The Catholic-Jewish tensions of Auschwitz
Dr. Robert Jan Van Pelt (left) speaks at The Sheen Center in New York on Jan. 26. Photo by Liza Vandenboom.
NEW YORK — Before it was a place of horror and destruction, Auschwitz was a town where Catholics and Jews used to live together.
“There was a large Catholic monastery right next to a synagogue,” said Dr. Robert Jan Van Pelt, a leading authority on the history of Auschwitz and historian and curator of Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.
Pelt addressed the issues of antisemitism and Jewish-Catholic relations in a lecture presented by the Sheen Center and the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Sunday night in New York City.
In the small border town between Germany and Poland, Barracks that used to house travelers and immigrants along their journey were adapted into gas chambres, morgues, and undressing rooms. The skeleton of a peaceful town became the death sentence of 1.1 million people.
The commemoration of the horror, Pelt said, created its own form of erasure. In 1947, the Polish state opened a museum at the site.
“While the communist regime in Poland is secular, practically, the iconography and the memory within Auschwitz itself starts to adopt significant Christian associations,” he said. “95 percent of the population after the war is Christian and Catholic.”
The memorial became increasingly saturated with Catholic influence. “You start to see within the museum a clear Christian iconography. 90 percent of the victims were Jews. You see here the beginning of a potential tension,” Pelt said.
The very preservation of the grounds, according to Pelt, presents its own controversy. The main camp, the grounds that were preserved, were primarily the camp for Polish Catholics, “while Birkenau, just down the road, where Jews were murdered, was allowed to fall to pieces,” according to Pelt. While the grounds of Birkenau are officially protected as part of the museum, the status provided little preservation.
“By the 1950s [Birkenau] looked like a ruin, and it’s not included in tours of the camp,” Pelt said. “Management of the site focuses on the side that is associated with Catholic Martyrdom or Polish Nationalism, but not Jewish Martyrdom.”
When a monument in Birkenau was erected in 1967, it made no mention of the fact that almost all of the victims of Birkenau were Jews.
Beyond the tensions incumbent of the museum’s structure, the use of the grounds for religious purposes created more controversy. Pope John Paul II, who was raised in the area surrounding Auschwitz, made his first return to Poland as Pope in 1979. Because it was the only site large enough to hold the myriad of pilgrims expected to attend, Birkenau was selected as the site for the Papal Mass.
“You have a situation where Birkenau, the place of Jewish martyrdom, the place where a million Jews were murdered-- you have a mass held in that place, with over a million Catholics in attendance,” Pelt said.
In his homily commemorating the horrors of Auschwitz, Pope John Paul II made mention of only two individuals, Father Maximilian Kolbe and Ms. Edith Stein, both of whom were Catholics. “Edith Stein died as a Jew. She was murdered because she was a Jew, not because she was Catholic," Pelt said.
In his homily, Pope John Paul II acknowledged the six million Poles who lost their lives. "What he means here, is three million Christian Poles and three million Jewish Poles...There is a problem with the fact that he does not distinguish between the fate of Christians and Jewish Poles. They're all put together in the six million as if they had the same fate, which is not really the case," Pelt said.
The prolonged and contentious history of Jewish-Christian relations shades in the background of the conversation. “[the Church] has always had the triflest kind of appropriation of the Jewish tradition, as if it had ceased to be relevant...Christian anti-Judaism, in some ways, paved the way for German antisemitism… and in a mass at Birkenau, [Pope John Paul II] did not utter a word about it,” Pelt said.
Aside from the Catholic presence in Auschwitz, there is a general problem with overtly religious practice, iconography, and discourse in the grounds, according to Pelt. “I’m against churches. I’m against synagogues. I’m against symbols of nationalism. I’m against anything that comes with a pre-packaged liturgy or system of symbols in that place. I think that this place is such an overpowering, and destructive symbol in itself. We must let it speak.”
Elizabeth Vandenboom is a student at The King’s College and an intern for Religion Unplugged.