Catholics, Jews Mark Camps’ Liberation

About 500 people crowded into the Marywood Center Auditorium in Orange Thursday night to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II, a meeting that marked the first time that Catholics and Jews observed the occasion in an official, countywide gathering.

The meeting was sponsored by the Diocese of Orange, the Orange County Board of Rabbis, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and various Holocaust survivors’ groups.

After a showing of the film “Night and Fog” and a welcome from Tony Franken, chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County, Msgr. John Sammon, vicar for pastoral and community affairs, offered words of comfort from the prophet Ezekiel.

Sammon quoted the prophet addressing “the valley of bones,” delivering God’s promise that “I will cause breath to enter you, so that you may come alive.”

The Rev. John T. Steinbock, Auxiliary Bishop of Orange, read from the memoirs of Pope John Paul II, detailing his feelings as a young man during World War II, when he was saved by a Jewish woman in Cracow after being hit by a German truck.

Mary Kress of Irvine recounted her personal history of hiding with her family in a cramped attic in her Polish village after the German invasion.

Eventually turned in to the Gestapo by the Polish couple who owned the house, Kress and her family were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where “that became the industry of the Third Reich.”

While at the camp, Kress was once selected for medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele, but she managed to slip away. Later, in a death march during the closing weeks of the war, Kress and her mother escaped to the countryside, where they were liberated on May 5, 1945.

“I am here today to speak about the Holocaust,” Kress said, “because it is my moral obligation and duty to do so for the millions of those who did not survive.”

Cecil Piantadosi, a member of the Diocese of Orange Ecumenical & Interreligious Affairs Commission, led a responsive reading from Psalm 88, recalling the inconsolable grief of King David:

I am all alone, here among the dead;

here among those murdered and in their graves;

among those you have forgotten;

those deprived of your protecting hand .

In addition to the Thursday night observation, the Diocese of Orange will be conducting programs on the Holocaust in four Catholic high schools next week, including films and presentations by Holocaust survivors and Steven Edelman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Father Joseph M. Melito, one of the organizers of the evening service and the educational program, said before the ceremonies that these kinds of activities are especially fitting, coming on the 20th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Catholic-Jewish relations. In that connection, he cited the 1,200 priests and other religious people put to death at Auschwitz.