Pope “escaped” from Vatican to visit Holocaust survivor

ROMA.- In another gesture on your part, without warning and more than eloquent, Pope Francis “escaped” this afternoon from the Vatican to visit the famous Hungarian writer and poet Edith Bruck at her home in central Rome. 88-year-old Holacusto survivor.

“I have come here to thank you for your testimony and to pay homage to the people martyred by the madness of Nazi populism. I sincerely repeat the words I spoke at Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem) and that I say to all those who, like you, have suffered so much: “Sorry Lord, in the name of humanity. ! “, Francis told him.

“The conversation with the Pope went through those moments of light from which his experience in the hell of the concentration camps was marked and evoked the fears and hopes for the times in which we live, emphasizing the value of the memory and the role of the elderly in cultivating it and transmitting it to the young, ”said Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press room. Bruni explained that after a meeting of about an hour, the Pontiff returned to the Vatican, in an outing that, unsurprisingly, caused a sensation among passers-by who suddenly encountered the man dressed in white.

As the Vatican News, the Vatican portal recalls, Francis was shocked by an interview that L’Osservatore Romano made to Bruck, in which she recounted the horror she and her family experienced during the Nazi persecution. From there he decided to personally meet the writer, who has lived in Rome for years and became an Italian citizen.

The director of the Osservatore Romano also participated in the meeting, Andrea Monda.

Born in 1932 to a large and poor Jewish family in Tiszabercel, Hungary, Bruck was deported to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. After years of pilgrimage he moved to Italy, where he nationalized and began to publish various books, novels, an autobiography and poetry.

As the Vatican News recalled, Bruck devoted his entire life to witnessing the horror he experienced. In fact, it was two strangers he met in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp who asked him to do it: “Say it, they won’t believe you, but if you survive say it, even for us. And he kept his promise.

What caught the Pope’s attention the most when reading the interview the Vatican newspaper gave him is his look of hope, beyond fear.

On January 27, remembering the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, famous for having many Jewish friends, warned that the Holocaust “may happen again” and assured that “remembrance is the condition for a future of peace and fraternity”.

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