1801

CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER VISITED THE AUSCHWITZ MEMORIAL

Tuesday, 08 April 2008
http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4&Itemid=8

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum on April 5. He paid his respects to the victims at the Death Wall in the courtyard of block 11, where the Nazis shot thousands of people. The Prime Minister, on a private visit, was accompanied by Museum Director Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, who informed him in French about the history of Auschwitz.

Harper toured large parts of the Museum exhibition. He saw the cellars of block 11, which housed the camp jail and where St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan friar, died a martyr's death. Harper also visited block 4, dedicated to the Holocaust of the Jews, and block 5, where part of the victims' property was stored. In addition, he saw the crematorium and gas chamber.

In the second part of his visit, Harper toured the site of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. He walked along the railroad platform where the Nazis conducted selection, before lighting a candle and laying a wreath at the monument to the victims of the camp. He was accompanied by a relative of Czesław Mordowicz, a Polish Jew who was an Auschwitz prisoner before escaping in May 1944. Mordowicz, one of the authors of a report on Nazi crimes that was delivered to the Allies while the war was still in progress, settled in Canada afterwards.

"We are witness here to the vestiges of unspeakable cruelty, horror and death. Let us never forget these things and work always to prevent this repetition. Lord, bless the souls of those who suffered and perished here and deliver us from evil," wrote Harper in the visitors' book.

Stephen Harper has been Prime Minister of Canada for two years. He is one of the founders of the Conservative Party of Canada, the largest party in the Canadian House of Commons.