Pope John Paul II paid silent tribute yesterday to thousands of Ukrainian Jews slaughtered by the Nazis at Babi Yar in 1941 in one of the bloodiest early chapters of the Holocaust.
On the third day of his visit to Ukraine, during which the head of the Catholic Church has urged reconciliation and harmony between the great religions, the Pope stood to pray at the Babi Yar ravine just outside central Kiev.
Silence fell as the Pontiff, with Kiev's Chief Rabbi, Yaakov Dov Bleich, at his side, bowed his head at the site where Nazi troops gunned down more than 30,000 Jews in late September 1941.
His right hand on his cane, left hand trembling and head bent the 81-year-old Pope prayed for five minutes. Before leaving, he read aloud the De profundis.
"Babi Yar is a name that still inspires awe and disgust as one of the prime symbols of evil and cruelty," the Chief Rabbi said in a statement he handed to the Pope.
Babi Yar was one of the first steps on the road to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others perished.
"It is here that Hitler and his henchmen successfully created a Kiev that was Judenrein (cleansed of Jews), murdering tens of thousands of Jews," the Chief Rabbi said.
Told they would be resettled by occupying German authorities and to bring warm clothing and identity cards, the victims were herded into a fenced area. They were shot, mostly in the head, their bodies tumbling into the ravine where they were buried.
The Germans killed 33,761 Jews within 72 hours - almost eight a minute. Over the next two years, the death toll at Babi Yar rose as high as 200,000.
Near the war's end, the Nazis ordered the bodies to be exhumed and burned, but failed to sweep away the evidence.
In 1970, the Communist government built a memorial to all the victims at Babi Yar.
The Chief Rabbi paid tribute to the Pope's efforts to preach reconciliation and his condemnation of totalitarian regimes.
Earlier in the day, the Pontiff held the second open-air Mass of his five-day visit to Ukraine at an airport outside the capital Kiev. Some 50,000 worshippers turned up, attendance far short of the 200,000 expected. Organisers blamed poor weather, stringent security and difficult travel arrangements.
Speaking fluent Ukrainian, the Pope urged his followers to relish their post-Communist freedom but also to tackle the widespread corruption that has come with it.
"My heartfelt hope is Ukraine will continue to draw strength from the ideals of personal, social and Church morality, of service to the common good, of honesty and sacrifice," he said.
The Pope left Kiev yesterday evening, taking a pilgrimage opposed by many Orthodox to the western city of Lviv, the heartland of Ukrainian Catholicism.
There he received a rapturous welcome from thousands of people lining the narrow cobbled streets and chanting "Long live the Pope" as his motorcade rolled by. Blue and yellow national flags fluttered from the facades of the historic buildings.
Today and tomorrow the Pope will hold open-air Masses and beatify 30 martyrs, 27 from the Soviet era, putting them on the road to sainthood. He flies to Rome on tomorrow night.