Holocaust
Remembrance Day, 2005
Archdiocese of Boston Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs
As we observe this year’s Yom HaShoah commemoration, it is only
natural to recall the remarkable legacy of the late Pope John Paul
II. This native son of Poland, who grew up with Jews, counted them
among his friends, and experienced anguish at their extermination in
the Shoah, made healing the past and calling for a new future between
Christians and Jews a bedrock of his pontificate.
He was the first pope to visit Auschwitz, where he observed that one
could not recall the suffering of the Jewish people during the Shoah
with indifference. During his historic visit to the Hall of Remembrance
at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in March, 2000, he spoke these words:
In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme
need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to
try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence
because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy
of the Shoah.
My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied
Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors,
some of whom perished, while others survived. I have come to Yad Vashem
to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything,
especially of human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust. More than
half a century has passed, but the memories remain.
Here, as at Auschwitz and many other places in Europe, we are overcome
by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and
children, cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew.
How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what
happened. No one can diminish its scale.
We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely
to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions
of innocent victims of Nazism.
And so, in the spirit of the late Holy Father’s “never
again,” we pledge to persist in the indispensable task of continuing
to build a new relationship of shared mutual respect between Christians
and Jews and to work to uproot the sin of anti-Semitism wherever it
exists.
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