Pope Francis received Holocaust survivor and kissed Nazi tattooed prisoner number 3

Pope Francis today kissed the tattoo with the prison number of Lidia Maksymowicz, deported to Auschwitz Birkenau camp when she was not yet three years old, after showing it while greeting him during the Wednesday public hearing at the Vatican.

The 81-year-old Belarusian rolled up the sleeve of her dress to show the Pope the number the Nazis marked prisoners entering concentration camps with and Francis kissed her before hugging her.

The two were able to exchange a few words and the woman told the religious the number three, the years with which he entered the concentration camp.

Maksymowicz is in Italy for the presentation of the documentary which tells the story of his life and which is called the number that was tattooed on him: “70072, the girl who didn’t know how to hate”, a project of the association “Memoria Viva”.

This old woman who lives in Krakow was deported in 1943 and ended up in the so-called children’s pavilion, the victim of the heinous experiences of war criminal Josef Rudolf Mengele.

He survived this horror and, like all prisoners of Auschwitz, She was freed in January 1945 by Soviet soldiers and abandoned for adoption into a Polish family, where she spent her youth imagining that her mother had died. But in 1962, they found her real mother, who also believed her baby girl was dead.

The title of the film comes from a phrase by Maksymowicz: “If I had to live with hate and revenge in mind, I would hurt myself and my soul, and I would be the sick: hate would kill me too.

Francis already surprised him last February when he left the Vatican unexpectedly to go to the house in Rome of Edith Bruck, a Hungarian poet survivor of the Holocaust.

On July 29, 2016, the Pontiff visited the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps during his trip to Poland.

(with EFE information)

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