Today, Jan. 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz death camp. As we solemnly remember, it is important for world leaders to recognize that a major desecration is taking place in part of Auschwitz called Birkenau, or Auschwitz II. Of the 1.1 million human beings murdered in Auschwitz, about a million were Jews, and nearly all of them were murdered in Birkenau.
Right there, in a building that once served as the SS commandant’s headquarters, is a functioning church, with large crosses in front and atop the building. I have great respect for the places and symbols of worship of all religions — but a church does not belong in Birkenau. Its presence jeopardizes honest Holocaust memory.
With the death camps decaying, it won’t be long before all that remains in Auschwitz-Birkenau is the Birkenau church and its Christian symbols of worship. The world will then believe that the Holocaust was an attempt at Christian — primarily Catholic — genocide. In fact, there was no program to murder Christians because they were Christians. The Nazi program was to exterminate all Jews.
Over many decades, I, together with activist friends, have raised a voice of moral conscience, protesting these violations of memory. In 1989, we peacefully climbed the fence of the building in which Zyklon B canisters were stored at Auschwitz I, where Carmelite nuns had taken up residence and had announced that they were praying for the souls of those murdered in Auschwitz.
Although many criticized us for violating the space of a convent, we argued the reverse: the nuns were violating the sacred space of Auschwitz. In the end, our appeal and the appeal of millions around the world won the day: Pope John Paul II ordered the nuns to leave.
We protested at the Birkenau church as well, holding a sit-in during the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz back in 1995. Arrested, we were manhandled and taken at frighteningly high speeds to a Polish police station. A doctor demanded that we strip to the waist. Incredulously, I looked up at him and said, “Haven’t enough Jews been stripped in this place?”
With most survivors now gone, with my generation, the second generation, now aging, soon the greatest evidence of this horrific chapter of Jewish history will be the “mute voices” of what remains standing in the camps. With Auschwitz-Birkenau under the control of Poland, a country where antisemitism tragically continues to raise its ugly head, there is great concern that Shoah memory will be distorted. And so I offer here a bold but fair suggestion.
In France today, there are cemeteries containing thousands of heroic American soldiers who perished defending America, Europe and the Free World from the Nazi onslaught. These cemeteries are appropriately designed and maintained by the United States government.
In a similar vein, Israel, the place to which the majority of Holocaust survivors fled, where most of the Holocaust’s second and third generation live, and where half of world Jewry are now citizens, should become the “keepers of the camps,” especially the largest of them, Auschwitz, and most especially Birkenau. Israel should maintain them so that the ashes and memory of the Jews murdered there will be forever protected. History demands no less.
Visiting Auschwitz five years ago on the 75th anniversary of its liberation, we again raised our signs in front of the Birkenau church. Joining the throngs visiting from all over the world that day, we marched deep into the camp. Wherever we stood, we could see the gigantic crosses atop the Birkenau church casting their shadows over the camp, as if they were safeguarding the souls of the human beings murdered there — human beings who, as it happens, were, overwhelmingly, Jews. It shouldn’t be this way.
Whenever walking through Auschwitz, I felt I was hearing the voices of our sisters and brothers coming from the ground, calling out the words of Job — “O earth, do not cover up my bloods, let there be no resting place for my outcry.” Those bloods, those cries, are calling out more searingly than ever — do not forget us.
The Birkenau church should be moved to the nearby town of Brzezinka. To prevent any future confusion about who was murdered in Auschwitz, Israel, the Jewish state, should be charged to maintain the sacred space of Auschwitz — protecting the peace of the dead at the largest place of Jewish death in the world.
Weiss is founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale – the Bayit in the Bronx. His book “Defending Holocaust Memory” will be published this summer.