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Najświętszego Serca Pana Jezusa
While waiting execution, Lieutenant Stefan Jasienski (1915–1944) carved this Sacred Heart of Jesus into the wall of his Section 11 cell at Auschwitz. In 1940 Jasienski had fled Poland after the German invasion and joined the Polish Home Army in England. In 1944 he was parachuted back into Poland near Auschwitz to establish contact with the resistance movement within the camp. He was captured, sent to Auschwitz, and shot at the Wall of Death in December 1944. Thirty-five years later, in 1979 Pope John Paul II celebrated mass just outside the walls of Auschwitz before more than a million Poles assembled in an open field adjacent to an abandoned theater building. An eight-meter high wooden cross was erected on a makeshift altar. During his sermon, the pope proposed that a place of prayer and penance be built at the site to honor the Catholic martyrs and to atone for the murders at the death camp. When in the autumn of 1984 a group of Carmelite nuns moved into the abandoned building, Jewish groups in Europe and the United States protested the Christianization of the Holocaust. Counter-protests by nationalistic Poles followed, and three hundred small crosses were planted in the open field. The controversy raged for fifteen years with the nuns in 1993 moving to new quarters further from Auschwitz and finally in 1998 removal of all the small crosses but making the papal cross permanent. The exact number murdered at Auschwitz by gassing, shooting, beating, starvation, overwork, and medical experimentation will never be known. The current best estimate—a benumbed calculation of humankind’s most inhumane atrocity—is 1.44 million European Jews, 146,000 Catholic Poles, 20,000 prisoners of war, mostly Soviet, and 23,000 Roma and Sinti. The Holocaust had many authors: anti-Semitism’s ancient insidious grip on European culture, the Nazi regime headed by Adolf Hitler, the German army, German industrialists, non-German collaborators throughout Europe, the silence of the church hierarchy both Catholic and Protestant, the willful ignorance among American officials, and the complicity of “average” European Christians, particularly in Germany, Poland, and other Central European countries. It is easy to say on this side of history, “I would have resisted,” “I would have hidden my Jewish neighbor.” Many who did were arrested, tortured, and executed. Pope John Paul II was right to recognize Catholic martyrs at Auschwitz, singling out Maximillian Kolbe (1894–1941), a Polish Franciscan brother who voluntarily took the place of a fellow inmate condemned to death. Like most of the minority who resisted, fighting solitary battles against a heartless dictatorship, little is known about Stefan Jasienski. His commando reconnaissance into Poland was heroic. Although for some the large cross looming over the ruins of this death camp is a symbol of repentance, for others it remains a belated and painful intrusion into what rightfully belongs to the tragedy of modern Jewish history. Jasienski’s small out of the way carving of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is perhaps a more propitious symbol of Christian presence and atonement at Auschwitz.
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