By SPIEGEL Staff
In the Nazi extermination camps, prisoners scratched their names onto stones and scribbled them on pieces of paper or wood, and then buried them. They knew that they would not survive. But they wanted their names to live on.
It is for the same reason that the names of those murdered in the Holocaust are preserved at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the Hall of Remembrance there on Monday, added his own words of remembrance. "I have come to stand in silence before this monument, erected to honor the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah. They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names."
The pope's speech, though, fell flat. Immediately following his visit, the Yad Vashem Council released a statement expressing disappointment with the pope's comments at the monument. "He did not mention that it was the Nazis who did the murdering, nor a word of his personal participation in the feelings of pain and sorrow," said Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau immediately after the speech. "Even the phrase '6 million' wasn't there. Not to mention that he didn't say 'I apologize.'"
Criticism didn't just come from Israel, either. In Germany, the Central Council of Jews in Germany blasted the pope for failing to more clearly distance himself from the Society of St. Pius X and the Holocaust denial of SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson. "What should one think of a public call to fight against anti-Semitism when he himself doesn't act and doesn't take consequences," said Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council. Council President Charlotte Knobloch said "I expected clearer words from the pope at Yad Vashem."
No Mention of Williamson
The pope was taken to the Hall of Remembrance shortly after 5 p.m. It is a dark room, with a low, concrete ceiling. The "Ankor" girls' choir sang the Song of a Martyr, and a rabbi chanted El Maleh Rahamim, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. A letter written by Elchanan Elkes, the head of the Kovno (Lithuania) Ghetto's Jewish Council, to his children was read out loud. Then Benedict XVI was led to six Holocaust survivors. He took their hands and listened to their stories. He did so in the same friendly and benevolent manner in which he has conducted every meeting during his trip to Israel. Then he was asked to step up to the podium, where he joined Israeli President Simon Peres, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council.
In the wake of the Shoah, it is the duty of future generations not to forget the names and to repeat them again and again. This is a core concept of Jewish theology, which the pope embraced when he said: "May their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten!" In contrast to the Central Council in Germany, many read the words as a radical rejection of Holocaust denier Williamson and his SSPX, as well as a benevolent exhortation to be vigilant so that tragedies like the Holocaust will not be repeated. The pope did not, however, mention Williamson by name.
Sacred scripture, he continued, "teaches us the importance of names in conferring upon someone a unique mission or a special gift." Then he mentioned the pool in the memorial, which reflects the faces of the murdered children. "One cannot help but recall how each of them bears a name," he said. "I can only imagine the joyful expectation of their parents as they anxiously awaited the birth of their children. What name shall we give this child? Who could have imagined that they would be condemned to such a deplorable fate! As we stand here in silence, their cry still echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of innocent blood. It is the cry of Abel rising from the earth to the Almighty."
No Sparks
They were powerful sentences, appearing in a manuscript that had been released in advance. Benedict remained true to his manuscript, reading it, word for word, in a quiet voice. But at the same time, he rattled off the sentences as if unaware of the impact of his words, swallowing and mumbling important words, as if he were reading a manuscript meant for someone else or, even more distressingly, as if he were unaware of what he was reading. It was not a powerful moment. There were no sparks.
It was the first and last time that a pope from Germany who had consciously experienced the war and the Nazi years would speak at Yad Vashem. And it was a pope who has said that he became a priest because he wanted to do something against injustice and untruth. Many had expected Benedict to speak as a German, as he did at the Auschwitz memorial. But instead he confined himself to an abstract invocation of the dead, in the tradition of Biblical elegies.
He came as a pilgrim and, at the same time, as the leader of a global church, believing that there was no room for Joseph Ratzinger the man, for his life and his memories. The German pope chose silence where some, especially in Israel, would have preferred more discourse. The criticism on Monday evening was sharp.
The pope never mentioned the culprits, or the German words engraved into the floor of the Hall of Remembrance at his feet: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Theresienstadt. He said nothing about the church's position on the Holocaust, or about its history of anti-Semitism, which made the Shoah possible in the first place. Instead, he confined himself to mentioning the "deep compassion" of the Catholic Church for the victims. His next sentence could be interpreted by the malicious -- who are not in short supply -- as a qualification of the uniqueness of the Shoah: "Similarly, she draws close to all those who today are subjected to persecution on account of race, color, condition of life or religion."
Preferring to Remain Silent
When Pope John Paul II spoke at Yad Vashem in 2000, he promised that "never again" would the church permit the persecution of Jews. His successor has renewed the promise, but in a far more generalized form: "As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I reaffirm -- like my predecessors -- that the Church is committed to praying and working tirelessly to ensure that hatred will never reign in the hearts of men again."
At the end of his address, Benedict said that he was grateful to God for the opportunity "to stand here in silence: a silence to remember, a silence to pray, a silence to hope." His speech ended with a sentence from one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament: "It is good to hope in silence for the saving help of the Lord" (Lam 3:22-26).
After the ceremony, the pope walked over to the girls' choir for a group photo. As everyone smiled for the camera, a few old people sat in their chairs on the other side of the room, looking forlorn: Avraham Ashkenazi, Ruth Bondy, Israela Hargil, Gita Kalderon, Dan Landsberg and Ed Mosberg -- the six survivors. There was no group photo for them.
The pope had already left Yad Vashem for his next appointment, as an elderly woman stood in the Hall of Remembrance. Her name is Lea Schnapp, a journalist from Jerusalem who watched her 12-year-old sister walk into a gas chamber. "Entire family was burned," she says in her broken German. She was one of about 1,000 children, between the ages of 12 and 16, being held in Block 8 at Auschwitz. "Twenty-five survived," she says. She is unwilling to pass judgment on the pope's speech. She says: "I am one-sided. This is a festival. But no one can understand."
She prefers to remain silent.
With reporting by Alexander Smoltczyk and Christoph Schult in Jerusalem.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
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