On Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the former concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim and a haunting symbol of the atrocities of the Holocaust.
The anniversary marks the day the Red Army liberated the camp in 1945. "That event, and the testimony of those who survived," Benedict stated, "revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany."
The German-born pope experienced the war firsthand. When Joseph Ratzinger was fourteen, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, an organization all high-school-age youth were required to join. He was later drafted into the national labor force, and subsequently assigned to infantry barracks in Bavaria, Germany.
"Today we celebrate 'Holocaust Remembrance Day,'" Benedict proclaimed, "to recall all the victims of those crimes, and especially the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honor those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity. Deeply moved, our thoughts go to the countless victims of that blind racial and religious hatred, who suffered deportation, imprisonment and death in those abhorrent and inhuman places.
"May the memory of those events," he concluded, "and in particular the drama of the Shoah which struck the Jewish people, arouse ever greater respect for the dignity of each person, so that all mankind may feel itself to be one large family. May omnipotent God illuminate hearts and minds, that such tragedies never happen again."
The Nazis opened Auschwitz as a concentration camp in 1940, soon using it to implement Hitler's “Final Solution,” the plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews. By the end of the war, at least 1.1 million people had died at Auschwitz and the neighboring camp of Birkenau. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the United Nations in 2005 as a global day of commemoration.
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