Auschwitz adds to U.S.-EU friction

Auschwitz adds to U.S.-EU friction

By Judy Dempsey
International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, January 26, 2005

BERLIN To the long list of what separates the United States and Europe these days, add the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, to be marked Thursday in a solemn ceremony that will bring together almost all of Europe's most important leaders, but not President George W. Bush.

For some prominent Poles, the attendance of Vice President Dick Cheney is a bitter disappointment. The Auschwitz ceremony will include President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Horst Köhler of Germany, President Jacques Chirac of France and President Moshe Katzav of Israel.

Although Auschwitz holds very different associations for each of these leaders - Putin represents the liberator, Katzav the victim and Köhler the perpetrator - the passage of time and the immense changes in Europe since communism crumbled in 1989 have allowed all three to share this anniversary.

Some believe the American president should be part of this occasion, which they see as a symbol of Europe's enlargement and its decision, after World War II, to renounce war and national sovereignties in favor of a still uncertain experiment in unity.

"I would like to see the president of the United States attend the liberation of the Auschwitz commemoration," said the distinguished Polish medieval historian Bronislaw Geremek, a former dissident, foreign minister and now member of the European Parliament.

"Auschwitz represented the end of the totalitarian regime," Geremek said in a telephone interview from New York, where he was part of the Polish delegation attending the first United Nations ceremony to commemorate the Holocaust.

"The role of the United States was enormous in ending this regime," Geremek said. "It is natural that a president of the United States should be present."

In Washington, a senior administration official was asked Tuesday about Bush's decision not to attend and replied that the president "sent one of his closest confidants to attend that very important ceremony." The official added: "He's been to Poland. He was just there last year."

Without the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after 1945, Western Europe would have been far less able to resist the Communist influence that swept across Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. Without the foresight and persistence of Dean Acheson, then secretary of state, France, Germany and Italy might never have founded the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor of today's European Union.

Yet veteran intellectuals such as Geremek say that with the passing of time, Auschwitz has come to play an increasingly important role in forging a kind of European identity almost separate from the United States. Geremek is among those who go so far as to see the liberation of this Nazi death camp as one foundation of the European Union.

"I do believe that we should consider Auschwitz as one of the founding events of the international community and the European Union in the sense that the United Nations, 60 years ago, was a response to the experiences of the Holocaust," said Geremek. "And it should be said that the Holocaust helped to create the European Union. It was the answer to the totalitarian ideology created on European soil, such as Auschwitz."

Even 10 years ago, at the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, the idea that the death camp would become part of Europe's collective memory was hardly conceivable. Michael Melchior, chief rabbi of Norway, a member of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament, and recently appointed Israeli deputy minister for education and culture, said he has been surprised by the big changes that have taken place in Europe.

"Something has happened in the past few years where the leaders of Europe have understood that they can't avoid looking towards Auschwitz," Melchior said by telephone from his office in Jerusalem. "It is becoming part of the European reference and no decent leader can avoid this."

Melchior, prominent in Jewish and ecumenical movements throughout Europe to promote understanding of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and crimes against humanity, said several factors helped to change European attitudes toward the Holocaust.

The first was the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which ended the cold war and the division of Europe. Until 1989, the former countries of Eastern and Central Europe had little idea about the legacy and role played by the large Jewish communities that had perished during the Holocaust.

Poland and other former Communist countries had no opportunity during the cold war years to embrace the Holocaust as part of their collective memory. During that time, the Kremlin supported Arab states and cultivated a climate of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, while the United States forged an ever closer alliance with Israel. As late as the 1960s, the Communists in Poland started a vicious campaign against the Jewish community, which numbered less than 30,000, in a bid to stamp out dissent.

In many cases, it was not until the 1980s that survivors in these countries started speaking about their experiences to their grandchildren, who had, if at all, only the vaguest idea about Jewish culture or identity. Only after 1989 could Moscow's former satellites openly address their own past.

"You must remember that during the 1990s, there was a new generation that knew nothing about the Holocaust," said Melchior.

During the 1990s, restitution of Jewish property showed this generation that Jews were not only killed, but also robbed. Then, said Melchior, there was the gradual "upgrading of anti-Semitism," with leaders in Europe taking Holocaust education and anti-Semitism more seriously.

George Schoepflin, a Hungarian political scientist who was elected to the European Parliament last year, agrees that the recent changes across Eastern Europe have influenced how Auschwitz is now viewed.

"It took the Poles some time after 1991 to decide whether Auschwitz should be a universal site, or one the Poles would appropriate," said Schoepflin.

"There has been an enormous contest for its symbolic value. Is it to be a European symbol of repentance or primarily a Jewish symbol of identity? The Poles now understand they cannot appropriate the site. The site, in ways, belongs to everybody in Europe."

In part, this is because of the slow but persistent enlargement of Europe, which went from 15 to 25 countries last May, bringing in the Baltic states and five other former Communist countries.

"Europe is becoming more inclusive, where the role of historical memory is being shared," said Klaus Becher, a German-born European security expert and founder of the London-based Knowledge and Analysis think tank.

The EU, Becher said, is not embarking on "some kind of general mission about how to deal with the past or how to impose the past. But it is very important to foster memory. In that sense, Europe, or the EU, is becoming more inclusive. Auschwitz is about the extermination of the weak and racial hatred."

Melchior said the enlargement of the EU is helping to "Europeanize the memory of the Holocaust." Schoepflin called this a very slow process, but noted that "you can sense some of the changes. If you are going to have some kind of European identity, you need some kind of European memory."