Convent at Auschwitz - Softcover

Władysław Bartoszewski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0906097126 ISBN 13: 9780906097120

Publisher: Bowerdean Publishing Co Ltd, 1990

About this title

From Library Journal

Bartoszewski (history, Warwick Univ.) provides a detailed account of the controversial Carmelite convent that appeared suddenly at the very gates of Auschwitz in 1984. In an effort to present both the Jewish and the Polish sides of the conflict, he begins by tracing the turbulent history of the Jews on Polish soil from the 10th century to the present while concurrently explaining the role of Catholicism in Poland. Bartoszewski then details the itemized story of American-Jewish efforts to get the convent relocated, and the Polish-Catholic opposition to that effort. Both fruitful talks and angry confrontations are present. There are harmful words by Cardinal Glemp and Prime Minister Shamir. All the information is recorded in a scholarly, textbook-like fashion and should be studied by anyone who is interested in this historic encounter. If Bartoszewski's book is the textbook to the controversy over the Auschwitz convent, then Rittner and Roth's collection of essays is exegesis to that text. Contributors are Holocaust scholars and scholars in other appropriate fields, which provides a look at the memory of Auschwitz through the lens of several disciplines. Among the essayists for Part 1, "The History and Politics of Memory," are Richard Rubenstein and John Pawlikowski; for Part 2, "The Psychology of Memory," Leo Eitlinger and Hermann Langbein; and for Part 3, "The Theology of Memory," Albert Friedlander and Robert McAfee Brown. There are many new ideas here, and much can be learned from this timely, scholarly, and exciting work.
-Gerda Haas, Lewiston, Me.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A well-documented, thought-provoking study of the international and interreligious brouhaha over the convent of Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz. The Polish-born and Cambridge-educated scholar Bartoszewski (Modern European History/Warwick Univ.) brings the impartiality of a social anthropologist to a controversy that is fraught with passion, bias, and irreconcilable theological differences. In 1984, Carmelite nuns moved into a vacant building in Osweiecem, Poland, to devote themselves to prayer near the martyrdom site of thousands of Poles, political prisoners and the ``saved'' soul of Sister Benedictina of the Cross. Many Jews saw the identical event differently: as Christians invading a zyclon B storehouse at Auschwitz to insult the memory of the hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews, including the ``lost'' soul of Edith Stein. Bartoszewski presents a thorough, chronological rundown of the many charges and countercharges, as well as of the confrontational and conciliatory gestures by the B'nai B'rith, the Vatican, Cardinals Glemp (Poland) and O'Connor (US), and Rabbis Weiss (US) and Sirat (France). Analytical insights to complement the research include the effects on the crisis of the Polish Communist government and the Claude Lanzmann film Shoah. Bartoszewski significantly records not just the details and quotations flung from one camp to the other, but he writes more deeply of ``Jews and Poles [struggling] to preserve conflicting and essential views of history grounded in the same place.'' -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bowerdean Publishing Co Ltd
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0906097126
• ISBN 13: 9780906097120
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English