in 1982, by John Paul II.

God's signs?

In Birkenau, a larger camp adjoining auschwitz, former prisoners, their families and other invited guests awaited the pope. He came and sat on a chair, facing a large stone monument to the victims and tables lined on the ground, marking the particular nationalities, whose members were killed in the death camp. The monument is composed into ruins of the blown-up ovens, which burned the dead to ashes. a single chimney still standing out… Benedict XVI sat still, glaring at the stones, mute. Then a Jewish band began to play, and between the music pieces, priests and rabbis walked along the monument to pray loudly, or chant the Kaddish: a Gypsy, a Protestant, a Russian Orthodox, a Catholic and three Jews, including Poland's chief rabbi — Michael Schuldrich. (Rabbi Schuldrich had been assaulted the previous day in Warsaw by a nationalistic youth shouting "Poland for the Poles!" — a live reminder of anti-Semitism still alive in the country with almost no Jews).

as the music of violins an a harp played, it rained and, some time later, a colorful rainbow appeared right over the chimney of a ruined crematorium. It was a beautiful and breath-stopping view, as if God himself made a sign of His Covenant with Israel. and in the slowly clearing up sky, an eagle flew over the former death camp, like a symbol of Poland. People gathered at this scene with bewilderment, and Benedict XVI, who apparently didn't see it, turned back to the rainbow arch and began his address to a small crowd of people, gathered on the camp's grounds. and, in the midst of this gathering and of a Biblical scene, he said: "…we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"

Pope's speech and comments

Some 32 TV stations and a crowd of press and agency newsmen reported the "German Pope's" visit to auschwitz-Birkenau. It was an event watched world-wide. Reading many comments, one could conclude that many focused not on what Benedict XVI actually said, but on what he didn't say. His reference to the German people "over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness (…) and also through terror and intimidation" were often interpreted as a Pontiff's attempt to exculpate the German nation of the WW II crimes. But Germans also died in the death camps: "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" — said the Pope.

He also didn't mention the thousands of Poles and other nationals, who risked their life helping Jews. Professor Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and a former Speaker of the Knesset, told Polish TV that he knew where God was at the time of the Shoah: "He was in the hearts of the Righteous among the Nations". The great majority of them were Polish.

History will judge

My personal remembrance of auschwitz includes many visits to that former Nazi concentration camp, a research I did on its history and the history of the Holocaust. Two visits in auschwitz were remarkable and had a deep impact on my life. First, in the early 1970s, when I prayed in the Death Ward with a former German soldier, the late Ludwig Pickel, a publisher from Nurnberg, one of these Germans who understood well what the Third Reich did to the Jews and Poles. Then, in 1986, when I went to the camp with a Japanese photographer-reporter, Ms. Yoshino Oishi from Tokyo. We toured Poland, meeting and interviewing survivors of the Nazi death camps in Poland. She took thousands of pictures and published a book later on. On that particular day, in auschwitz, in the dreadful underground of the Death Ward (Barrack 11), we stood together in front of Father Kolbe's death cell. There was an inscription on the door, marking the date of his execution by a poison shot into his heart: august 14, 1941. I looked up at the date and froze: it was the date of my own birth! I told Yoshino. She put her hands around my neck and cried. Then she took a picture which is in her book, published in Japan. Many times I wondered what influence that scene had on my later life. a remembrance of Father Kolbe's martyrdom made my imprisonment in a communist jail a lighter experience and my present life of an invalid with a broken spine more tolerable.

I come from a family, composed of many nations. My father was a German, who refused to accept the citizenship of the Hitler Reich and was expropriated and expelled. a part of my Polish mother's ancestry is Jewish. But she survived the war being a Catholic. Most of my family -- from Poland, Germany, austria and Bohemia -- live in Canada and in the United States, some since the 18th century. and I consider america my second homeland.

I welcome Benedict XVI as a "German Pope" with a universal outlook and a long life-record of honesty and service to God. In the turbulent and dangerous times we live through now, in the divided World and with a prospect of a "war of civilizations" between the Judeo-Christian West and the World of Islam - prompted by Islamist radicals — we need firm beliefs and acceptable authorities. John Paul II was such , and Benedict XVI could also become one.