By Alexander Smoltczyk in Oswiecim
Behind the memorial lies a small forest of black birches and poplars. To one side are the remains of bombed brick walls, a watchtower and a dark pool with ashes in it. The Pope has come from Krakow, travelling over closed highways in a convoy. Policemen were stationed every 100 yards, their backs turned to the road, and in the villages people waited with yellow-white pennants and held up their children. When Pope Benedict XVI stands before an Auschwitz's memorial with inscriptions in the 22 languages of the dead, the wind is blowing drizzle at him.
"Words fail in this place. Only a devastated silence can stand here -- a silence that is a necessary cry to God: Why were you silent?" That's how he begins his address. Standing in front of the stone with a German inscription, he thinks of Edith Stein, whom his predecessor John Paul II beatified, "a Jew and a German, who disappeared in the horror of the night of German Nazi concentration camps, along with her sister" and who "belongs to the witnesses of the truth and goodness that hadn't perished in our people."
Then the Jewish Kaddish prayer is sung, the invocation of the dead. The rain has stopped, the birch trees rustle, and behind the Pope a rainbow reaches from the camp's entrance to a gray cloud that breaks apart from above. The spectacle of nature would presumably not surprise him.
Born as Joseph Ratzinger in Germany, it was the Pope's wish to come here. He silently embraces Henryk Mandelbaum in the main camp, one of the few survivors from the work teams who had to work in the gas chambers. Ratzinger stands in front of the death wall with his head bowed for a long time, and for a moment it seemed as if he would kneel. But Benedict is not John Paul.
"God bless you, Holy Father!"
He isn't interested in dramatic gestures. Nonetheless, he's managed to mobilize three million people in the past few days. The Poles have accepted him on this doubly difficult pilgrimage. He followed in the footsteps of his Polish predecessor, without being able to imitate him. And while he spoke as the leader of a world religion, he had to expect that many would listen to him as a German and a member of the generation that was pulled out of school and recruited for the Third Reich failing efforts during the final years of World War II.
In the end, the Poles approached Benedict XVI at the place of pilgrimage Jasna Gora, calling out "Grüß Gott, Heiliger Vater!" (roughly "God bless you, Holy Father!") in a chorus – and in German. Most Polish believers don't care where the Pope was born. They love him – because he has so thoroughly studied their difficult language; because he subjects himself to the tedium of protocol so uncomplainingly and mildly; because he has a message, even if it is a strict one; because he quotes their beloved Jan Pawel II in every address; but most of all – because he's the Pope.
His easily misunderstood remark that he was coming "first and foremost as a Catholic" and not as a German, made on the flight to Poland, hasn't upset anyone there, although it caused raised eyebrows in Germany and France.
The Pope could say "Krakow is my city too" in front of a million pilgrims, but Auschwitz is his place too: "I'm standing here as a son of the German people," he says, a small crowd of white-haired survivors with neckscarves in the colors reserved for concentration camp inmates standing next to him, "and that's just why I have to say, why I may say: It would have been impossible for me not to come here." But then he falls silent.
No "guilt" mentioned
The word "guilt" is never used. There is no "mea culpa," neither with regard to anti-Semitism in the Church, nor with regard to the role of his country. The Germans, he says – and the remark will probably be associated with him for a long time to come – the Germans are a people "that a gang of criminals managed to achieve power over with deceitful promises, with the promise of greatness, of the resurrection of the nation's honor and significance, with the promise of well-being and also with terror and intimidation, such that our people could be used and abused as an instrument for their fury of destruction and domination." He is standing here as Benedict XVI, not as Joseph Ratzinger, born in the Bavarian town of Marktl am Inn. He has to cite the past and move beyond it at the same time.
Instead of speaking about guilt, Benedict XVI speaks about metaphysics. The destruction of the people of Israel is essentially the will to destroy God, he says: "By eradicating this people, those purveyors of violence wanted, deep down, to kill the God who had called upon Abraham, who had spoken on Mount Sinai and established the still valid principles of humanity there." And he continues: "Ultimately, the destruction of Israel was intended as an unearthing of the foundation upon which Christian faith rests, and as its replacement by a new, artificial faith in the rule of man, the rule of the strong."
But not a word about anti-Semitism, neither yesterday's nor today's. "The place at which we stand is a place of memory and a place of the Shoah." The word "Shoah" was missing in the original draft of the speech, which was already distributed in the morning. Benedict had spent a great deal of time working on this speech, but he had refused to let the manuscript be read one of his cardinals. As a result, the "Shoah" was only slipped into the German Pope's Auschwitz speech at the last minute.
In his speech, Ratzinger avoids equating Auschwitz with other totalitarianisms. In the very first sentence he speaks about "this place of horror, an accumulation of crimes against God and man without parallel in history." He does mention "new catastrophes" that threaten: the "abuse of God for justifying blind violence against innocents," apparently a reference to Islamic fundamentalist terror, and, "on the other hand, the cynicism that doesn't know God and mocks faith in him."
Mixed reception
Many of Holocaust survivors praised the Pope's speech. "What else should he have said? The highest voice of the Catholics says that God was not at Auschwitz. That's more than enough," the leader of the ghetto uprising Marek Edelmann told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. But for others Ratzinger's silence is not enough.
The head rabbi of Warsaw, Michael Schudrich, who said he wished the Pope had clearly addressed growing anti-Semitism in Catholic Poland. Only a day early he had been attacked on the streets of Warsaw with a gas pistol. The Vatican specialist Marco Politi in Rome laments that the Pope's Poland trip proves the bold statements of the John Paul era are gone forever: "In the end the feeling is growing that the courageous time of active regret of Woityla finally is over."
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