"May today’s mankind not forget Auschwitz and the other death factories in which the Nazi regime tried to eliminate God and take His place! May it not give in to the temptation of racial hatred, which is the source of the worst forms of anti-Semitism!" This is the cry with which Benedict XVI closed today’s general audience, all focussed on the highlights of his apostolic journey to Poland. "It is just in that infamous place said the Pope as he mentioned the last stop of his second journey out of Italy, after the one of last August for the WYD in Cologne that I wanted to stop before coming back to Rome. In the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as in other similar camps, Hitler had over six million Jews exterminated. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, about 150,000 Poles and dozens of thousands of men and women of other nationalities also died". Then, the theological reading of the Shoah: "Before the horror of Auschwitz repeated the Holy Father the only response is Christ’s Cross: love going down to the depths of evil, to save man at the root, where his freedom can rebel against God". Finally, the wish that such horrors may never happen again: "May man prayed the Pope acknowledge once again that God is a Father to all of us and calls all of us in Christ to build together a world of justice, truth and peace".
