Pope Francis says while visiting the former Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi death camps in Poland he reflected on today's cruelties in "this world sick with cruelty, violence and suffering."

In recounting his visit to Poland last week, he told pilgrims at the Vatican Wednesday that while seeing the camps, he thought that even though today's cruelties aren't as concentrated as those practiced at the Nazi facilities, they're similar in sense of suffering.

He recounted how in "in that great silence I prayed for all the victims of violence and war."

Visiting the museum and memorial, he says, helped him understand "more than ever the value of memory." That value, for him, consists not only in remembering past events but as a "warning and responsibility for today and tomorrow."