Convent at Camp : Auschwitz: Controversy Over Symbol

A tour of the Nazis’ old Auschwitz concentration camp here helps explain why the relatives and descendants of its victims are quarreling almost half a century later. What happened here is almost too hard to fathom, too hard to bear, and it is easy to fall into aimless rage.

A controversy has erupted over a Roman Catholic convent at the edge of the camp. Many visitors barely notice the large, unmarked brick building along the barbed-wire outer edge of what is known as Auschwitz I. The relentless images of death are so great that the convent makes little impact.

Yet its presence has caused much anguish. Sensitivities were bruised even more when the nuns contemplated naming their convent after Edith Stein, the Jewish-born Carmelite nun who was killed at Auschwitz and beatified last month by Pope John Paul II, also amid Jewish-Roman Catholic controversy.

And those relations have now been further exacerbated by news that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, accused of participating in Nazi atrocities during World War II, has been granted an audience by the Pope at the Vatican on Thursday.

Plan to Move Convent

In February, at a meeting in Geneva, European Catholic and Jewish leaders agreed on a plan to move the convent away from the camp. The issue grated on Jewish feelings and left Poles bewildered.

In an impassioned statement to Catholic officials at the Geneva meeting, Dr. Ady Steg, a French Jewish leader, said, “Do not try to drain the meaning out of the symbol that is Auschwitz by placing a cross there.”

Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the Polish Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, wrote at the height of the controversy that Auschwitz was both the monument of Jewish destruction and a symbol of the martyrdom of the Polish people in World War II.

“We do not draw a parallel between the destruction of the Jews and the fate of the Poles during the war,” he wrote, “but do these two symbols really have to divide our two nations? Could they not bring us closer together, unite us?”

Second Camp Built

The facts about Auschwitz are simply told. In 1940, the Germans set up a concentration camp in an old Austrian army barracks in the Polish city of Oswiecim (called Auschwitz in the German language). The camp, about 30 miles west of Krakow in southern Poland, was designed as a detention center for political opponents and later came to be used as a work camp for prisoners forced to labor in Nazi factories. It proved to be too small, and a second camp, Auschwitz II, was built in 1941, a mile and a half away at Birkenau.

In 1942, the Germans began using Birkenau and, to a lesser extent, Auschwitz I, as centers for exterminating Jews. The victims, arriving by train, were ordered to strip and crowd naked into chambers they were told were shower rooms. The Germans then filled the chambers with gas that took only minutes to kill.

The bodies were burned in giant crematoriums that could consume up to 10,000 corpses a day, though the largest number of prisoners gassed in any one day was probably 9,000.

Railroad tracks were laid down so that trains could come directly into Birkenau and unload their human cargo near the gas chambers. Not every Jew was gassed. Doctors at the tracks selected the strongest, about 10%, for slave labor.

4 Million Dead

Nearly everyone who entered Auschwitz died, but immediate gassing was reserved almost entirely for Jews. The others died mainly of exhaustion and disease after a few months of slave labor. The English historian Martin Gilbert has estimated that 2 million Jews and 2 million non-Jews died at Auschwitz.

For Jews, the symbolism is obvious. Auschwitz was the largest and most notorious engine of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution”--the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe. A third of the Jews killed in Europe during World War II died at Auschwitz. It is the most important symbol to Jews of what they call the Holocaust--in Hebrew, the Shoah.

For years, many Jews have been infuriated by what they regard as a Polish government attempt to minimize the status of the Jews as a special target of Hitler. Almost a million people a year visit Auschwitz, but they do not always get the full story.

‘Monument to Martyrdom’

The government officially describes Auschwitz as “a monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other nations.” Lumping Poles and Polish Jews together, the government’s official guidebook to Auschwitz lists Poles as the main victims. Jewish anger is prompted by the fear that the official Polish line obscures the reality of what happened to the Jews of Europe.

On a recent visit, however, Jan Graff, a 56-year-old chemical engineer who works part-time as an official guide, did not try to diminish what had happened. Graff, a Polish Catholic whose mother-in-law died in slave labor at Birkenau, made it clear that the primary aim of the gassing was the extermination of the Jews.

“The Jewish people see Auschwitz as the place of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the final solution,” he said in English. “The Polish people see it as the place that killed half their intelligentsia.”

He sounded as if he believes that both concepts are valid, that neither excludes the other.

Exhibits on Display

Except for the barbed wire and the ironic iron sign that the Germans put over the gate-- Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free), Auschwitz I looks like an ordinary compound of dormitories. But the government has filled these barracks with exhibits that try to tell the story of Auschwitz.

Some exhibits are stark--hanks of hair severed from corpses, artificial limbs torn from victims, hunger cells for starving prisoners to death. But the most poignant and startling exhibits are the enormous displays of suitcases and pots and pans.

