Auschwitz: Kolbe and Edith Stein

1. What Auschwitz Was

Auschwitz was a complex of German camps built and run by the SS between 1940 and 1945 on annexed Polish territory around the town of Oswiecim, roughly 65 kilometres west of Krakow. It began as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners and grew into the camp where the largest number of people were killed in the Holocaust. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which administers the ground today, states that at least 1.1 million people were killed there, about one million of them Jews, along with roughly 70,000 to 75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma, about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and some 10,000 to 15,000 people of other nationalities.

Casualty figures on this page, and the statement that more people were killed at Auschwitz than at any other camp, are those published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, resting on the research of the historian Franciszek Piper. This page carries no estimate of its own.

The first prisoners arrived on 14 June 1940, a transport of Polish men brought from the prison at Tarnow. For its first eighteen months the camp held Poles: members of the underground, teachers, priests, officers, people arrested in street round-ups. Mass killing by gas began with Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners in 1941, and from the spring of 1942 the site became the destination for Jewish transports from across occupied Europe. Trains came from Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Norway, Bohemia and Moravia, from the ghettos of Poland, and in the spring and summer of 1944 from Hungary, in a deportation carried out at extraordinary speed.

Most of the people brought to Auschwitz were killed within hours of arrival and never entered the camp records at all. Selection happened at the ramp. Those judged fit for labour were tattooed, numbered and worked; the rest, which meant the old, the sick, most women with children and the children themselves, were taken directly to the gas chambers. The scale of that arrangement is the single hardest thing for a visitor to hold in mind, because the buildings that survive are the buildings of the prisoners who lived a while. The buildings of the people who died the same day are ruins in a field.

The SS marched tens of thousands of prisoners west in mid-January 1945 as the Red Army approached, and soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army reached the camps on 27 January 1945 and found several thousand people still alive. The United Nations General Assembly designated 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005. The Polish parliament established the state museum on the site by an act of 2 July 1947, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1979, changing the inscribed name in 2007 to Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) to make the authorship of the crime unmistakable.

2. The Three Camps and the Ground Today

Auschwitz was three main camps and dozens of subcamps, and the two saints died in two different ones. Knowing which is which is the difference between standing in the right place and standing in a car park.

Kolbe died in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz I. Edith Stein was killed at Birkenau. The two places are about two miles apart and a visitor sees both in a single day, in that order, because that is the order the museum route runs.

The main camp on foot

Entry to Auschwitz I is under the wrought-iron sign reading Arbeit macht frei, made by prisoner metalworkers, the B set upside down. The original sign was stolen in December 2009 and recovered in Poland cut into three pieces; the museum holds the restored original and a replica hangs over the gate. Beyond it the blocks stand in rows, red brick, two and three storeys, with the double electrified fence around them and the guard towers still up.

Blocks 4 and 5 hold the exhibition the museum calls the material evidence of crime: the hair, the shoes, the suitcases with names painted on them, the prosthetic limbs, the empty Zyklon B canisters. Blocks 6 and 7 show how prisoners lived. Block 27 holds the exhibition on the Shoah prepared by Yad Vashem, opened in 2013, and several other blocks hold national exhibitions prepared by the countries whose citizens died here. Block 11 is at the far end of the second row, and beside it is Block 10, where women were held for the sterilisation experiments of Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann, its windows to the yard boarded so the prisoners could not see what happened between the two buildings.

Birkenau on foot

Birkenau is silence and distance. The brick gatehouse with the arch opens onto a rail spur laid into the camp in 1944 and a ramp where the selections happened in the last year. Before that spur existed, transports were unloaded at the Judenrampe, an older platform on the line between the two camps, where a memorial with freight cars now stands. Edith Stein arrived in 1942, which means she arrived at the older ramp, and walked from there.

Walking west along the length of the camp takes about twenty minutes. At the far end are the ruins of Crematoria II and III, dynamited by the SS in January 1945 and left as they fell, and between them the International Monument, unveiled in 1967, with plaques in more than twenty languages. Beyond and to the north lie the sites of the two converted farmhouses used as gas chambers in 1942, marked with low stones among the trees, and the ponds where ash was dumped.

3. Kolbe: From Niepokalanow to Prisoner 16670

Maximilian Kolbe arrived at Auschwitz on 28 May 1941 and was given the number 16670. He was a Conventual Franciscan priest, born Raymund Kolbe at Zdunska Wola in 1894, who had founded a Marian association in Rome in 1917 and built it into a publishing operation with a circulation across Poland. Our profile of Saint Maximilian Kolbe carries his life in full; this section covers only what brought him through the gate and what happened after.

The friary he founded in 1927 west of Warsaw was called Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculate. It printed a monthly, Rycerz Niepokalanej, and from 1935 a daily newspaper, and the community of friars living there grew very large. Kolbe spent the early 1930s in Japan, founding a friary on a hillside outside Nagasaki. He came back to Poland in 1936 and was superior at Niepokalanow when Germany invaded in September 1939.

