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L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP
World News

Pope Francis visits Auschwitz concentration camp

by Hannah Tooley

More than one-and-a-half million prisoners, including one-in-six of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, died in the camp at the hands of the Nazi regime.

Pope Francis will be the third pontiff to pass through the gates of Auschwitz.

One young Christian visiting the site from Clifton and Plymouth Diocese told Premier he wants the trip to focus on "the beauty of humanity, rather than the awfulness of it."

He said: "Pope Francis is doing that, he's trying to show the beauty of the human person, and then that way hopefully people will not want to destroy it, but want to build it up and care for it."

L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP

One woman from the group said she will try to approach the trip with the Catholic Year of Mercy in mind.

She said: "It's a word we use an awful lot at the moment and it's very hard to think about what it means.

"For me, I think it's somewhere between forgiveness and understanding - we forgive them for what they've done and we try to understand why they did it.

"This is here the site of one of the worst atrocities of the modern era and for that I think it's really a good place to be praying at this time, especially with a lot of the other stuff that's going on in the world at the moment.

"We really do need to learn to forgive."

AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

There is controversy surrounding the visit and Catholic-Jewish friction remains over how to properly commemorate the horror of what occurred at Auschwitz.

It was was built in 1940 to hold political prisoners, but it was extended as part of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population.

According to The Wall Street Journal Pope Francis will not speak publicly during his visit to Auschwitz but will pray silently.

Listen to young Catholics reflect on their journey to Auschwitz here:

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