Pope Francis kissed, on Wednesday (26), the detention number tattooed on the arm of a Holocaust survivor, during the general audience held in the Vatican, in a spontaneous gesture of solidarity.
Lidia Maksymowicz, 81, a Polish woman of Belarusian origin, deported in 1943 to the Auschwitz Birkenau camp when she was less than three years old, was also a victim of the experiences of war criminal Josef Mengele.
Among those present at the outdoor audience, the elderly woman took the opportunity to greet the pontiff at the end of the meeting.
After exchanging a few words, she pulled on her sleeve to show the high pontiff the tattoo with the number 70072, marked by the Nazis when she entered the concentration camp.
The Argentine pope leaned over to kiss her, and the survivor, touched, embraced him spontaneously.
“With the Holy Father we understood each other with a glance, no words were necessary,” confided the lady after her meeting with the pope, according to the Vatican news portal.
Among the last survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, Maksymowicz is in Italy as a guest of the association “Memória Viva” to tell young people about her testimony, collected in a documentary entitled “The girl she didn’t know how to hate”.
Undergoing horrible medical experiments by dr. Mengele, as an inoculation of viruses, vaccines and poisons, you consider it a duty to tell your story so that it does not repeat itself.
“All the children knew who Mengele was and were afraid of him. I think I have a mission to tell my story, I owe it to those who died,” he confessed during a virtual meeting with hundreds of young Italians.
“I am one of the few survivors. More than 200,000 children died there,” he said.
Adopted and saved by a Polish family after her liberation in 1945, she found her real mother in Russia in 1962, thanks to tattoos.
The Latin American pontiff, who has among his closest friends several Argentine Jews, was on July 29, 2016 in the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, in Poland, one of the most exciting visits of his pontificate.
