UN event on the Church’s effort to save lives during the Holocaust

Vatican News

Monday, January 27, marks the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s notorious death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.  International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is being observed today across the world, to recall the systematic killing of six million Jewish men, women and children and millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.

Several events are being organized at the United Nations in New York. Among them is an international symposium entitled: "Remembering the Holocaust: The Documented Efforts of the Catholic Church to Save Lives".

The aim of the conference is to make known to the international public about the recent results of historical research documenting how the Catholic Church and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli who later became Pope Pius XII (from 1939 to 1958), helped save the lives of numerous persecuted people, many of them Jews, during the Nazi persecution.

The symposium is being organized by the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN, in collaboration with "Pave the Way Foundation",  a non-profit organization. The event will be streamed live from 7.30 p.m. (UTC) onwards on http://webtv.un.org.

Among the international experts participating in the symposium are Gary Krupp (USA), Edouard Husson (France), Michael Hesemann (Germany), Ronald Rychlak (USA), Mark Riebling (USA), Limore Yagil (France), Matteo Luigi Napolitano (Italy), Johan Ickx (Holy See).

Ickx, the head of the Archives of the Section for Relations with States of the Vatican Secretariat of State, will address the gathering citing from about 2000 pages of research by Dominiek Oversteyns on the efforts of Pope Pius XII to save lives.  The study is based on primary sources, documents and testimonies of survivors, revealing what happened to the Roman Jews, many of whom were hidden in the convents of the Eternal City.