Following Edith Stein to Auschmitz.

In our March 1999 issue we published Lianne Laurence's article on Edith Stein entitled "True daughter of Israel" (pp. 12-15, p. 22). Now she follows with urther reflections on her journey to Poland and the meaning of the canonization for both Jews and Catholics. St. Edith Stein's feast day is August 9.

The town of Oswiecim is a scant hour's drive from the city of Krakow in southwest Poland, where the famous Oskar Schindler's factory still stands, and where Karol Woytyla served as Cardinal-Archbishop before being elected Pope in October 1978. The wan fall countryside, vaguely green and yellow under an overcast sky, boasts sporadic clusters of trees, and is reminiscent of the Canadian prairie landscape, only lacking a certain harshness. Pilgrims or tourists intent on visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau can easily obtain a bus ride from Krakow to Oswiecim and Bzrezinka, where the notorious Nazi death camps were situated.

On this grey October day, the state-run Auschwitz museum is besieged with school tours; Polish children cascade in kaleidoscope fashion out of yellow buses, chattering, laughing, jostling, oblivious of the significance of their surroundings. With the insouciance of youth, they sweep the older and much more sombre visitors, along with the vigorous blustering wind, into the brooding museum entrance.

It becomes quickly apparent that English is not as well known here as the anglocentric visitor may have expected. I finally gathered that an English-speaking guide would be provided only for a minimum of ten people; otherwise, one would have to pay about $40 for the privilege of a solo guide through the camp.

After anglophone tourists grouped together uneasily to meet the required quota, we obtained the services of Jan, a grimly eloquent Polish man who looked to be in his late fifties. Thus accompanied, we entered, not without apprehension, through the famous main gate over which were the words "Arbeit macht frei"--"Work will make you free." In one sense, it seemed impossible to wrap one's mind around what had taken place here, 50 years ago. My own suspicion was that it is somewhat dangerous even to try--try, that is, to appropriate the horror of those times merely on a speculative or emotional level.

Victims of the Holocaust

I had come to Auschwitz from Rome just prior to the canonization on October 11, 1998, of Edith Stein, because this is where she was killed. Pope John Paul II has asked all Catholics to remember in a particular way the victims of the Holocaust--or Shoah--on St. Edith's feast day. It seemed particularly fitting that a Polish Pope who works tirelessly to improve relations between Catholics and Jews presided over the canonization of this remarkable woman. Now referred to as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and later became a Carmelite nun. She and her sister Rosa (who also converted to Catholicism) were killed in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942, as part of a Nazi retaliation for the Dutch bishops' forthright condemnation of Nazi treatment of the Jews.

Edith Stein, in actuality, was gassed at Birkenau (often referred to as Auschwitz II), close to the village of Bzrezinka, about five kilometres away from Auschwitz. A guide book written by Kazimir Smolen and published by the State Museum in Oswiecim tells us that the town of Oswiecim and surrounding area was renamed the German "Auschwitz" when Poland fell to the Nazis in September 1939. The deserted Polish military barracks were first used by the Nazis to intern Polish political prisoners. They soon became a forced labour and extermination camp for Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other targets of the Nazi genocidal policy. Auschwitz was chosen by the Nazis because of its isolation and its proximity to important railway junctions, Smolen informs us.

While Auschwitz had one crematorium, it was at the neighbouring Birkenau that the Nazis "constructed most of their instruments of mass destruction, namely, four crematoria with gas chambers, two makeshift gas chambers in specially converted farmhouses, cremation pyres, and pits," writes Smolen.

Zyklon B 

Behind a glass barrier in the Auschwitz museum are grotesque piles of hundreds and hundreds of rusty cans, like the old cans of floor wax or jam in use when I was a girl. These once contained Zyklon B, which, our guide tells us, was originally intended for use as a common pesticide. He did not explain how the Nazis discovered its lethal capabilities, but nine cans of Zyklon B were sufficient to gas 1,500 people. The merciless killing that went on at the camps is documented to a small degree in a set of photographs taken of a transport of Hungarian Jews in 1944. It includes the following commentary by camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss: "The highest number of those gassed and burnt within a 24-hour period was just over nine thousand. It was in the summer of 1944 during the extermination of Hungarian Jews, when due to train delays, instead of three,...five packed trains arrived...."

Behind another glass window one views hundreds of suitcases. Jews were told they were being resettled, Jan said, and therefore brought what personal possessions they could carry along with them-toothbrushes, shoe polish, etc.--all of which are displayed in cabinets in the museum.

Another glass has walled-in piles of human hair. The Nazis experimented with using the hair in a number of ways, in making linens, for example. As evidence, a section of grey cloth with human hair as part of its fibres hung behind another protective glass barrier.

"Anus mundi"

So we made the rounds of the barracks, of the special punishment cells, where four men were packed together with scarcely enough room to stand, let alone lie down; past the cell block in which St. Maximilian Kolbe was starved to death, and which now contains a small plaque commemorating his martyrdom; past the "wall of death" between cell blocks 10 and 11, where thousands of prisoners, mostly Poles, were shot by the SS. "In the yard in front of block 11, SS men administered punishments in the form of flogging or hanging prisoners on a special stake by their arms, which were bent behind their backs," the guide-book tells us. In a state of increasing revulsion, we passed the gallows where, after the Allied victory, Commander Rudolf Hoss was hanged on April 16, 1947.

At Birkenau, railroad tracks lead directly past the brick walls into the compound. This was the last destination for hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were immediately dispatched on arrival to the gas chambers, into which darkness they were packed, naked, perhaps knowing the worst, perhaps still in a state of ignorance. Nazi doctor John Paul Kremer, quoted in the museum literature, called Birkenau the "anus mundi (the anus of the world).... Compared to this, Dante's Inferno appears almost a comedy."

The barracks in Birkenau are pitifully stark. Bare boards which slant downwards are bunks to hold eleven people; the latrines in which prisoners were given only a few moments to relieve themselves, bare holes in cement benches.

And then there are the gas chambers, long caverns of bare walls, and the ovens, squat and black, now covered with lit candles. Altogether several million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of these, well over one million were Jews from various countries but mostly from Poland, and the remainder, other Polish nationals, prisoners of war, and Gypsies.[*] It becomes increasingly harder for your mind to seize what occurred here; your imagination freezes in a natural state of self-protection. And at times, you experience a peculiar sensation of absolute cold, as if the veins in your arms are strung through with taut wires, instead of warm blood.

Field of crosses

I looked in vain for the controversial field of crosses at Auschwitz. Finally, I asked our guide. "I will show you," he said, and as we walked down

the path between the barracks, he pointed to a far brick wall. All that was visible, and then only barely, was the top of one large cross.

"How can I see the field?" I asked. "You have to go out of the camp, down and around the side," he said, gesturing in a way which encompassed the outer wall of the camp. "Do you think the government will remove the crosses?" I asked him, and he smiled wryly, shrugged and responded only, "It's a private field." (The Polish government did have the crosses removed eight months later, on May 28, 1999.)

The field, off to one side, is enclosed by a fence, with a gate on the front that was covered with signs in Polish. A trailer is parked just inside the enclosure. At my persistent yelling, a bearded man in a cowboy hat pokes his head out and yells truculently in Polish. I assume this was Kazmirierz Switon, who began the "campaign crosses" in mid-August 1998.

This is the site where the Carmelite convent was to have been built but, because of opposition, the nuns had made their home about a kilometre farther down the road. Currently, the plot of land has been leased to a non-profit "save the cross" group. A young Polish man, whose attention had been attracted by my attempts to communicate with Switon, scoffed at my ignorance. "Didn't you read about it in the papers?" he said, "The Jews have a lot of power. They want us to take the crosses down, but how can they tell us what to do? This is Poland."

Remembering the Shoah and Edith Stein

In its document on the Holocaust, or Shoah, released March 16, 1998, (Editor: for text, see C.I., July/August, 1998, pp. 30-35) the Vatican noted that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis clearly had its roots in neo-paganism and that the National Socialists' ideology was both a rejection of Christianity and a hatred of the Catholic Church. The Nazis "did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her members also". But the document also seriously addresses the question as to whether Nazi persecution of the Jews "was not made easier by anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts."

