Poles Suffered Too, but Justice Seems to Give Jews Deciding Word on Auschwitz

The distressing conflict between Catholics and Jews that has broken out at Auschwitz is driven by the belief of each that the other is attempting to appropriate the moral legacy of the death camp to sectarian advantage. This is not so, but, unhappily, the fact that it is not so does not stop people from thinking that it is so.

This affair began with a small community of Carmelite nuns moving into the building at Auschwitz used during the war to store the gas used to murder the camp’s victims. The Carmelite order, founded in 1452 (its most famous member was the great 16th-Century reformer and mystic, St. Teresa of Avila) is a contemplative community whose members live an enclosed life of poverty, sacrifice and prayer of atonement for human sin.

It is obvious why they thought it right to install themselves at Auschwitz, and why the Polish church authorities agreed. They are not in the camp itself but in a building on the perimeter.

The matter attracted little attention until a Belgian Catholic group appealed five years ago for funds for the nuns, using terms that seemed to suggest that this was some kind of gesture toward the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The language was rapidly withdrawn, but Jewish groups began to ask why Catholic nuns should establish a convent in a place of Jewish sacrifice and Jewish memory.

A growing controversy, mainly in Western Europe, led to meetings in Geneva in 1986 and again in 1987 between representatives of the international Jewish community and church officials from Poland, Belgium and France. The latter agreed that the convent would be considered “provisional,” and they promised that it would be relocated within two years of the date of the second meeting’s adjournment, in February, 1987. This was not done. A postponement was agreed to, but the new deadline again was not met.

Several weeks ago, a group of Jewish activists from the United States tried to force their way into the convent and were ejected by Polish workmen on the site. This episode was followed by demonstrations at Auschwitz by other Jewish groups, and by contradictory statements by church officials. The archbishop for that area announced that he was indefinitely suspending fulfillment of the Geneva agreement because of “the atmosphere of aggressive demands” created by the Jewish groups.

The French archbishop of Lyons, who had been one of the four cardinals who signed the Geneva agreement, declared that it must be honored. The Vatican has been silent, treating the affair as if it were a local matter, but its silence has been equivocal. It certainly is not--any longer--a local matter.

Polish attitudes in the affair reflect the fact, frequently ignored in the West, that more that 6 million Polish civilians perished in World War II, in addition to half a million fighting men and women, many of them serving under British command on Western fronts. In 1945, Poland was left with a million war orphans. It lost more than a third of its national assets, as measured by a postwar claims commission. (Britain lost 0.8% of its assets by this measure; the United States experienced vast growth and soaring prosperity as a result of the war.) The Poles lost a portion of their country, annexed by the Soviet Union, and fell under Soviet domination.

Auschwitz was originally a camp meant to destroy the educated classes of Poland in order to render the Polish population leaderless in their resistance to Nazi exploitation. The Poles, like the Jews, were identified in Nazi racial doctrine as an inferior people. They were not, however, to be exterminated but to be permanently subjugated to Germany as a source of labor.

To that end, Polish political leaders, army officers, priests, teachers, aristocrats, landowners and other people of influence were to be destroyed. This program was begun at Auschwitz.

Eventually, of course, and overwhelmingly, it was Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz, but it was not only Jews, and this is why there is resentment in Poland to what seems to many an attempt by Jewish groups to appropriate Auschwitz as a wholly Jewish place of memory. There is bitterness at the assumption by many in the West that only Jews were victims of Nazi extermination programs. There is resentment that the history of anti-Semitism in Poland has been cited to suggest that Poles somehow are partly responsible for the Holocaust, rather than having themselves been victims of Nazi racial policy.

There is something unbearable in this clash between the two peoples who suffered most from Nazism. It is madness--perpetuating the evil from which Nazism arose. Auschwitz is where Jews and Poles both died, where individuals died. Nonetheless, in justice, in inevitability, it would seem to this writer, a Catholic, that Jews possess the right to say the deciding word about Auschwitz. A former grand rabbi of France, Rene-Samuel Sirat, recently wrote:

“No one in the world has the right to transform into a place of prayer this place where the most appalling idolatry was practiced, by man proclaiming the death of God and striving to make himself divine by reducing other human creatures to the condition of objects, non-persons. Such prayers risk becoming, according to the biblical expression, ‘an abomination.’ Auschwitz must absolutely become a place of absolute silence, non-prayer, non-testimony, evidence of paroxysm and havoc . . . . Let us all, together, make ours the words of the psalmist, ‘For you, Lord, the silence alone is prayer.’ ”