Here is an excerpt video clip of the Pope's speech. Scroll
down for the full transcript.
It follows the full text transcript of
Pope Benedict XVI's address at Auschwitz, delivered at
Oswiecim, Poland - May 28, 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 June 7, 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 honor, 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 June 7, 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 Edith Stein, Theresia
Benedicta a Cruce: 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 instill 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
neighborhood 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).
Also called the
Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars were
fought for almost half a century from 492 BC -
449 BC. Greece won against enormous odds. Here
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