The ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Poland claims he is powerless to remove a Carmelite convent from the grounds of the former Auschwitz death camp because the nuns refuse to leave, according to the president of the Women’s International Zionist Organization.
Raya Yaglom reported here that she recently had a long conversation with the Polish cardinal, Franciszek Macharski.
He was one of the European cardinals who signed the Geneva agreement with world Jewish leaders in February 1987, promising that the convent would be relocated within two years.
“We spoke for two hours, and after much pressure he admitted he had signed the undertaking but was incapable of carrying it out,” Yaglom said.
“He justified this by repeating over and over that he had not expected the nuns to be so recalcitrant and that he had anyway received tens of thousands of letters from Polish Catholics who wanted the convent left where it was,” Yaglom reported.
She arrived in Israel after leading a 300-member international WIZO delegation on a study tour of Holocaust sites in Poland.
They staged a demonstration at the Auschwitz site to protest the continued presence of the convent.
Yaglom said she had her meeting with Macharski after the Auschwitz visit, when she asked him what the significance was of the 24-foot-high cross recently erected in front of the convent.
The cardinal told her it marked the place where the first Poles fell victim to the Nazis.
The WIZO head said her meetings in Poland left her “with the clear feeling that there is a strong desire there, particularly in the Church, to de-Judaize the Shoah and turn it into a Christian Holocaust.”
She said of Cardinal Macharski, “At no point did he mention Jews or the suffering of the Jews. He spoke of Polish suffering, and he also denied that the convent’s premises had ever been the storehouse for the death camp’s Zyklon B gas cylinders.”
But the Polish minister of religions, Vladislav Lorenc, admitted to Yaglom that the building that now houses the convent had indeed been used to store the gas, though it had not been the main storage.
Yaglom said that in parting, she asked the minister why he thought the Nazis chose Poland as the place to build their extermination camps.
“He went very red and said, ‘That’s a very provocative question,’ without elaborating further,” Yaglom reported.
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