Pope Francis is set to visit on Friday the former Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II, where some 1.1 million people were murdered, most of them Jews.
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.
The pontiff will meet both Christian and Jewish survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, as well as a group of Christian Poles who risked their lives during the war to give help to Jews, a group recognised by Israel's Yad Vashem (World Centre for Holocaust Research) as "Righteous Among the Nations."
Jews lived for nearly a millennium in Polish lands forming Europe's largest Jewish community on the eve of World War II, at nearly 3.5 million people.
Of those, an estimated 350,000 to 425,000 survived and most of those ended up fleeing postwar anti-Semitism.
Survivors of the Auschwitz camp - Alojzy Fros, aged 100, Ewa Umlauf, 74, who was only two when she was imprisoned by Nazis in Auschwitz, and Janina Iwanska, 94 - are excited to have an opportunity to meet Pope Francis.
Though Germans were solely responsible for the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian relations in Poland are deeply marked by the war.
Prewar anti-Semitism led to the indifference by some Poles to the slaughter of the Jews taking place before them — crimes that occurred as the Germans also murdered some 2.5 million non-Jewish Poles.
With his visit to Auschwitz, Pope Francis will become the third pontiff to visit the site after predecessors John Paul II, a Pole, and Benedict XVI, a German. There he will pray at an execution wall and in the cell of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who volunteered to die at Auschwitz to save the life of a family father.
Francis will meet Auschwitz survivors, among them Christians, at the main Auschwitz camp and will meet members of the 'Righteous Among the Nations'
and Jewish community at nearby Birkenau, where most of the camp's Jewish victims were murdered in gas chambers.
Organisers say his visit to Birkenau will be marked by silence in a gesture reflecting the horrific nature of the atrocities committed there.
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