Pope Francis Prays With Slovakian Holocaust Survivors in Bratislava

Pope Francis honored Slovakian Jews killed in the Holocaust and atoned for Christian complicity in wartime crimes as he sought to promote reconciliation on Monday in a country where a Catholic priest was president of a Nazi puppet state that deported tens of thousands of its Jews.

The head of the umbrella group of Slovakian Jewish communities, Richard Duda, said at the encounter in Bratislava that dialogue was the only way to achieve peaceful coexistence.

"We hope that the sincerity and availability for an open dialogue will allow us to one day put a final point even on the dark sides of the complicity which, during the terrible world war 80 years ago, marked relations between the people of this land," he said.

While Francis' visit marked a new step in Catholic-Jewish reconciliation, it also served to remind Slovaks that Catholics also saved lives.

A Holocaust survivor, Tomas Lang, cited a Vatican embassy official at the time, Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, as someone who "was unceasingly trying to halt the antisemitism of the murderous regime of the time."

He described how he survived thanks to courageous nuns who hid children in the hospital.

"The brave hospital nurses, nannies in the hospital where I stayed protected us, the children, by writing out the names of various highly infectious diseases on the doors of individual departments, and this has discouraged the armed gunmen from entering," said Lang.

"Your history is our history, your sufferings are our sufferings," Francis told members of Slovakia's small, remaining Jewish community, standing in the shadow of the country's Holocaust memorial.

Even though St. John Paul II made three trips to Slovakia, he never met here with the country's Jews, evidence of the strained local Catholic-Jewish relations that endured in the post-war decades even with a Polish pope known for his outreach to Jews.

As a result, Francis' visit - held during the solemn 10-day period of repentance stretching from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur - was a significant step forward and was hailed as historic by local Jewish leaders who said it was chance to look to the future.

Francis is on the second day of a four-day pilgrimage to Hungary and Slovakia, his first big international outing since undergoing intestinal surgery in July.

The 84-year-old pope has appeared in good form, walking around to greet well-wishers and clearly basking in the enthusiasm of Slovaks after being cooped up in the Vatican for over a year of coronavirus lockdowns.

On Monday afternoon he was solemn, listening intently via headphones providing simultaneous translation as he heard testimony from a Holocaust survivor and the enduring pain of the Jewish community.

"Let us unite in condemning all violence and every form of antisemitism, and in working to ensure that God's image, present in the humanity he created, will never be profaned," Francis said.

Slovakia declared its independence from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and became a Nazi puppet state with politician and Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso becoming the country's president.

Under his rule, the country adopted strict anti-Jewish laws and deported some 75,000 Jews to Nazi death camps where some 68,000 perished.

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