Auschwitz cross protester held

POLISH POLICE raided the campsite of a Catholic protester at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp yesterday. Arriving at dawn, 200 police and interior ministry troops removed about 300 crosses he had erected over the past 11 months.

The leader of the Polish Catholic group, Kazimierz Switon, was arrested on Thursday after explosives were found at the site. Mr Switon had said he had mined the area. Police detonated the devices in a controlled explosion.

A single large cross associated with the Pope, who is Polish, was left at the site to defuse anger over the removal of the other crosses. The raid, eight days before the start of a Papal visit to Poland, follows the passing of a law that makes zones around the sites of Nazi death camps "protected areas".

The dispute over the Auschwitz crosses concerns historical memory, a sensitive subject in Eastern Europe. Jewish and Polish groups have swapped accusations that each minimises the other's losses under Nazi occupation. More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz, 90 per cent Jews. The crosses were installed in memory of Polish intellectuals who also died.

The time had come to stop trading statistics, said Jerzy Wroblewski, director of the Auschwitz museum. "The Jewish people consider Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust, where the extinction of the Jews was carried out. The Poles consider this a place of national martyrdom and national memory. Both of them are right," he said.

"The first prisoners were Poles, and Auschwitz was created to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia. Only later did it become a place of Jewish extermination. It would be good if this difference in symbols could be understood in a natural way. I cannot see why there is a need to compare tragedies. Auschwitz was an unimaginable tragedy for both nations."

Polish government officials and Church leaders had opposed the field of crosses, fearing that it merely confirmed the old stereotype of Poland as anti-Semitic. Post-Communist Polish governments have made strenuous efforts to repair relations with Jewish groups and Israel. Mainstream opinion in the Catholic Church favours dialogue and rapprochement with Jewish groups.

Jerzy Kichler, the head of Poland's small Jewish community, welcomed the police raid but said that the issue of the Papal cross still had to be resolved. "According to our tradition we cannot pray in front of any symbols. The problem remains how we can pray at Auschwitz, which represents the whole Holocaust."