The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (review)

This is a brilliant book, both in terms of the author's insights and depth of understanding, and in terms of the coherence and logic of her presentation of her material. Geneviève Zubrzycki, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, spent more than three years doing fieldwork in Poland, interviewing appropriate persons in Cracow, Katowice, Os´wie˛cim, and Warsaw, and visiting the sites she discusses in her book. In addition to onsite fieldwork, she also made extensive use of published materials in Polish, English, and French. The result is, she points out, "the only extensive sociological analysis of Polish nationalism that focuses on the post-Communist period" (p. 28), taking up her subject through the prism of controversies about the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The symbolic center of focus for her is the War of the Crosses of Auschwitz, as it has been dubbed in journalistic accounts, which reached its climax in 1998-99, and the differing ways in which Poles and Jews have remembered what happened at Auschwitz during World War II. For Poles, the town known to most of the world as Auschwitz is Os´wie˛cim, and, at the first level of meaning which Poles came to assign to the camp, it was remembered that Auschwitz was originally established as a detention center for Polish political prisoners, intellectuals, professionals, and priests; indeed, partly for that reason, Poles came to think of themselves as having been the principal martyrs at the camp (pp. 102-103).

At a second level, Polish communists conflated the victims at Auschwitz into an opaque category of "Polish citizens," thereby effectively making Jews invisible among the victims. As she notes, this served to turn the camp, for Polish communists and all who went to school in communist times, into a symbol not of the Holocaust but of the martyrdom of the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist resistance. And whereas the Jews remember Auschwitz as the place where between 1.1 million and 1.5 million persons were killed, 90% of them Jews (p. 114), Poles who went to school in socialist times were taught that Jews were only one of a number of groups to be liquidated at the camp. Polish communists inflated the number of dead at Auschwitz to some 4 million (p. 105). As late as 1995, a survey found that some three-quarters of adult Poles identified Auschwitz as "the place of martyrdom 'of the Polish nation' or 'of several nationalities'" but did not show any awareness that the overwhelming majority of the victims at the camp had been Jews (p. 137).

Finally, Catholic clergy and members of religious orders were among the first victims at Auschwitz; two of those who lost their lives there were later canonized: Fr. Maksymilian Kolbe, who had edited an anti-Semitic daily before the war, and Sister Teresia Benedicta (Edith Stein), a Jewish convert to Catholicism. The latter was executed because the Nazis considered her Jewish, but the Catholic Church has claimed her as a martyr for the Catholic faith.

Because of these three levels of meaning connecting Auschwitz to a Polish national narrative, some Poles (such as Father Waldemar Chrostowski) have been hostile to what they have perceived as a programmatic "de-Polonization" of the former camp and appropriation of the site as an exclusive symbol of Jewish suffering. But, for the residents of the town of Os´wie˛cim (which is adjacent to the site of the former concentration camp of Auschwitz), it is clear that the past haunts the present, as shown, for example, in the worldwide controversy when a disco opened in the town (p. 123). During the struggle over the crosses, Zubrzycki notes, "Jews were offended, repulsed, hurt, and angered by the presence of the papal cross at Auschwitz, while many Poles were offended, hurt, and angered by demands to remove the...