Crosses Moved From Lot Next to Auschwitz

Troops backed by police and priests removed 300 crosses Friday from a lot bordering the former Auschwitz death camp, in a move intended to end a long-running controversy between Jewish groups and Poland’s Roman Catholic Church.

The move came eight days before Pope John Paul II is scheduled to begin his eighth pilgrimage to his homeland to stress, among other things, religious tolerance in Poland.

Soldiers took the crosses--some crude and handmade, others thick and varnished, with metal nameplates--to a Franciscan friars’ cloister.

They left behind a large wooden cross placed on the site more than a decade ago to honor 152 Polish Catholics killed there by the Nazis in 1941.

The 26-foot papal cross, from a 1979 Mass celebrated by the pope at the nearby Birkenau death camp, launched the controversy between the Polish church and Jewish groups that argued the cross insulted the memory of more than 1 million Jews killed at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Conservative Catholics erected the smaller crosses near the papal cross in the past year to oppose Jewish demands for its removal.

By taking away the smaller crosses Friday, church and government officials wanted to display a unified resolve to combat Poland’s reputation for anti-Semitism.

But Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, “There is no room for religious symbols at Auschwitz or Birkenau.”