several conflicts over attempts to
make commercial use of sires associ-
ated with Holocaust suffering. In
1996, for example, plans for a mini-
shopping center near Auschwitz were
halted after Jews protested that it
would desecrate the memory of
Holocaust victims.
But officials in Oswiecim for years
have been trying in a variety of other,
less confrontational ways to assert an
independent identity for the city and
pull the town, its history and its cul-
tural associations out from under the
dark shadow of Auschwitz.
A city guidebook published several
years ago, for example, concentrates
on the general history of the town
and devotes less than a fifth of its 75
pages — and just one of its more
than a dozen illustrations — to the
death camp or World War II period.
Likewise, the cover of a city map
features an idyllic view of Oswiecim's
castle overlooking the Sola River.
The need of Oswiecim to assert its
own identity — and the hope that the
new Jewish center could help do this
by focusing attention on the city itself
— was a prominent motif in the
speeches of Polish authorities at the
Auschwitz Center dedication.
"The synagogue has been resurrect-
ed after 61 years of nonexistence," said
local Bishop Tadeusz Rakoczy. "It is in
Oswiecim, not Auschwitz. The history
of Auschwitz and the crimes there was
ended, I hope forever, 55 years ago.
"Today we are in Oswiecim. It is not
only a place where there were victims,
but the town itself also became a vic-
tim of history. It needs to break free
from the vicious Auschwitz."
Mayor Krawczyk welcomed the new
center and new Jewish presence as a
means of education and local reconcil-
iation, but also as a way to draw out-
side visitors to the town itself, not just
to the Auschwitz camp.
Indeed, the Auschwitz Jewish
Center's organizers said that in the
past four months the center had about
5,000 visitors, even though it was not
formally open.
They said they expected tens of
thousands of visitors to eventually visit
the site, which would make the center
by far the most visited site in the town
proper.
But Krawczyk urged Jews and others
to be sensitive to the town's identity
problems and its day-to-day economic
and social problems.
Indeed, as he spoke, a line of unem-
ployed people waited to receive benefit
payments from an office in a building
next to the new Jewish center.
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