Tens of thousands of Catholic teen-agers are expected to visit the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps this month for tours and seminars on the Holocaust. The program in which they will participate will include material on the uniquely Jewish character of the event.
Most of the more than 50,000 youth from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union and Poland will stay for only a few hours during their visits, which began this week and continue until Aug. 17.
But many will stay overnight in the recently completed administration building of the new Carmelite convent a short distance away from the Auschwitz camp border, and in a tent city being built specially to accommodate the visitors on the grounds of the new complex.
The largest number of young people will be arriving for an overnight stay on Aug. 16, after spending several days in Czestochowa, some 130 miles southwest of Warsaw, where they will be celebrating the sixth World Youth Day.
More than a million young Catholics are expected to take part in the gathering there.
The highlight will be a rally with Pope John Paul II, who is making the stop on his Aug. 13-20 trip to Poland and Hungary, during which he will also meet with Jewish leaders.
The young Catholics who visit the area for a few hours will tour Birkenau, about two miles away from the convent. Those who stay overnight will see Auschwitz and listen to lectures being organized by local Polish church authorities. Some of the lectures may be presented by Jews, according to Shimon Samuels, European representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Samuels met with senior Vatican and Polish Church officials last month to ensure that the gatherings at Auschwitz are conducted with the appropriate respect for the meaning of the site, and that information about the Jewish nature of the Holocaust is included in the program.
“It’s one thing if the purpose is to expose the young people to the horror of Auschwitz, including the fact that 90 percent of all victims gassed there were Jews,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center.
“If the true facts were to be heard, that could be very positive,” he said. “But if it is allowed to be turned into a Woodstock-type jamboree on the periphery of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, it would certainly be viewed as a highly explosive and insensitive act.”
‘GENOCIDE’ FILM TO BE SHOWN
While meeting with Samuels, Monsignor John Radano, a senior member of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, acknowledged that since “Czestochowa was the main event, and Auschwitz a side event, this could psychologically reduce the significance (of the death camp visit) to the young visitor.”
Cardinal Pio Laghi, the Vatican official in charge of Catholic education, told Samuels that “it would be difficult to control any extremists if they aimed to misuse” the gathering at Auschwitz, and that “damage control can only be through education,” according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center.
The youths will receive guidebooks to the Auschwitz Museum in their native languages.
But after several meetings with Samuels, the Catholic authorities agreed that the educational program should include additional information about the Jewish character of the Holocaust.
“Genocide,” a 108-minute Wiesenthal Center film, will be shown in English, French, German and Spanish, and a 40-panel exhibit, titled “The Courage To Remember,” which illustrates the history of the Holocaust, will be displayed at several sites around the convent tent location.
The willingness to integrate into the program information from the Jewish perspective “assures us that the authenticity of the Jewish experience is included, that it’s not just a Christian pilgrimage,” Samuels said in a telephone interview from Paris.
“It’s a very encouraging sign for the future, and it will go a long way. If (the Catholic youths) come back with a clearer understanding of what happened in Auschwitz, that could lead to a greater sensitivity to Jews in their own countries,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
