ROME (JTA) — Pope Benedict XVI met with a Holocaust survivor from his native Germany.
The pope met Wednesday, after his weekly general audience, with Cacilie Peiser, the founder and honorary president of the Child Survivors Deutschland Association. Peiser presented the popewith a signed copy of her biography, which tells the story of her survival.
She was accompanied by Father Norbert Hofmann, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews.
"After the ‘night of broken glass’ in 1938, at the age of 13, I was forced to flee with my younger sister Jutta and other children to Holland," Peiser, who is 84, said in the official Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano.
Her mother and younger brother were deported and killed.
After the war, Peiser worked with former prisoners who had contracted tuberculosis in the camps. She moved to Palestine in 1946, but returned to Germany in 1957, where she worked with handicapped children.
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