Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Rabbi hold ceremony at Nazi death camp
The Archbishop of Canterbury called Auschwitz-Birkenau an "image of hell" as he made his first visit to the Nazi death camp.
Dr Rowan Williams said it was vital that people saw the site where more than 1 million were killed during the Second World War in order to understand how the atrocity had come about.
He and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, placed candles on the railway tracks that lead under a watchtower into the vast Birkenau camp. It was from there that hundreds of thousands of European Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners were bundled from cattle trucks and either murdered in gas chambers or used as slave labour for the Nazi war effort.
At a memorial next to the destroyed crematoria where victims' bodies were burned, the two religious leaders read prayers at a ceremony attended by almost 200 English schoolchildren and their local MPs, who had been taken on the one-day trip by the Holocaust Educational Trust which sends two pupils from every school as part of a Government-funded scheme.
Dr Williams described the visit to the concentration camp in western Poland, made with seven other faith leaders from the UK, as "shattering".
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Dr Rowan Williams said it was vital that people saw the site where more than 1 million were killed during the Second World War in order to understand how the atrocity had come about.
He and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, placed candles on the railway tracks that lead under a watchtower into the vast Birkenau camp. It was from there that hundreds of thousands of European Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners were bundled from cattle trucks and either murdered in gas chambers or used as slave labour for the Nazi war effort.
At a memorial next to the destroyed crematoria where victims' bodies were burned, the two religious leaders read prayers at a ceremony attended by almost 200 English schoolchildren and their local MPs, who had been taken on the one-day trip by the Holocaust Educational Trust which sends two pupils from every school as part of a Government-funded scheme.
Dr Williams described the visit to the concentration camp in western Poland, made with seven other faith leaders from the UK, as "shattering".