Page 8 - Witness

KEEP AN OPEN HEART: POPE FRANCIS
Camila Gorban Acosta: “Francisco, I’ve just been on the March of the Living. What can we teenagers do to prevent another genocide?”
Pope Francis: “Work for peace. Unite with people from different cultures and religions. Keep an open heart. Don’t discriminate. Welcome and understand others. May God bless you.”
A BLESSING FROM POPE JOHN PAUL II
The first official Vatican commemoration of the Shoah took place in the Vatican on April 7, 1994 under the direction of Polish-born Pope John Paul II. The event was held on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the same day as the March of the Living. Among the young Marchers was Canadian Jennifer Shneer whose father had an audience with the Pope that same day. “When I met the Pope,” her father recalled,
“I mentioned that my daughter was in Auschwitz that very day on the March of the Living.” The Pope smiled and said: “I know all about the March of the Living. God bless your
daughter, and God bless the March of the Living.”
Pope John Paul II was the first Pope to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel and to ask forgiveness for the church’s treatment of Jews over the last 2,000 years.
Edith Zierer was a starving 13-year-old Polish Jewish girl from Kraków, who fled the Nazi German camp at Częstochowa after its liberation by the Soviet army in January,
1945. Edith reached an old train station and sat there for
two days without food or water until a stranger, a young man, arrived bringing her tea and two pieces of bread with cheese.
He covered her with his cloak, to protect her from the cold, and then carried her on his back for three kilometers until they found a train to Kraków. There she was taken in by a relative and eventually made her way to Israel. The young man who rescued her was Karol Wojtyla, later known as none other than Pope John Paul II.
Camila Gorban Acosta with Pope Francis, Vatican City
16-year-old Camila Gorban Acosta, of Buenos Aires, Argentina, took part in the 2018 March of the Living.