Last February, Pope Francis paid an impromptu visit to Edith Bruck, an 88-year-old writer and survivor of the Holocaust, at her home in Rome.
TheJewish novelist, of Hungarian origin, has been living in Italy since the mid-1950s.
The conversation between the Pope and the intellectual lasted about an hour, and was the occasion for the writer to bear witness to the “experience of the hell of the Nazi concentration camps,” where she was sent during her childhood. Much of her family perished in the camps — her mother in Auschwitz, her father in Dachau.
Now, Bruck has written the Pope as he returned from her homeland. The message was delivered to him by a journalist abroad the papal flight.
Pope Francis responded briefly, but forcefully: "Anti-Semitism is making a resurgence, it is fashionable, it is an ugly, ugly thing...."
The Holy Father met representatives of both Hungarian and Slovakian Jewish communities on his trip.
In Hungary, he said:
