Half a century on, Poland's Jews still suffer at Auschwitz

Adrian Bridge in Cracow explores the controversy over this week's comme moration of the Nazis' victims

The haunting strains of an old Yiddish folk song filled the air of Renata Zisman's modest Cracow apartment. It was a song she had learnt in her youth: from her murdered mother and father.

On the wall, a large black and white photograph showed Mrs Zisman in her early thirties. She was once a strikingly beautiful brunette. But like the sounds now crying out to a world forever gone, the eyes in the photograph conveyed an overwhelming sorrow.

"I wish I had been born somebody else," she said quietly. "I wish my life had not been so full of sadness; that once in a while I had been able to laugh."

Like all Auschwitz survivors, Mrs Zisman, now in her early seventies, is still suffering. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Red Army. But there has not been one day when she has not relived its unspeakable horror. Frequently unable to sleep, she recalls those condemned to die and the sadistic beatings meted out by the SS and the Kapos, their prisoner henchmen. She recalls 3.30am roll-calls, having her head shaved, the lice, hunger and the constant fear that life could end at any time.

In the late summer of 1944, when the gas chambers were working at their peak, Mrs Zisman faced one of the infamous "selections". Instead of being set aside with those judged fit to work, she and her sister, Elizabieta, were put in the group to be dispatched to the chambers. Waiting, naked, the two sisters hugged each other desperately and then cried hysterically. But for some reason they were spared. Later an older prisoner told them there had been a problem with the delivery of the lethal Zyclon B gas pellets.

"God, fate, chance, destiny saved me," said Mrs Zisman, one of the tiny minority of Jews who survived Auschwitz - her parents died in another camp - and one of the even tinier minority that then remained in Poland. "But I am not sure it was a good thing."

After the Nazis overran Poland in the autumn of 1939, they began looking for a location for a concentration camp to house the thousands of Polish "political" prisoners they were rounding up. In the southern town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz), they found a barracks fitting the bill. Situated well outside the town, it could easily be expanded - and remain isolated. It was also situated on an important railway junction.

The first batch of 728 prisoners arrived in June 1940. The numbers soon swelled to 15,000 and terror was refined. In addition to summary executions and brutal floggings, there were starvation cells, darkness cells and standing cells, 90cms (3ft) square, where prisoners had to remain upright all night. Building started on a larger complex at nearby Birkenau, later called Auschwitz II, - the biggest single killing field in history.

The convoys of Jews began in 1942, the year that started with the Wannsee Conference in Berlin at which the Final Solution of the "Jewish problem" was worked out to the last detail. There were many death camps in the Holocaust - Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek - but nowhere did the killing assume the scale of Auschwitz.

Between the first convoy from the Netherlands that July to the last in late 1944, an estimated 1.1 million Jews were sent there, the vast majority of whom were gassed on arrival. They came from as far afield as Norway and Rhodes, but the greatest numberswere from Poland (300,000) and from Hungary (438,000).

During the height of the Holocaust as many as 20,000 Jews a day were crammed into the gas chambers. Even working flat out, the crematoria could not handle the corpses: many were burned on huge pyres. The stench was unbearable.

When the Red Army overran Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 many traces of the exterminations had been erased. All four gas chambers and crematoria in the Birkenau complex had been blown up. In some partially destroyed rooms, the troops found 43,000 pairs of shoes, seven tons of human hair, and countless toothbrushes, glasses and cooking pots.

The enormity of the crimes usually renders visitors to the on-site museum, set up in 1947, speechless, yet there has always been controversy surrounding its legacy. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Soviet investigators declared that four million people died at Auschwitz, which the Polish Communist authorities clung to until 1989, despite the fact that more thorough research indicated the number to be closer to 1.1 million.

Much more controversially, the museum failed to acknowledge that about 90 per cent of those killed were Jews. Plaques and memorials referred to the generalised "victims of fascism" and emphasis was placed on Polish and Soviet prisoners.

In 1984 an ugly dispute arose between Jews and the Catholic Church after Carmelite nuns established a convent outside the camp fence. Nine years later, only a papal intervention persuaded the nuns to move: to a new Catholic ecumenical centre 500 metres away.

Almost unbelievably, a row broke out over the plans for the 50th anniversary of the liberation. According to many Jewish survivors, the programme of events devised by the office of President Lech Walesa fails to take into account the scale of Jewish suffering . In addition to having a ecumenical flavour, the official programme fails to give enough prominence to Jewish speakers, they say. The final straw was that the most important official ceremony has been scheduled for Friday - the eve of t he Sabbath, when religious Jews must be home by sunset - and does not allocate time for Jewish prayers for the dead.

Underlying the dispute are long-standing Jewish claims of Polish anti-Semitism. Jews point out that after the war many Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust were expelled. Only 7,000 Jews now live in Poland, compared with a pre-war population of 3.5 million.

The Poles accuse the Jewish representatives of trying to stir up old disputes and of acting out of "personal ambition" and many admit that they believe Auschwitz should be seen as more than simply a memorial to the Jewish dead. "We too suffered enormously in the camp," said Tadeusz Zaleski, a Polish survivor living in Cracow. "I think it is wrong to say Auschwitz is synonymous with the Holocaust. It was more complicated than that."

Many Christian Poles see Auschwitz as the place where most of the brightest members of their society were murdered. Of the 150,000 Poles held there between 1940 and 1945, 75,000 were killed. Other victims included 20,000 gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 25,000 people of other nationalities. "None of us disputes that others suffered at Auschwitz," said Mrs Zisman. "But nobody suffered as we did." That, say Jewish groups, is the point, and it should be acknowledged unequivocally.

Health allowing, Mrs Zisman hopes to visit the camp during the commemorations planned for Thursday and Friday. She will probably go on the first day, when a Jewish ceremony has been arranged at Birkenau. Friday's ceremony, to be attended by heads of state and Nobel Prize winners, she will probably watch on television.

As to who stands where and who speaks when, she is disgusted. "It is unbelievable, if ever there was an event that should have been arranged in complete dignity, calm and respect, this was it.''