Auschwitz – Birkenau Memorial as a pilgrimage place
In 1940 the German occupiers established a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, members of the resistance and intelligence in the town of Oświęcim (Ger. Auschwitz). In time it was expanded, and from 1942 it also served as a death camp for Polish and European Jews. In view of this latter function, in the second part of the camp, called Birkenau, four huge gas chambers were built, in which victims were killed using a gas called Zyklon B. More than a million people lost their lives in Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also tens of thousands of Poles, Sinti, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war. After the war, the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau became a symbol of the Holocaust.
St Maksymilian Kolbe was murdered in the starvation cell of Block No. 11 in the original camp of Auschwitz, and Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) perished in the gas chamber in Birkenau. Nowadays, the site of the former camp is a cemetery, site of memory and museum. It is also a place for profound theological and moral reflection and a place of dialogue. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was visited by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI.