Pope acts on Auschwitz

The Pope has told nuns to leave a controversial convent at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, Reuter reports from Warsaw. 'By the will of the Church you are to move now to a different site in Oswiecim (Auschwitz),' the Polish-born pope said in a letter to the Carmelite nuns.

Many Jews regard the convent, attached to the walls of the former death-camp, as an intrusion on the most symbolic of all monuments to the Holocaust. The Nazis killed an estimated 1.6 million people at Auschwitz and the neighbouring Birkenau camp. The dispute over the convent flared afresh when the nuns moved into an old theatre and storehouse thought to have been used to store the gas used to kill many of the victims at Auschwitz.