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

Geneviève Zubrzycki has authored the best book to date on the Auschwitz "crosses controversy" in post-communist Poland. Her work is far more than a description of the events. She sets this controversy, which has been central to the redefinition of national identity in Poland, in the larger context of the history of such self-definition in that country. The end result is a comprehensive study of religious symbolism and its impact on people's self-understanding as a national community. Hence the book is as relevant for sociologists of religion as it is for historians and religious-studies scholars. Other books on the subject of the crosses controversy have treated it in isolation from Poland's overall historical journey, with some seeing it as merely another manifestation of traditional Polish antisemitism. While antisemitism certainly was involved and needs to be clearly acknowledged, looking at the controversy through the lens of antisemitism alone will result in an incomplete and ultimately distorted analysis.

Zubrzycki begins her volume with an overview of the historical formation and transformation of Polish nationalism, deconstructing in large measure the notion of Poland as an eternally and primordially Catholic nation. She then examines the post-1989 period, during which the Polish population began to overcome the legacies of both fascism and communism. The crosses controversy, she rightly argues, was a central moment in the often acrimonious debate about a renewed national identity following more than sixty years without independent statehood. In Zubrzycki's view, without the historical background to this transition many of the political battles and public debates, including the crosses controversy, remain unintelligible. The public war of sorts about the crosses placed at Auschwitz had several profoundly intertwined dimensions. On one level, the dispute centered around the basic significance of the Auschwitz camp site. Was it primarily or even exclusively a Jewish memorial site, or was it also a place of Polish non-Jewish martyrdom? But at another level the controversy was an intra-national debate between those sectors of Polish society who desired to define revived Polish national identity in ethno-religious terms and those who emphasized the need for a secular nationalism. Eventually, the first group split into two subgroups: one included members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy who, under some pressure from the Vatican—and from Pope John Paul II himself—eventually supported the removal of the small crosses; the other included small nationalist groups such as the one led by Kazimierz Świtoń , as well as some heretical Catholic groups that defied the Polish episcopacy's policy on the crosses controversy. While outside Poland most commentators on the dispute saw it as essentially a Polish-Jewish conflict, within the country it became regarded as an intense internal discussion about the meaning of Polish identity.

The author observes that for many in post-communist Poland the cross came to represent the crucial boundary between those who were to be considered "true Poles" and those perceived as "inauthentic Poles"—including "bad Catholics," "cosmopolitan secularists," and Freemasons—whose influence on the new Polish ethos had to be marginalized. The latter two labels became code words for "Jews." Thus, the discussion about the placement of the crosses at Auschwitz was not an isolated conflict, but rather part of a much broader discussion of the cross as a defining symbol of "authentic" Polishness. Internally, Jewishness was identified by those espousing what Zubrzycki terms the "Polak—Katolik" ("a Pole is a Catholic") model of the reconstituted Poland as a symbol of the civic-secular model that they vigorously rejected. In this view of national identity, the label of "Jewishness" is intended to exclude all those who fail the ideological test in the minds of the "Polak—Katolik" camp. This use of "Jewishness" as a concept against which to define "Polishness" explains in part the much-discussed phenomenon of contemporary antisemitism in a country now largely devoid of Jews.

Zubrzycki...