Rome (Monday, March 14, 2016, Gaudium Press) Pope Francis is scheduled to visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp when he visits Poland in July for World Youth Day.
According to a draft schedule of his tour of Poland, the Pope will visit the camp, where more than one million Jews and a number of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and gypsies were killed by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944, on July 29.
When he visits Auschwitz, Francis will be following in the footsteps of two of his predecessors – St John Paul II visited the camp in 1979 and Benedict XVI went there in 2006.
Pope Francis will visit Poland for five days, arriving on July 27 and leaving on July 31. As well as chairing World Youth Day and visiting Auschwitz, he will also visit the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki and visit the Czestichowa shrine, attending a Mass there celebrating the 1050th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Poland.
Meanwhile, the Auschwitz memorial and museum is setting aside days exclusively for World Youth Day pilgrims who want to tour the former Nazi death camp.
The museum has set aside July 20-28 and August 1-3 for participants in World Youth Day, which runs July 26-31 in Krakow, about one-and-a-half hours away.
World Youth Day officials set aside 300,000 places and have asked participants to register for the dates. In early March, they said about 57,000 places remained.
Auschwitz was the largest camp complex established by the Nazis. The main camp, known as Auschwitz I, was expanded to include Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) in 1941 and Auschwitz III (Auschwitz-Monowitz) in 1942.
Among those killed were St Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, and St Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun.
The starvation cell, where St Maximilian and others spent the last days of their lives, can be viewed in the basement of Block 11. It is known as “the death block” because it was used by the SS to inflict torture.
Source Catholic Herald
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