The time has come to address the issue of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Progress may be on the horizon regarding this country's handling of the international hot-button issues of preserving and protecting the Holocaust sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But there are also setbacks on the anti-semitism front that neither the Polish Catholic Church nor the government are addressing.
And it's coming up to another election season, which bodes ill for resolving these complex issues even when it is clear that Poland's overall international standing is very much affected by the fact that these issues remain front-burner controversies.
There are many layers here: the proposal before the government to make the Auschwitz-Birkenau a protected historic site; the upcoming springtime "March of the Living" visits to Polish-based death camps by Jews from Israel and North America; the need to upgrade history textbooks about the Holocaust (in Poland texts from the past half century, where this was given short shrift, but also in countries like Israel where some texts demonize Poland without acknowledging that it was a Nazi-occupied country and that 3 million non-Jewish Poles also died in the war). Of course, there is also the issue of anti-semitism in the Polish Catholic Church itself.
Polish-American theologian and ethicist John Pawlikowski is somewhat pessimistic as to whether there is progress or not to get a Polish sign-off on a plan to preserve and protect the Auschwitz-Birkenau site. "It's really hard to know," he said.
Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's office promises action "but then things don't happen," he said. He added that a general sense exists that Buzek is too weak, politically, to carry the issue to a conclusion. Solidarity Election Action (AWS) is divided, and some forces apparently think that a sign-off would be a victory for President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who first broached a rough outline of a solution two years ago to Holocaust Museum officials in Washington.
Pawlikowski, who is a presidential appointee to the board of the Holocaust Museum, also is connected to U.S. and international Catholic political moves, as a professor at the Chicago-based Catholic Theological Union. And he is pessimistic about the Polish church's recent handling of anti-semitism issues.
Cardinal Jozef Glemp appears to have routed the church progressives, Pawlikowski said, with a new recruit on his side being a Warsaw-based priest, Father Chrostowski, the onetime co-chair of the Polish Council for Christians and Jews. "Chrostowski has done an about-face," said Pawlikowski, after a 1998 theological showdown with Jesuit theologian Stanislaw Musial over what constitutes anti-semitism. Musial had criticized the church's handling of the Gdansk-based priest who had tried to block the appointment of Bronislaw Geremek as foreign minister.
Now, Pawlikowski said, the church leaders are trying to silence Musial. "Musial has almost been put under house arrest. He's not allowed to travel and has been told he shouldn't speak (on Holocaust or anti-semitism) issues in Poland," Pawlikowski said. Musial has also been forced to cancel plans to speak at next week's Stockholm conference on Holocaust educational issues and to bow out of invitations he had accepted at Brandais University and others.
"There's been no formal statement from Glemp but this has been a word-of-mouth pressure that if he (Musial) didn't back down, the Jesuits in Poland would suffer," he said.
A Kwasniewski ally is credited with stoking the latest anti-Polish sentiment abroad. It concerns a recent sermon from an obscure 79-year-old priest near Warsaw, Father Sikora. It was mostly ignored within Poland. But Szymon Szurmiej, head of the Civic and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland, got the text of Sikora's speech and sent it around the world, through a web site on the Holocaust. Szurmiej, who runs the Jewish Theater and has strong ties with ex-communists, also has the ear of many U.S. and Israeli Jewish groups.
"The Polish press generally ignored his (Sikora's) horrible ultra-nationalist remarks. Nonetheless his remarks have been made in the international internet and have certainly tarnished the Polish national and Polish Catholic image," Pawlikowski said.
