Two delegations that visited the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz recently saw a newly erected 23-foot-high cross there and say it appears that the nuns are not planning to leave, despite assurances from Catholic officials to the contrary.
A French-Belgian delegation that included a Catholic priest was stopped from entering the convent last week, and a petition from the group asking the nuns to leave was rejected.
The 10 or so nuns living in the convent have not moved, despite an agreement signed by Catholic officials in Geneva two years ago that pledged the convent would be relocated by Feb. 22, 1989.
The failure to make good on that promise has soured Catholic-Jewish relations worldwide. The presence of the convent on the site where more than 2 million Jews were murdered is deeply offensive to Jews, especially Holocaust survivors.
But it has also angered many Christians. A Belgian priest, Abbe Bernard, accompanied two officials of the French Section of the World Jewish Congress on a visit to the convent last week.
They brought with them a petition, signed by 800 Belgian Catholics, asking for the removal of the convent from the Auschwitz site.
“The nuns rejected the petition, and after 15 minutes of discussion refused the delegation to enter the convent,” the group reported to WJC headquarters here.
The group also said that the convent building has been “totally reconstructed” and that a recently established, 23-foot-high Christian cross “symbolizes that the place belongs to the Catholics.”
Making the visit were Gilberte Djian and Serge Cwejgenbaum, chairwoman and secretary-general, respectively, of WJC’s French Section.
‘MASSIVE CROSS’ ERECTED
Similar findings were reported by a B’nai Brith Canada delegation that recently returned from Poland.
Frank Dimant, executive vice president of B’nai Brith Canada, who led the group of 16, described the new crucifix as “a massive cross, just towering alongside the convent.
“Since we had some survivors in our mission, it was very difficult for them to understand and to witness this,” he said in a telephone call from Jerusalem last week.
Dimant also said his group “didn’t see signs” the convent was being abandoned. “It is well-kept,” he said.
The group met with Polish government officials to discuss the convent and also the prosecution of Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.
The group included Dimant; Moishe Smith, president-elect of B’nai Brith Canada; and R. Lou Ronson, vice president of B’nai B’rith International. They met with Acting Foreign Minister Jan Majewski and Wladyslaw Lorane, director of the Office for Religious Denominational Affairs.
On the thorny issue of the convent, Ronson told Lorane that the convent’s location at Auschwitz “is most painful to the world Jewish community.” He asked government help to “expedite an early resolution to this problem.”
In response, said Dimant, “the Polish officials indicated to us that they were looking for a solution to the problem, although they were not a party to the agreement made in Geneva. They nevertheless would like to see that agreement implemented.”
PROBLEM RESTS WITH CARDINAL
From those talks, Dimant said, he had the sense that the power to resolve the problem rests with Cardinal Franciszek Macharski of Krakow.
Macharski, one of the signatories to the 1987 agreement to remove the convent, wrote that construction of an alternative center for “information, education, meeting and prayer” had “entered the final phase of its implementation.”
As Dimant understands it, “it’s a question now of the cardinal’s agreeing to one of the three alternative sites proposed, and apparently the decision to agree on the site by the cardinal is not moving as expeditiously as it should be.”
“The impression that we were left with is that absolutely no work has begun on that alternate convent, since it has not been selected,” he said.
During its visit, the B’nai Brith Canada group was stunned and frightened to turn a corner at Auschwitz and come upon men and women dressed in the garb of prisoners and SS officials.
They had unwittingly encountered Arnold Kopelson’s filming of the story of a Jewish boxer from Salonika.
“It penetrated our very souls to see that,” especially when actors told them the uniforms were originals, Dimant said.
The Canadian group also visited the Majdanek and Treblinka concentration camps. It was Dimant’s first trip to Poland, and the visit to the camps left a deep impression on him.
“I want to stress that we intensify our programs of bringing people to the camp sites,” he said. “No amount of literature, no amount of photographs can substitute walking into the torture chamber of Auschwitz.”
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