He grew up far from World War II Europe – unlike his predecessors – but the horror of the Holocaust is strong within Francis’s pastoral care. The call for the extermination of the Jews is now placed next to the Russian aggression of the Ukraine. On Monday, the Center for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the Catholic University of Lublin commemorated the anniversary of Operation Reinhardt. During the Second World War, it caused the extermination of almost two million victims, above all of Jewish origin. «May the memory of this horrible event arouse in all of us resolutions and actions for peace. And history repeats itself, repeats itself, now let’s see what happens in Ukraine. Let us pray for peace» said Pope Francis in the general audience, greeting the Polish pilgrims.
The extermination operation in Poland evoked by the pope
Operation Reinhard was the code name used by the Nazis for the extermination project developed and carried out on Polish Jews in the General Government (the part of Poland not directly annexed to the Reich), between 1941 and 1943. The operation it mainly served three extermination camps equipped with gas chambers, set up in 1942 in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. According to estimates by the Ushmm – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – about 1.7 million people were killed during Operation Reinhard, mostly Polish Jews. Why that name? It was given in 1942, naming the mass killing of Jews after Reinhard Heydrich, the “butcher of Prague”, one of the SS leaders to whom Hiteler had given the task of planning the “final solution” of the Jewish question, planned in Wansee conference in January 192. Months later Heydrich died following an attack on Prague by the Czech resistance, an event following which widespread reprisals were consumed.
The recent meeting with the World Jewish Congress
Over the years, Pope Francis has continually remembered the Shoa, visited symbolic places – one above all Auschwitz, but also Yad Vashem in Jerusalem – and delivered many speeches and had countless meetings with both religious and civil Jewish exponents. For two weeks he received the participants in the Executive Committee Meeting of the World Jewish Congress in audience: «Today, in many regions of the world, peace is threatened. Let us recognize together that war, any war, is always, however and everywhere a defeat for all of humanity!». And he added: «I am thinking of the one in the Ukraine, a sacrilegious war which threatens Jews and Christians alike, depriving them of their loved ones, their homes, their possessions, their very lives!», Francis continued, according to which « only in the serious will to draw close to one another and in fraternal dialogue is it possible to prepare the ground for peace. As Jews and Christians, we try to do everything humanly possible to stop war and open ways of peace.