Pope Francis shared a touching moment with a Holocaust survivor on Wednesday, kissing the number tattooed on her arm by the Nazis when she was a child.

The tender gesture came as the leader of the Catholic Church greeted the faithful after a general audience in Vatican City’s San Damaso Courtyard.

Lidia Maksymowicz, a Polish citizen who was deported to Auschwitz from her native Belarus at the age of 3, rolled up her sleeve to reveal the tattoo and Francis bent down to kiss it before embracing her.

“With the Holy Father, we understood each other with our eyes,” she told Vatican News. “We didn’t have to say anything to each other, there was no need for words.”

Maksymowicz, 80, spent three years in the children’s area of the concentration camp and was subjected to medical experiments by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death.” 

When the camp was liberated in 1945, she was taken in by a Polish Catholic family.

Now living in Krakow, Maksymowicz made a visit to Italy as a guest of the Living Memory Association of Castellamonte, to share her Holocaust experience with young people.

She wanted to take advantage of her trip, which had been postponed several times due to the pandemic, to come to Rome and meet the pontiff.

His affectionate act “has strengthened me and reconciled me with the world,” she told Vatican News.

The pope has paid tribute to Holocaust survivors in the past, including a 2014 visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

In February, he met with survivor Edith Bruck, an 88-year-old Hungarian-born writer and poet, in her Rome apartment.

“I came to thank you for your witness and to pay homage to the people martyred by the craziness of Nazi populism,” Francis told her, according to the Vatican.

“And with sincerity I repeat the words I pronounced from my heart at Yad Vashem, and that I repeat in front of every person who, like you, suffered so much because of this: ‘Forgive, Lord, in the name of humanity,’” he said.

With Post wires