Pope Francis walks alone through Auschwitz

Pope Francis on Friday walked alone through the notorious wrought-iron "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) gate as he visited the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Free for once of his security entourage or cardinals, he sat on a bench among the trees and bowed his head in prayer, remaining at length in silent contemplation before meeting Holocaust survivors. "Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty," the pope wrote in a memorial book. In front of the death wall where the Nazis executed thousands of people, he tenderly kissed former prisoners. Among them was Helena Dunicz Niwinska, a 101-year-old woman who played the violin in the Auschwitz orchestra, as well as inmates who worked at the camp hospital or who were there as children. "It was very moving," 86-year-old survivor Janina Iwanska told AFP. "I wanted to kneel before him, but he took me in his arms and kissed my cheeks." Fellow survivor Alojzy Fros, who is 99, still remembered his arrival at the camp. "Just after I arrived, through an open door I saw naked bodies piled up like logs about a metre high," he said. "I'll never forget it." Francis lit a candle in front of the death wall before visiting the cell of Polish priest and saint Maximilian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz after taking the place of a condemned man. Francis cut a solitary figure as he knelt in the dark, underground cell where the priest was starved then executed. The Argentine later lead prayers for the 1.1 million people who were murdered at the camp as part of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" of genocide against European Jews which claimed six million lives in World War II. - 'Auschwitz cruelty not over' - Francis had said that rather than making a speech, he would stand in silence to reflect on the horrors committed. "Cruelty did not end in Auschwitz and Birkenau", he said in an address to pilgrims in Krakow later Friday. "How is it possible that we men, created in God's image, are able to do such things?" He said at the camp he saw "the cruelty of 70 years ago, how people were shot, beaten to death or gassed". But "today, in many parts of the world... the same things happen," he said. As he arrived Wednesday in Poland -- the heartland of Nazi Germany's atrocities -- the pontiff said the world had been plunged into a piecemeal third world war. He has repeatedly denounced those committing crimes in the name of religion, after a string of deadly jihadist attacks in Europe. The pope travelled the two miles (three kilometres) to Birkenau, the main extermination site, and was driven alongside train tracks which allowed prisoners to be transported directly to the gas chambers and crematoria. Francis prayed near the ruins of a crematorium blown up by the Nazis as they evacuated the camp, as Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich sang a Jewish prayer for the dead in Hebrew. - Executed in childbirth - Some 25 Christian Poles who risked their lives during the war to help hide and protect Jews -- a group recognised by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as "Righteous Among the Nations" -- also met Francis. The group included Maria Augustyn, whose family hid a Jewish couple behind a wardrobe for years, and Anna Bando, who helped rescue an orphan from the Warsaw ghetto and gave several Jews forged "Aryan" papers. "We shook hands and he looked me in the eyes in a lovely way and gave me a good memory to take away," one of the group, Ryszard Zielinski, told AFP. Stanislaw Ruszala, Catholic parish priest of the town of Markowa where a family was wiped out for sheltering Jews, read a Polish translation of the same Hebrew prayer read by the rabbi. Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were butchered in Markowa. Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant at the time, had started giving birth before she was executed. Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Francis had been particularly moved by the Ulma family's story. More than 100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and anti-Nazi partisans also died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland. The Soviet Red Army liberated it in 1945.