A view of the former Nazi German concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
By Devin Watkins
Jan 27 2022
As the world prepares to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, Pope Francis urges families to remind younger generations about the millions of people, especially Jews, killed at the hands of the Nazi regime.
“This unspeakable cruelty must never be repeated.”
Pope Francis made that appeal at the end of the Wednesday General Audience, one day before the world dedicates a day to recalling the horrors of the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held on the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on 27 January 1945.
The Pope said the world must remember the “extermination of millions of Jews, people of various nationalities and religious faiths.”
He lamented the genocide of around 6 million of Europe’s Jews, or two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population, at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Pope Francis greets Holocaust survivor Lidia Maksymowicz from Poland
Teaching younger generations
Pope Francis also appealed to everyone, but especially to “educators and families, so that they might engender in younger generations the awareness of the horrors of this dark page in human history.”
‘So much cruelty’
Pope Francis visited the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 2016, where the Catholic priest St. Maximillian Kolbe was killed, along with 1.1 million others.
The Pope spoke no words on that occasion, but only embraced several of the camp’s survivors.
He wrote his prayer in Spanish in the Book of Honor:
“Señor ten piedad de tu pueblo. Señor, perdón por tanta crueldad! Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty!” -Vatican News
