Hungarian author Edith Bruck, now almost 90 years old, has lived in Italy for many years. Struck by her witness in her at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Pope Francis on Saturday decided pay her a visit at her home in Rome’s centre on February 20, 2021

“I have come here to thank you for your testimony and to pay homage to the people martyred by the insanity of Nazi populism,” Pope Francis told her. “And with sincerity I repeat to you the words that I spoke from my heart at Yad Vashem and that I repeat before every person who, like you, has suffered so much because of this: [I ask] forgiveness, O Lord, in the name of humanity.” In a statement, the Holy See noted that, “the conversation with the Pope revisited those moments of light with which the experience of the hell of the camps was punctuated and evoked the fears and hopes for the time in which we live, emphasizing the value of memory and the role of the elderly in cultivating it and passing it on to the young.”