The Polish move came one day after police detonated explosives at a site where Kazimerz Switon, the Polish Catholic activist who led a campaign beginning last August to erect the sea of crosses, was staging a sit-in.
“We have to congratulate the Polish government and President Kwasniewski for their swift action,” Kalman Sultanik, the vice president of the Auschwitz Museum Council, said, referring to President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s signing last month of a bill that would set up protective zones around Auschwitz and other former Nazi death camps in Poland.
“This action will enable the Polish government to renew its dialogue with the Jewish community and Israel,” he said.
The controversy over religious symbols at Auschwitz is nothing new — and despite the burst of goodwill, the controversy over crosses is far from over.
In 1984, a Carmelite convent was installed flush against the Auschwitz camp’s northeastern wall. By 1988, Jewish groups were pressing for the convent to be relocated, which it was in 1993.
In 1988 a 26-foot “papal cross” reappeared, erected next to the convent as a sign of resistance. The large cross was originally erected for a mass Pope John Paul II held at Birkenau in 1979 that was attended by 300,000 Poles.
Despite a yearlong protest by Israel and Jewish groups, the papal cross will remain near Auschwitz — for now.
A coalition of Jewish groups that deals with Polish relations is scheduled to meet Monday in New York to discuss removal of the papal cross, according to Sultanik.
The position of the Jewish community, said Sultanik, remains firm: Religious symbols have no place at Auschwitz — “not crosses, not Stars of David, not anything.”
But, he added, the removal of the smaller crosses makes it likely that Jewish leaders will give the Polish government more time to remove the papal cross.