An
End to Symbols at Auschwitz By
Walter Reich Tuesday,
September 8, 1998; Page A15 AT
STAKE
in the escalating battle about crosses and
churches at Auschwitz is the future of
memory. The outcome will determine what
coming generations think they know not
only about Auschwitz but about the
Holocaust itself. In this battle, only
truth, as best we can determine it, must
be allowed to prevail. A
well-meaning Aug. 31 editorial in The
Post illustrates how old fictions
about Auschwitz have been accepted as
facts -- fictions
that have been used repeatedly to distort
the camp's history. The
Post identified Auschwitz-Birkenau as
the death camp "where 3 million Jews and
millions of others were murdered by the
Nazis." Recent scholarship by a Polish
historian has put the number of deaths
there conservatively at about 1.1 million,
with other estimates ranging to about 1.5
million. Approximately 90 percent of the
dead were Jews. The
Post's numbers may have been derived
in part from the inflated estimate --
originally of Soviet origin and endorsed
by Polish authorities after the war -- of
about 4 million dead. This number, and
other numbers of similar magnitude, were
repeated so often that they came to be
accepted by many as true, even though
historians in Poland and elsewhere have
revised this number down
considerably. For
some in Poland, the larger numbers were
embraced because they emphasized Polish
suffering in Auschwitz during the German
occupation: The larger the total number of
victims, the larger the number who must
have been Catholic Poles. Scholarship in
recent years has put the number of Polish
dead in Auschwitz at less than 100,000 --
many fewer than were originally said to
have died there but by any standard a
tragically large number, eternally marking
Auschwitz as a place of Polish national
loss. As
a memorial site, however, the central
problem that has plagued Auschwitz is that
the expression of one group's mourning has
from time to time collided with the
sensitivities of another group. Over the
decades, the history presented there has
tended to obscure the fact that the Jews
were the overwhelming majority of the
camp's victims. The use of Christian
religious symbols and structures has
disturbed Jews whose relatives were
systematically killed during the
Holocaust, at Auschwitz and elsewhere,
simply because they were Jews. Small
wonder that Jews who have been focused on
the memory of their dead have reacted
strongly to what they see as the
Christianization of Auschwitz. When, in
the 1980s, a convent was established at
Auschwitz I, Jews protested its presence.
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2.
Lately,
Jews protested, as they had before, the
presence of a large cross at Auschwitz I,
and particularly a church installed in the
former SS headquarters at nearby Birkenau
(Auschwitz II), the massive killing center
of the Auschwitz complex, with a cross
atop it and a very large one in front of
it. About 95 percent of the victims at
Birkenau were Jews. The
latest protests were provoked by news that
an agreement was about to be signed in
July with the Polish government by Jewish
and other organizations that would forbid
the introduction of new religious symbols
at Auschwitz but permit the presence of
the large crosses and churches already
there. Polish nationalists immediately
erected more than 100 additional crosses
at Auschwitz. On
Aug. 11, six members of the U.S. Congress
wrote to the Polish prime minister
protesting the crosses at Auschwitz I,
both the new ones and the old, as well as
the church in Birkenau. Such religious
symbols and structures are, they wrote,
"inappropriate at this location and are in
violation of the UNESCO agreement which
Poland signed in the late 1970s." They
wrote that while they respect crosses and
churches as places and symbols of
holiness, "we believe they do not belong
at a place such as
Auschwitz-Birkenau." Why
so much protest about churches and
crosses? What harm can come, after all,
from religious symbols and
structures? The
first harm is to historical accuracy, no
less than the harm caused by the use of
the inflated figures for victims cited by
The Post. The use of religious
symbols, like the use of inflated figures,
distorts perception of the past. There
seems little doubt that decades from now,
visitors to Auschwitz, seeing the
Christian symbols and places of worship,
will assume that they symbolize accurately
those who were killed and will fail to
understand history as it really was. For
some Jews, moreover, this would rip from
the Jewish people the tragedy of their
history and impose on the Jewish dead
symbols and structures that misrepresent
who the victims were and why they
died. Let
there be no religious symbols or
structures at Auschwitz -- no crosses, no
churches, no Stars of David, no
synagogues. To be representationally
accurate, for every cross built there
would have to be 10 stars built, and for
every church, 10 synagogues -- and there
would be no end to the tragic competition
of victims and victimization. Let visitors
be told, in clear language, as they stand
amid the mute ashes of the dead, who was
murdered in Auschwitz, in what numbers and
why. Let there be only words of accurate
history in that kingdom of boundless
evil. The
writer was director of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum from 1995 to
1998. ©
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
Company |
A
WELL WRITTEN and thought-provoking
piece.
write to David Irving