It is the Polish Pope who grew up not far from Auschwitz whose forthright statement is quoted in the document: "In the Christian world--I do not say on the part of the Church as such--erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability [for the death of Christ] have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility toward this people."

It is this same Pope who went forward with the canonization of Edith Stein despite Jewish protests and the cautions by ecumenists that such a move would be a mistake. Epraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem commented that Edith Stein's canonization "sends the worst possible message to Catholics all over the world--that is, that the Jews the Catholic Church likes the best, are those who have left Judaism." Other Jewish leaders expressed the fear that the canonization would lead to an "appropriation" of the Holocaust itself by making it seem that the Church, not the Jewish people, was the primary victim of Nazi genocide.

Leads to understanding

But the Pope, rather, regards the canonization of Edith Stein as an opportunity for Catholics to deepen their relationship with their Jewish brothers and sisters.

Edith Stein scholar Dr. Freda Oben, herself a Jewish convert to Catholicism, comments in the October 1998 issue of the magazine Inside the Vatican that, while Edith Stein's conversion is what "unhappily but understandably...wounds the Jewish community so intent on maintaining their faith, a knowledge of the true intentions of Stein, as well as that of the Church in recognizing her sanctity, would remove this fear."

The key to Edith Stein's thought, Dr. Oben points out, is "the spiritual formation of the person." Edith's expressed desire to give her life in atonement for the Jewish people "has been taken as a prayer for the conversion of the Jews...but she is actually praying that faith in God be professed by all--so that his kingdom will come in holiness."

It has been remarked that there is no evidence that Edith Stein exhorted her family or friends explicitly to leave the Jewish faith; rather, it was her life and witness, if anything, that drew them to investigate the truth of Christianity.

"In her inner heart," Dr Oben writes, Edith could well have wished "her beloved people to share in her joy and peace found in Christ. That could have been true of an ordinary person, and she is a saint. But we also have her philosophical and theological testimony concerning the value of each human being, and her certitude in God's redemption for the Jewish people."

The author is the managing editor of Catholic Insight. An earlier article entitled "Edith Stein on women," was published in Catholic Insight, June 1996.

*Editor's note 

The total figure for prisoners who died in Auschwitz (both camps) remains uncertain. Significantly enough, the little guidebook by Kazimierz Smolen, State Museum in Oswiecim, Auschwitz-Birkenau, printed in 1998, does not provide a figure. It mentions that camp records exist which contain information about approximately 400,000 people of different nationalities. It is not certain that all of these died. In addition, it is generally calculated that the crematoria in Birkenau devoured at least one million human beings, almost all Jewish.

After the Soviet armies occupied rather than liberated Poland in 1944, their propaganda apparatus claimed that as many as one million Soviet P.O.W.s had been gassed. Being secretive, they prevented others such as Polish or Jewish historians from getting to the truth.

Because of the enormity and scale of the massacre, Jewish sources first estimated that four million Jews had died in Auschwitz. But as new documents about other camps and new research about population transfers became available the figure was reduced to the modern calculation of one to one-and-a-half million Jews (Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg says one million).

In addition there are the 150,000 Polish P.O.W.s, of whom at least half died; at least 120,000 Russian P.O.W.s, but perhaps many more, of whom most perished; 23,000 Gypsies (their records were smuggled out of the camp); and, of course, many other Polish gentiles and Jews, and people from all over Europe.

Crosses at Auschwitz:

What would Edith Stein think of it all?

It seemed faintly ironic that at the time of Edith Stein's canonization in Rome, a controversy took hold at the place of her death over the symbol with which she united her life: the Cross. And after nearly a year of wrangling and standoffs, the crosses which stood in a field adjacent to Auschwitz were finally dismantled on May 28, 1999, by decree of the Polish government, and with the approval of the Polish bishops.

What was behind this unseemly protest? The "save the cross" campaign was initiated in August 1998 by Kazmirierz Switon. He called for the planting of crosses in the field in response to a rumour that Jewish groups were demanding the removal of a 26-foot "papal cross".

