Already, though, the dispute is giving way to signs of reconciliation between Poland’s Roman Catholics and Jews. The new convent is one part of a church-run center at Auschwitz, which will bring Catholics and Jews together to study their painfully shared past. Poles are starting to rethink the prejudices and historical inaccuracies that surrounded Jewish issues during the communist era. There has been an outpouring of new publications on Judaism and an upsurge in Polish-Israeli exchanges. “There’s definitely a greater interest in Jewish history and culture,” says Grazyna Pawlak, the managing director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which runs special classes for schoolteachers from around the country and was recently asked by Polish bishops to offer similar courses for religious-instruction teachers. “The confrontation over the convent made people realize they have a lot to learn.”
Auschwitz is now a good place to begin. Gone are the communist-era placards that both inflated the number of the camp’s victims to 4 million, instead of the 1.5 million generally accepted as accurate, and failed to acknowledge that most of the victims were Jews. Guides, new films and improvised signs now explain that 90 percent of the victims were Jewish, even if the original camp was largely populated by Polish political prisoners, about 75,000 of whom died there. “These changes are absolutely necessary,” argues Auschwitz museum director Jerzy Wroblewski. They are also slow and painful. Three years after removing plaques at the Birkenau gas chambers where most Jews perished, the museum’s international council only recently granted final approval for new inscriptions.
The debates over Auschwitz are no longer marked by a struggle between competing groups to appropriate the camp for themselves. “Aside from being a symbol of the Holocaust, Auschwitz is also a symbol of Polish martyrdom during the war,” says Stanislaw Krajewski, the Jewish cochairman of the recently formed Polish Council of Christians and Jews and a member of the museum’s international council. “One does not rule out the other: these two symbols can coexist.” Increasingly, the international council is divided along lines other than religion. For example, some members emphasize the camp’s teaching role and want it to offer detailed information; others see it primarily as a memorial and prefer minimal inscriptions to preserve its austere setting. In this debate, there are Jews and Catholics on both sides.
The same was true when Hollywood director Steven Spielberg recently asked to use Auschwitz as a site for “Schindler’s List,” a film about a German industrialist who managed to save hundreds of Jews. Some council members feared that the 1,500 extras might damage the camp and objected to plans to re-create the chimney that once stood on top of the crematoriums. Spielberg agreed and constructed sets and filmed only outside the camp grounds.
Despite the signs of progress, anti-Semitic attitudes are still disturbingly commonplace in Poland, and new efforts to overcome them encounter many obstacles. The town of Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz) faces special problems because of its chilling name. Although the town now has its own chapter of the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society, Israeli Ambassador Meron Gordon rebuffed an appeal by Oswiecim’s mayor to set up contacts with an Israeli city. “It’s a psychological problem,” says Gordon, “and it probably can’t be resolved for at least one generation.”
Nonetheless, the new Catholic-run center in Auschwitz hopes to inspire further reconciliation. Encouraged by the progress to date, American Jewish and Catholic activists are considering a project to plant millions of trees in Poland, as both a memorial to Auschwitz victims and a corrective to the ecological devastation of the communist era. As Rabbi Jack Bemporad, the director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, explains: “We want to show that out of the ashes of death, you can have the trees of life.”
