OSWIECIM, Poland — A tour of the Nazis' old Auschwitz concentration camp here helps explain why the relatives and descendants of its victims are quarreling almost half a century later. What happened here is almost too hard to fathom, too hard to bear, and it is easy to fall into aimless rage.
A controversy has erupted over a Roman Catholic convent at the edge of the camp. Many visitors barely notice the large, unmarked brick building along the barbed-wire outer edge of what is known as Auschwitz I. The relentless images of death are so great that the convent makes little impact.
Yet its presence has caused much anguish. Sensitivities were bruised even more when the nuns contemplated naming their convent after Edith Stein, the Jewish-born Carmelite nun who was killed at Auschwitz and beatified last month by Pope John Paul II, also amid Jewish-Roman Catholic controversy.
And those relations have now been further exacerbated by news that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, accused of participating in Nazi atrocities during World War II, has been granted an audience by the Pope at the Vatican on Thursday.
Plan to Move Convent
In February, at a meeting in Geneva, European Catholic and Jewish leaders agreed on a plan to move the convent away from the camp. The issue grated on Jewish feelings and left Poles bewildered.
In an impassioned statement to Catholic officials at the Geneva meeting, Dr. Ady Steg, a French Jewish leader, said, "Do not try to drain the meaning out of the symbol that is Auschwitz by placing a cross there."
Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the Polish Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, wrote at the height of the controversy that Auschwitz was both the monument of Jewish destruction and a symbol of the martyrdom of the Polish people in World War II.
"We do not draw a parallel between the destruction of the Jews and the fate of the Poles during the war," he wrote, "but do these two symbols really have to divide our two nations? Could they not bring us closer together, unite us?"
Second Camp Built
The facts about Auschwitz are simply told. In 1940, the Germans set up a concentration camp in an old Austrian army barracks in the Polish city of Oswiecim (called Auschwitz in the German language). The camp, about 30 miles west of Krakow in southern Poland, was designed as a detention center for political opponents and later came to be used as a work camp for prisoners forced to labor in Nazi factories. It proved to be too small, and a second camp, Auschwitz II, was built in 1941, a mile and a half away at Birkenau.
In 1942, the Germans began using Birkenau and, to a lesser extent, Auschwitz I, as centers for exterminating Jews. The victims, arriving by train, were ordered to strip and crowd naked into chambers they were told were shower rooms. The Germans then filled the chambers with gas that took only minutes to kill.
The bodies were burned in giant crematoriums that could consume up to 10,000 corpses a day, though the largest number of prisoners gassed in any one day was probably 9,000.
Railroad tracks were laid down so that trains could come directly into Birkenau and unload their human cargo near the gas chambers. Not every Jew was gassed. Doctors at the tracks selected the strongest, about 10%, for slave labor.
4 Million Dead
Nearly everyone who entered Auschwitz died, but immediate gassing was reserved almost entirely for Jews. The others died mainly of exhaustion and disease after a few months of slave labor. The English historian Martin Gilbert has estimated that 2 million Jews and 2 million non-Jews died at Auschwitz.
For Jews, the symbolism is obvious. Auschwitz was the largest and most notorious engine of Adolf Hitler's "final solution"--the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe. A third of the Jews killed in Europe during World War II died at Auschwitz. It is the most important symbol to Jews of what they call the Holocaust--in Hebrew, the Shoah.
For years, many Jews have been infuriated by what they regard as a Polish government attempt to minimize the status of the Jews as a special target of Hitler. Almost a million people a year visit Auschwitz, but they do not always get the full story.
'Monument to Martyrdom'
The government officially describes Auschwitz as "a monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other nations." Lumping Poles and Polish Jews together, the government's official guidebook to Auschwitz lists Poles as the main victims. Jewish anger is prompted by the fear that the official Polish line obscures the reality of what happened to the Jews of Europe.
On a recent visit, however, Jan Graff, a 56-year-old chemical engineer who works part-time as an official guide, did not try to diminish what had happened. Graff, a Polish Catholic whose mother-in-law died in slave labor at Birkenau, made it clear that the primary aim of the gassing was the extermination of the Jews.