An agreement reached in March 1997 and signed in December of that year between Jewish leaders and Polish representatives stated that no religious, political or ideological symbols would be erected at Auschwitz. But the agreement exempted the papal cross, so dubbed because it was used by Pope John Paul II when he visited and said Mass at the infamous death camp in 1979, and which was later planted in the adjoining field in 1988. Some Jewish spokesmen expressed dissatisfaction with the exemption.

Mr. Switon's campaign attracted its supporters, and soon the field was dotted with over 300 crosses. His stated goal was 152, to remember that number of Polish soldiers executed there in 1941. Meanwhile, Jewish leaders protested to the Polish Catholic bishops and the government for the removal of the crosses. As in the case of the Carmelite convent, they finally appealed to the Vatican, but this time no statement from the Holy See was forthcoming.

The campaign captured media attention. Commentators noted that the controversy underscored the long-simmering tensions between Polish nationalists--revealing the darker side of this sentiment--and Jewish leaders intent on preserving Auschwitz as a memorial of the uniquely Jewish character of the Holocaust.

Society of St. Pius X 

One aspect of the controversy that has received little or no publicity is the support of the schismatic Society of St. Pius X for the "save the cross" campaign. The Society's founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991), rejected several Vatican II documents, particularly the document on the liturgy. He also repudiated the documents on religious freedom and ecumenism; he considered such efforts as both erroneous and a surrender to Protestantism. Archbishop Lefebvre was finally excommunicated in 1988 when he consecrated four bishops in direct opposition to a specific Vatican directive.

Today, the St. Pius X Society regards the Catholic Church as weak-kneed and as compromising the faith with all this ecumenical dialogue, including her conversations with the Jews. Thus, the situation with the crosses at Auschwitz was ripe for exploitation by the schismatics, who set themselves up as the true defenders of the faith. In their bulletin Communicantes, Father Karl Stehlin relates how members of the Society of Saint Pius X erected an 18-foot-high protest cross in the field on August 15, 1998. On the horizontal beam was inscribed: "Omnia Instaurare in Christo" [To restore all things in Christ]--the motto of Pope St. Piux X (1903-1914), whose name the schismatics have taken as their own.

Fr. Stehlin is critical of the effect of Nostra Aetate, the document on Jewish-Catholic relations issued after the close of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). He writes that "the conflict stirred by the Auschwitz crosses is a visibly emblematic sign of the most terrible crisis the Catholic Church has ever witnessed. At the core of the whole crisis is the contradiction between the traditional Catholic Faith and post-conciliar ecumenism. ..."

He stated that the Pius X Society "was only responding to the requests of the faithful who have felt themselves abandoned by their shepherds." Parenthetically, Poland's Catholic Bishops' Conference condemned the "schismatic activities" of the St. Pius X Society in a statement circulated nationwide in December 1998, and they warned that Catholics who support the Society could be excommunicated.

What would Edith Stein think of it all? It is perhaps as unwise to put thoughts in the mind of a saint as it is to try to "enter into" the horrors of Auschwitz. Yet we are not left to grope aimlessly for clues as to what Edith Stein did think about her people, among whom she counted herself and along with many of whom she died.

The hermeneutical key to her attitude towards Judaism is, according to Edith Stein scholar Fr. James Sullivan, OCD, the saint's treatment of her mother. Almost in anticipation of Nostra Aetate, Edith often voiced her conviction that her mother, a devout Jewess, was in heaven and interceding for her.

The famous dialogue between mother and daughter after Frau Stein had been advised of Edith's decision to enter the Carmelite order, while revealing the tenderness of the daughter, exemplifies the best of Catholic-Jewish relations. When her mother cried, "Then is it not possible for a Jew to be pious?" Edith responded, "Yes, if that is all he knows." As always, the truth had first claim on Edith Stein. And ultimately, she chose Christ above her beloved mother, leaving behind everything to go with Him. Paradoxically, Edith, who rejected her Jewish faith as a child, observed that "I did not begin to feel Jewish again until I returned to God."