Pope says world must remember but never repeat Holocaust

Published: 2005-01-27

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- "Never again, in any part of the world, must others experience what was experienced" by the victims of the Holocaust, Pope John Paul II said. In a message marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, the pope called the Nazi extermination of almost 6 million Jews, 3 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies and homosexuals "the final tragic outcome of a program of hatred." The pope's message, released at the Vatican Jan. 27 in seven languages, including Hebrew, was carried to the anniversary commemoration in Poland by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, the papal envoy to the ceremony. Pope John Paul said it was essential to remember the Holocaust in order "to honor the dead, to acknowledge historical reality and, above all, to ensure that those terrible events will serve as a summons for the men and women of today to ever greater responsibility for our common history."

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