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Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company from Constantine's
Sword by James Carroll. Copyright (c) 2001 by James Carroll. All
rights reserved.
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Sign of Folly
The cross is made of stout beams, an intersection of railroad ties. It
stands in a field of weeds that slopes down from the road. The field is
abutted on one side by the old theater where gas canisters were stored,
also looted gold; where, much later, Carmelite nuns accomplished cloistered
works of expiation, sparking fury; and where, now, a municipal archive is
housed. On another side, the field runs up against the brick wall, the
eastern limit of the main camp.
At more than twenty feet, the cross nearly matches the height of the wall,
although not the wall's rusted thistle of barbed wire. Immediately beyond
are the camp barracks, the peaked roofs visible against the gray morning
sky. The nearest building, close enough to hit with a stone thrown from
the foot of the cross, is Barracks 13, also known as the death bunker or
the starvation bunker. In one of its cells the Franciscan priest
Maximilian Kolbe was martyred. He is now a saint of the Roman Catholic
Church. Kolbe is the reason for this cross.
In 1979, Karol Wojtyla came home to nearby Krakow as Pope John Paul II. He
celebrated mass in an open field for a million of his countrymen, and on
the makeshift altar this same cross had been mounted -- hence its size,
large enough to prompt obeisance from the farthest member of the throng.
Visiting the death camp, the pope prayed for and to Father Kolbe who had
voluntarily taken the place of a fellow inmate in the death bunker. The
pope prayed for and to Edith Stein, the convert who had also died in the
camp, and whom he would declare a Catholic saint in 1998. She was a
Carmelite nun known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, but the Nazis
murdered her for being a Jew. In his sermon that day, the pope called
Auschwitz the "Golgotha of the modern world." As he had at other times,
John Paul II expressed the wish that a place of prayer and penance could be
built at the site of the death camp to honor the Catholic martyrs and to
atone for the murders: at Auschwitz and its subcamp, Birkenau, the Nazis
killed perhaps as many as a quarter of a million non-Jewish Poles and
something like a million and a half Jews. Fulfilling the pontiff's hope, a
group of Carmelite nuns moved into the old theater in the autumn of 1984.
They intended especially to offer prayers in the memory of their sister
Teresa Benedicta. The mother superior of this group was herself named
Teresa.
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Jewish protesters invaded the grounds of the convent, carrying banners
that said, "Do Not Christianize Auschwitz and Shoah!"
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The Carmelite presence at the gate of Auschwitz was immediately protested
by leaders of Jewish groups throughout Europe and in the United States and
Israel. "Stop praying for the Jews who were killed in the Shoah,"
one group pleaded. "Let them rest in peace as Jews." Jewish protesters
invaded the grounds of the convent, carrying banners that said, "Leave Our
Dead Alone!" and "Do Not Christianize Auschwitz and Shoah!" The
protesters registered complaints about Father Kolbe, who before his arrest
had been the publisher of a journal that had printed antisemitic articles,
and about Edith Stein, whose conversion could only look to Jews like
apostasy.
Polish Catholics from the nearby towns of Oswiecim and Birkenau rallied to
the nuns' defense. Fights broke out. "One More Horror at Auschwitz," read
a headline in a British paper. "They crucified our God," a boy screamed
during one demonstration. "They killed Jesus." At one point the nuns'
supporters arrived carrying the stout wooden cross from the papal altar in
Krakow. They planted the cross in the field next to the old theater.
However piously intended, it could seem a stark act of Christian
sovereignty, a sacrilege. Eventually John Paul II intervened in the
dispute, offering to fund a new convent building for the Carmelites a few
hundred yards away. He prevailed on the nuns to move. The sisters did so
in 1994. In the compromise that was worked out, Jewish leaders in turn
accepted that the cross would remain in the field near the wall, but only
temporarily.
In early 1998, the Polish government, perhaps responding to pressure from
American senators friendly to Jews -- pressure exerted just prior to the
U.S. Senate's vote on Poland's admission to NATO -- announced that the
cross, like the convent before it, would be moved. "The cross overlooks
the camp, which is unacceptable for Orthodox Jews," a Polish official said,
"because it imposes Christian symbols." But a month later, before the
removal had occurred, Poland's Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Jozef
Glemp, insisted that the cross should remain where it was. Jewish leaders
again protested, prompting an expression of concern from the Vatican. At
Auschwitz itself, Polish Catholics began to plant new crosses, appropriate
to a cemetery, making the point that Catholics, too, died at the camp. The
dispute raged throughout 1998, with escalations even to the point of
homemade explosive devices being planted in the field by radical Catholics,
More than one hundred small crosses were put in the ground. Finally, in
1999, in an odd "compromise," the Polish parliament passed a law requiring
the removal of the smaller crosses but making the papal cross permanent.
