BOOK REVIEW : The Clash of Symbols Over Auschwitz : THE CONVENT AT AUSCHWITZ <i> by Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski</i> ; George Braziller $17.95, 169 pages

After Auschwitz, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno, is it barbaric to even utter a prayer?

That’s the question at the heart of “The Convent at Auschwitz,” a brief but thorough and potent study of the controversy over the Carmelite convent at the site of the death camp near the Polish city of Krakow.

Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski neatly sets forth the contending arguments of Poles and Jews over the proper meaning and use of Auschwitz--and, in an astounding feat of moral and intellectual compression, his book becomes a lens that focuses the heat and light of a millennium of Polish-Jewish history on a patch of bloodied soil that has become a metaphor for all that is evil.

“The convent was considered to be an insult to the Jewish people because Auschwitz is for them the main symbol of the Holocaust,” Bartoszewski explains. The Polish people, on the other hand, “considered Auschwitz to be a symbol of evil for all humanity, for Poles and Jews alike.”

As a result, the debate over the convent--which took the form of shrill verbal skirmishing in newspapers and pulpits around the world, solemn diplomatic convocations in world capitals, and hand-to-hand struggle on the very grounds of Auschwitz--turned into a superheated disputation over the politics of the Holocaust.

“Since the war, Auschwitz has played a central role in the formation of Jewish identity and an only sightly lesser role in the formation of the Polish equivalent,” Bartoszewski explains.

“The clash over the Carmel was so violent and persistent because both communities felt that their past and future identity was being directly threatened. Thus, the issue was not about the presence of a few nuns praying in an old dilapidated building. It was about the Jews and the Poles being able to preserve two separate, conflicting and essential views of history grounded in the same place.”

Bartoszewski, a Polish scholar who may have learned something about Jewish sensibilities while teaching at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, adopts a studiously even-handed stance as he catalogues the grievances, passions and anxieties of the contending factions. Many of the most inflammatory and even insulting accusations are rendered as neutral accounts of various players in the drama, and the author only rarely gives voice to his own point of view.

Still, Bartoszewski is frank enough about Polish grievances toward the Jewish people to strike some sparks of indignation and outrage. For example, he complains about “a double standard” that is applied to excuse what he calls “the Jewish collaborators” who served in Nazi-sponsored Judenrate (municipal councils) and the security apparatus of the Communist Party while, he insists, condemning Poles for doing essentially the same thing.

Indeed, the book is fascinating for another reason--Bartoszewski seems to be invigorated and emboldened by the freshening winds of intellectual and political freedom in Poland, and he is flexing muscles that may have been paralyzed by four decades of oppression under the Communist regime.

Among the many meanings of Auschwitz, he reminds us, is the old notion of Poland as “the Christ of nations,” a people who have been betrayed throughout their history and, most recently, by the Allies who abandoned them to Hitler at the outset of World War II and to Stalin at its victorious conclusion.

Bartoszewski himself--like many advocates on both sides of the controversy--makes an effort to pierce the rival symbolisms of Auschwitz and seize upon some ultimate historical reality.

Bartoszewski, for example, points out that the convent is actually outside the legal boundaries of the camp itself, and he makes much of the fact that the original concentration camp at Auschwitz was first intended for the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia; most of the Jewish victims, he argues, were murdered in gas chambers at Birkenau (or “Auschwitz II”), a satellite of the original camp. But Bartoszewski concedes that when it comes to Auschwitz, historical reality is less important than moral resonance.

Many readers, I suspect, will be troubled by the objections of Jewish activists who have extracted a promise (as yet unfulfilled) to move the convent to another location: “Who are we, where have we got to nowadays,” asked one Jewish commentator quoted by the author, “if we find a group dedicated to prayer and contemplation offensive to us?”

But Bartoszewski is honest enough to give eloquent and anguished voice to Jewish observers for whom the memory of the Holocaust is so painful, and yet so crucial, that even the borrowing of Auschwitz by the Carmelite nuns as “a spiritual fortress” threatens the moral equilibrium of history.

“Auschwitz must . . . become a place of absolute silence, non-prayer, non-testimony, evidence of paroxysm and havoc,” the chief rabbi of France argued--and Bartoszewski, to his credit, allows us to understand why. “Let us all, together, make ours the words of the psalmist: ‘For you, Lord, the silence alone is prayer.’ ”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa (Pantheon) .