A booklet called “Auschwitz history and thought” was presented in Berlin on 28 May. It’s the first joint Christian and Jewish stance on Auschwitz in Germany, after the Holocaust. According to Hans Joachim Meyer, president of the ZdK (“Central Committee of Catholics”), speaking at the book launch, “the book is intended to make a contribution to mutual understanding and reconciliation” and at the same time to promote “the sensitization of public opinion on the scale of the suffering of the Jewish people in the death camp”. Published by the “Jews and Christians” club of the ZdK, the book contains contributions from nine Jewish authors and from eighteen Catholics on the Shoah and its causes. Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, Jewish historian and co-editor of the book, points out that the relations between Jews and Christians have had an “almost always positive” development over the last forty years”; in this regard he recalls the visit of John Paul II to the Holy Land in March 2000.
