Pope Francis has made an emotional and silent visit to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, later saying many of the horrors committed are again happening in places at war today.
Seated on a bench near the gate to the camp site in Poland, Pope Francis prayed on Friday in silence in tribute to the 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, killed there by Nazi occupiers during World War Two.
The third pope to visit Auschwitz and the first not to have lived through the war in Europe, he entered the camp by foot, passing through iron gates under the infamous sign reading "Arbeit Macht Frei", German for "Work Sets You Free".
Visibly moved by the sight of the wooden guard towers, barbed wire fences and inmate barracks, Francis said before the trip that he had decided to make no statement as silence was the best way to honour the dead.
Reflecting on his visit several hours later, Francis asked young people: "Is it possible that man, created in God's image and likeness, is capable of doing these things?"
"Cruelty did not end at Auschwitz and Birkenau," he said.
"It is still around today ... in many places in the world where there is war, the same things are happening."
He cited torture, over-crowded prisons and starving children.
The Pope spent a few minutes quietly greeting about a dozen Auschwitz survivors, kissing each of them on both cheeks.
One man gave the Pope a picture of himself surrounded by other emaciated inmates in a bunk, and asked Francis to sign it.
The 79-year-old Argentine-born pontiff then proceeded to walk through the barely lit corridors of the drab, brick building of Auschwitz Block 11, which had housed prisoners selected for special punishment.
With aides using small flashlights to light his way, Francis visited the underground cell where Franciscan monk Maksymilian Kolbe was killed after offering his life to save a Polish man whom had been picked to die of starvation.
Just outside the cell, in Auschwitz's commemorative book, Francis wrote in Spanish: "Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgiveness for so much cruelty".
Between 1940 and 1945, Auschwitz developed into a vast complex of barracks, workshops, gas chambers and crematoriums.
Later, the Pope, who has made many strong condemnations of anti-Semitism, also visited Birkenau, a part of the camp where most of the killings were in gas chambers, and was driven past ruins of crematoriums that the Nazis blew up before the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.
He listened silently as Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, sang from Psalm 130 and a priest read the psalm in Polish, just metres away from the end of the single rail track where cattle cars brought hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the camp.
