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PARTISAN REVIEW
Despite the impact of the Pope's strikingly fraternal gestures, Catholic–
Jewish relations would, however, be overshadowed for the rest of the
1980s by the affair of the Carmelite nuns in Auschwitz. This episode,
which raised both Polish-Jewish and Jewish-Catholic tensions to new
heights of ugliness, is glossed over by the anthology and treated somewhat
sketchily even by O'Brien. It ignited Jewish impatience with the Vatican
and anger at a resurgent Polish nationalism that was staking a renewed
claim
to
Auschwitz as being, above all, the site of Polish martyrdom.
Another unfortunate incident was John Paul II's proclaimed inten–
tion, during his June .1999 Papal visit to Poland,
to
beatify over a hun–
dred Polish Catholics as martyrs of Auschwitz. Again, as was the case
ten years ago, such a step is bound
to
heighten Jewish fears that this
Pope (despite his remarkable opening
to
the Jews) is surreptitiously
encouraging the "Christianizing" of the Holocaust. Worse still, in the
eyes of some militant Catholics it may promote the historical falsifica–
tion that there was a war against the Catholics analogous
to
the Nazi
war against the Jews. Whatever the Pope's true intentions (and while I
believe him
to
be misguided in this instance, there are no grounds
to
sus–
pect any anti-Jewish slight), the symbolic conflict between Jews and
Catholics over the meaning of Auschwitz is still seemingly intact. In
1989 similar tensions produced the malevolently anti-Semitic homily of
Cardinal Glemp (Primate of Poland) against the "anti-Polonism" of the
allegedly all-powerful "Jewish" media-and in the Polish elections that
followed, the "Jewish question" once more raised its ugly head. Today,
things have fortunately not yet reached such a boil, but the tensions
between Polish Catholics and Jews over the memory of Auschwitz are
still potentially explosive.
The feeling exists
to
this day among many Polish Catholics that while
the Jewish Holocaust is universally honored (especially in the West), the
three million non-Jewish Poles who lost their lives in the war are
ignored; that, while Auschwitz is widely seen as the symbol of Jewish
memory, the blood sacrifice of tens of thousands of Polish Catholic vic–
tims in the same death camp is barely known outside of Poland. This
sense of frustration and rivalry in victimhood is by no means restricted
solely
to
anti-Semitic Poles-it also festers and has found voice even
among those who helped Jews during the war. This resentment may be
humanly understandable, but it is a form of Polish and Catholic paranoia
to
present this situation as some kind of "Jewish conspiracy." There is,
however, still worse news. Today, in the United States, there are militant
Catholic voices who have taken this a stage further in a soft form of
"Holocaust revisionism," which claims that five million Catholics
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