The Continuing Agony: From the Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz (review)

This volume assembles a variety of documents and commentaries related to the extraordinary controversy that broke out in the 1980's concerning the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, located outside the town of Oświęcim in Poland, and dragged on for longer than a decade amid furious argument over the proper ways to commemorate the most infamous site in the world. The flashpoints of this dispute were the establishment of a Carmelite convent in an abandoned camp building, and the subsequent planting of hundreds of Christian crosses on the Auschwitz grounds. For the most part, these acts were motivated by benevolent intentions of memorializing both Jews and gentiles murdered there, but they inspired painful or angry reactions in many Jewish quarters. The resulting debate raised a host of thorny issues, including fundamental theological differences between Christians and Jews, the moral and legal right of Catholic Poles to honor their dead on sovereign Polish territory, age-old Polish traditions of spontaneous display of crosses to link religion and patriotism, and Jewish sensitivities regarding the historical symbolic connotations of the Cross and the danger of "dejudaizing" the Holocaust. Along the way, this Auschwitz quarrel revived echoes of the bitter legacy of the past dividing Jews from Catholics, and Jews from Poles. Polish right-wing nationalist elements seized on the emotive "battle for the Cross" for their own purposes, considered unsavory by most, and both the Polish primate, Cardinal Józef Glemp, and the Israeli prime minister of the day stooped to the unhelpful bandying of malicious stereotype. Resolution of the protracted impasse required a delicate process of negotiation among Church officialdom, Jewish representatives, and a series of embarrassed Polish governments, communist at first, democratic in the later stages of the dispute. The Carmelites vacated the premises in 1993, upon direct order of the Pope, and an act of the Polish parliament in 1999 led to removal of all the offending crosses except the one used by John Paul II in celebrating Mass at Auschwitz during his momentous pilgrimage to his homeland in 1979. Whether this solution closes the book on the incident remains to be seen.

The editors have brought together a useful collection of statements and declarations by principals in the episode, contemporary extracts from the Polish Catholic and secular press, academic essays, and reactions from such authoritative figures as Elie Wiesel and Jan Karski, the Polish wartime courier who tried to alert the world to the Nazis' genocidal plans for the Jews. The contents are, by turns, stimulating, provocative, instructive, and sometimes moving. The complications of the Auschwitz affair are so tangled that one might wish the editorial team had provided a timeline, or brief introductions to the selections to place them in context. To some extent, these tasks are carried out by an informative if preachy introduction and afterword, of the type that leans heavily on repeated intonation of "the Other" as high-minded buzzword. The editors tend to labor their unexceptionable point that both Christians and Jews should draw the lesson of the need for mutual goodwill and respect, and tell us in advance which contributors have got things right, as if not trusting readers to figure it out for themselves. This irritation does not lessen the service this volume provides by updating the literature in English on this fascinating story of conflicting claims of memory at the most notorious killing ground of modern times. Along with two earlier studies—The Convent at Auschwitz, by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, and the collection of articles Memory Offended, co-edited by Carol Rittner and John Roth—The Continuing Agony will enlighten scholars and interested general readers alike.