The small crosses were taken away by Polish officials, but the large cross
remains at Auschwitz to this day.
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If Auschwitz has become a sacred center of Jewish identity, what does
the cross there imply about the relations between Jews and Christians, and
between Judaism and Christianity?
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What does the cross of Jesus Christ mean at such a place? What does it
mean to Jews? What does it mean to Christians? Or to Polish Catholics?
Or to those for whom religious symbols are empty? What does the cross
there signal about our understanding of the past? And what of the future?
If Auschwitz has become a sacred center of Jewish identity, what does the
cross there imply about the relations between Jews and Christians, and
between Judaism and Christianity? These questions were in my mind one
November morning as I stood alone before that cross.
I thought of the pope's designation of this place as Golgotha, and I
recognized the ancient Christian impulse to associate extreme evil with the
fate of Jesus, precisely as a way of refusing to be defeated by that evil.
At the Golgotha of the crucifixion, death became the necessary mode of
transcendence, first for Jesus and then, as Christians believe, for all.
But I also thought of that banner, "Do Not Christianize Auschwitz and
Shoah!" Can mechanized mass murder be a mode of transcendence? I
could imagine the narrowed eyes of a Jewish protester as he detected in
prayers offered before the cross at Auschwitz echoes of the old refrain
"Jews out!" -- only now was it Jewish anguish that was expected to yield
before Christian hope? If Auschwitz must stand Jews as the abyss in which
meaning itself died, what happens when Auschwitz becomes the sanctuary of
someone else's recovered piety?
Christians are not the only ones who have shown themselves ready to use the
memory of the six million to advance an ideology: Orthodox Jews can see a
punishment for secularism; Zionists can see an organizing rationale for the
state of Israel; opponents of "land for peace" can see a justification for
a permanent garrison mentality. The "memorialists," who have raised the
new temples of Holocaust museums and memorials in the cities of the West,
have anointed memory itself as the deepest source of meaning. The legend
engraved at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the first Holocaust memorial, reads,
"Forgetfulness is the way to exile. Remembrance is the way to redemption."
The god who led a people out of Egypt is, of course, a redeeming God, but
at Auschwitz the question must have become, Are God's saving acts only in
the past? Some formerly religious Jews saw in the holocaust only the
absence of God, and moved on without faith. Other Jews went from atheism
to the faith of Job, an affirmation devoid of piety. There are the Jewish
voices, from Elie Wiesel to Richard Rubenstein to Emil Fackenheim, who
reject the idea that suffering such as Jews underwent in the death camps --
a million children murdered -- can be meaningful. To value those deaths in
such a way is to diminish their horror. And there are the voices Emmanuel
Levinas, who speaks of the Holocaust as a tumor in the memory", and Theodor
Adorno, who, in a famous essay, argued that the entire enterprise of
education must change after the Holocaust. "Auschwitz negates all systems,
opposes all doctrines," Wiesel argues. "They cannot but diminish the
experience which lies beyond out reach." These and other figures insist
that the Holocaust shatters all previous categories of meaning, certainly
including Christian categories. But isn't the state of being shattered,
once reflected upon and articulated, itself a category? Does the very act
of thinking about the Holocaust, in other words, diminish its horror by
refusing to treat it as unthinkable? The more directly one faces the
mystery of the Holocaust, the more elusive it becomes.
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The cross signifies the problem: When suffering is seen to serve a
universal plan of salvation, its particular character as tragic and evil is
always diminished.
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Perhaps the voice a troubled Christian most needs to hear is that of the
Jew who says the Holocaust must be made to teach nothing. "What
consequences, then, are to be drawn from the Holocaust?" asks the
theologian Jacob Neusner. "I argue that none are to be drawn, none for
Jewish theology and none for the life of Jews with one another, which were
not there before 1933. Jewish theologians do no good service to believers
when they claim that 'Auschwitz' denotes a turning point." That voice is
useful because if Jewish responses to the holocaust, which range from piety
to nihilism, are complex and multifaceted, Christian interpretations of the
near elimination of Jews from Europe, however respectfully put forth, must
inevitably be even more problematic. The cross signifies the problem: When
suffering is seen to serve a universal plan of salvation, its particular
character as tragic and evil is always diminished. The meaningless can be
made to shimmer with an eschatological hope, and at Auschwitz this can seem
like blasphemy.
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