Pope visiting Auschwitz Pope Francis
Pope Francis

Pope Francis

WARSAW. – Two Holocaust survivors took to a stage at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto this week to perform lively pre-war tunes – the 91-year-old played drums and the 88-year-old was on accordion, keyboard and vocals.

In the audience several elderly Christian Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust swayed and tapped their feet to songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish.

Poland, a deeply Catholic nation, has a complex relationship with the Jews who flourished for centuries in the Eastern European land before perishing in the Holocaust.

It is a deeply emotional story of both betrayal and salvation that Pope Francis will encounter during a sombre visit today to the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where some 1,1 million people were murdered, most of them Jews.

There he will meet with both Christian and Jewish survivors of the camp, as well as a group of Christian Poles who risked their lives during the war to give aid to Jews, a group recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Church officials and several of the Righteous say it’s the first time a pope will ever meet with them, a belated gesture to a group whose acts embody Francis’ own determination to help people of other faiths threatened by war and violence today.

Several of the Christians who will meet the pope attended the open-air concert in the former ghetto Tuesday evening, an unusual performance by two Polish-born Jews who live in Florida and whose dream was to return to their birth country with a message of peace. On Sunday they also performed a private concert in front of Auschwitz in memory of the dead.

“I was very moved by this concert,” said Stanislaw Swierczewski, an 84-year-old Pole who worked with his father during the war to help Jews escape the Plonsk ghetto and hide them in their attic.

He spoke after the concert in Warsaw, which drew hundreds of enthusiastic people.

“This is so beautiful and I will remember this day for the rest of my life.”

Swierczewski said he was also looking forward to greeting the pope, and has a message for him if he gets a chance to say a few words: Christians and Jews are brothers and sisters.

“We are one family, bred on this soil,” he said, pointing down to the ground. – AP.

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