The suitcases are covered with names and addresses, neatly lettered by the victims who hoped to retrieve them after undressing and entering the “shower rooms.” The pots and pans were brought by Jews who had been told they would need them in their new homes.

Ruins of Gas Chambers

Birkenau, unlike Auschwitz I, still has an eerie, bleak air. A visitor can climb to the top of the watchtower at the gate and see the full story immediately. Lines of railroad tracks creep forward, seemingly heading nowhere, then stop abruptly, a couple of hundred feet from the twisted, churned concrete ruins of enormous gas chambers and ovens. The Germans dynamited them before retreating before the advancing Soviet armies, hoping to destroy the evidence of what had happened at Auschwitz.

The convent is in a building that was used as a theater before World War I, at a time when this region of Poland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During World War II, the Germans used it as a storehouse for canisters of crystallized prussic acid, which produced the killing gas, hydrogen cyanide, known as Cyklon-B.

There is some question as to whether the building is legally part of the grounds of Auschwitz, and Graff did not point out the convent until he was asked about it.

A group of 10 Carmelite nuns, after receiving permission from the Polish government, set up the convent in the fall of 1984. The idea of a convent at Auschwitz had the full support of Cardinal Franciszek Marcharski, the archbishop of Krakow. He said the nuns would “live in seclusion offering prayers of expiation for the crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

One of the nuns was a survivor of Auschwitz, and the sisters wanted at first to name the convent in memory of Stein, the Carmelite nun gassed at Birkenau and beatified in ceremonies at Cologne, West Germany, on May 1.

But the nun’s beatification is also a sensitive issue among Jews, for she was a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and many Jews insist that she was gassed not because she was a Catholic nun but because she was born a Jew. The Carmelites have abandoned the idea of naming the convent here after her.

Catholic Fund-Raising Drive

Foreign Jewish organizations first became aware of the convent in 1985, when a Catholic group in Belgium organized a drive to raise funds for it. The matter was complicated by the tone of the appeal, which struck some Jews, perhaps mistakenly, as a call for conversion. The appeal, in any case, ignored the special meaning of Auschwitz for Jews.

European Jewish leaders and Polish Catholic officials soon found themselves in conflict. The Jewish position was probably put most forcefully by Steg, who heads the Universal Israelite Alliance in France. He made it clear that many Jews felt that the Catholic Church was trying to take away the symbol of the Holocaust and perhaps the Holocaust itself from Jews.

“How are we to remain calm,” he said in Geneva, “when, rather than seeking the pardon of Jews for what they have suffered for 2,000 years in Christian countries, the Carmelites come to Auschwitz to exalt the triumph of the Church?

” . . . How could we fail to be appalled by this triumphant annexation of the Shoah, erasing it, subtly changing its character? All of this can only lead to the denial of the Shoah.”

The Jewish position received powerful Catholic support. Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, and Cardinal Albert Decourtray, the archbishop of Lyon, agreed that the Carmelites should leave Auschwitz. Cardinal Lustiger, a convert, was the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to France; his mother died in Auschwitz.

Support from Polish Jew

The Carmelite nuns, on the other hand, received the support of Stanislaw Krajewski, an unofficial but influential spokesman for the small Jewish community left in Poland. Krajewski argued in the Polish press that the Catholic prayers could not hurt the symbol of Auschwitz.

“There is nothing wrong with their praying in Auschwitz,” he said in a recent interview at his apartment in Warsaw. “They are, after all, in Auschwitz I, which was for everybody, and not in Birkenau, which was mainly for the Jews. . . . Many Jews outside Poland did not know what the controversy was all about. Some thought they would have to walk through a Catholic convent to see Auschwitz.”

Still, he said, “the controversy did teach the Catholic Church here something about the strong feelings outside.”

After two sessions at Geneva, attended by French, Belgian and other European Jewish leaders and by Cardinals Marcharski, Lustiger and Decourtray and other Catholic officials, agreement was reached last Feb. 26 to move the Carmelite convent from Auschwitz to a site nearby within two years. This second site, still unselected, would also serve as a Catholic center of information about the Jewish Holocaust and about the martyrdom of Poles and other peoples.

In a statement issued afterward, Marcharski said that Catholics intended, in the new center, “to take care of the memory of the Jewish nation, which was the main victim of the death camp.”

Suspicions Remained.

But conflict and memory were still raw enough for some Jews to remain suspicious. One delegate to the conference, Sam Hoffenberg, a French survivor of Auschwitz and the European director of B’nai B’rith, refused to sign the agreement. He said he suspected that Polish Catholic officials had no intention of moving the convent and were simply trying to gain time.

The controversy did not evoke much excitement within Poland itself. Not many Poles knew much about it. Those who did found the outside Jewish reaction overblown.

“The sisters believe that they can pray for everyone and not harm anyone,” said Graff, the Auschwitz guide. “They pray for eight hours, work for eight hours and sleep for eight hours. They do not bother anyone. We never see them.”