The Germans dispersed the community and closed the presses. Kolbe was held briefly in 1939 and released, went back, and kept the friary going as a shelter for refugees expelled from the western provinces, among them Jews. He was arrested again on 17 February 1941 and taken to the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, and from there to Auschwitz at the end of May. The German campaign against the Polish Catholic clergy was systematic: priests were arrested in large numbers from the first weeks of the occupation, and most of the clergy sent to the camps ended up at Dachau, which held a dedicated priests' block. Kolbe went to Auschwitz instead, and was assigned to Block 14 and to labour hauling timber.

The escape and the selection

In the last days of July 1941 a prisoner went missing from Block 14. The camp's standing practice in such cases was collective reprisal. The deputy commandant, Karl Fritzsch, had the block paraded and selected ten men to be locked in the underground bunker of Block 11 and left to die of hunger and thirst. One of the ten, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish army sergeant, cried out about his wife and his children.

Kolbe stepped out of the rank, identified himself as a Catholic priest, and asked to take that man's place. The request was granted. Nothing in the camp's procedure required it to be granted, and there is no other reason for it than that Fritzsch allowed it. Gajowniczek went back into the ranks. Kolbe went down the steps into the basement of Block 11 with nine other men.

Gajowniczek survived the war, outlived his sons, and was in St Peter's Square when Kolbe was canonised in 1982. He died in 1995 at the age of ninety-three. For the rest of his life he told the story to anybody who asked, in Poland and abroad, and the reason the details of the selection are known at all is largely that he and other survivors of Block 14 gave testimony after the war.

4. Block 11 and Cell 18

Block 11 was the prison inside the prison, the building where the camp punished its own inmates, and prisoners called it the Death Block. It stands at the end of a row in Auschwitz I, and the visitor route goes in at ground level, through the rooms where the summary court sat, and then down a flight of stairs into the basement.

The basement held several kinds of cell. There were dark cells with almost no air, where men suffocated. There were standing cells, brick boxes about a square metre in floor area entered through a hatch at the bottom, in which four men were made to stand all night and go out to work in the morning. And there were the starvation cells, ordinary small rooms with a stone floor, where prisoners were locked in and given nothing at all.

Cell 18 is one of those. It is small, whitewashed, with a barred window high in the wall giving onto a light well. Kolbe was locked in it with nine other men at the end of July 1941. Accounts from the Polish prisoner who worked as an interpreter and orderly in the block, Bruno Borgowiec, and from other survivors describe the men praying and singing hymns in the cell, audible in the corridor, and the guards finding this unusual enough to remark on.

They died one by one over about two weeks. Kolbe was among the last still alive. On 14 August 1941 the camp needed the cell, and an orderly, Hans Bock, was sent down to administer an injection of phenol into the heart, which was the standard method of killing prisoners the SS wanted rid of quietly. Kolbe died that day. His body was burned in the camp crematorium the following day, 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, which is the reason his death is often described in Polish devotion in Marian terms.

What the cell looks like now

Cell 18 is left bare. There is a stone floor, plain walls, a memorial plaque, and usually a candle and fresh flowers left by visitors, along with an urn and a paschal candle associated with John Paul II, who came down to the cell and prayed in it during his visit in June 1979. Groups pause there, sometimes for a minute, sometimes longer. It is a narrow doorway with a queue behind it, and the honest experience of most visitors is a few seconds of looking followed by moving on.

Two things are worth knowing before you get there. The first is that the other nine men who went into that basement with Kolbe have no cult, no plaque of their own and, in most cases, no marked resting place; they were Polish prisoners condemned for somebody else's escape, and they died the death Kolbe volunteered for. The second is that Block 11's basement was used for years for many kinds of killing, and Cell 18 is one door among many in a corridor of them.

The Death Wall

Between Block 10 and Block 11, in a small enclosed yard, stands the wall where prisoners were shot, most of them Poles brought over from the summary court upstairs. The SS dismantled the original wall in 1944; what stands there now is a reconstruction placed by the museum. People leave flowers and candles against it. If you are walking out of Block 11 after seeing Cell 18, this yard is the next thing you see, and the two belong together: the same building, the same authority, thousands of deaths that produced no saint and no story.

5. Edith Stein: Breslau, Cologne, Echt

Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who became a Carmelite nun and was deported to Auschwitz as a Jew. She was born at Breslau, now Wroclaw in Poland, on 12 October 1891, the youngest of eleven children of an observant Jewish family, and she was born on Yom Kippur, a coincidence her mother treasured. Our profile of Saint Edith Stein covers her thought and her conversion; this section covers the road that ended at Birkenau.

She lost her religious belief in her teens and described herself thereafter as an atheist. She studied under Edmund Husserl at Gottingen and then Freiburg, took her doctorate in 1916 with a dissertation on empathy, and worked as Husserl's assistant. In 1921, staying at the house of her friend Hedwig Conrad-Martius, she picked up the autobiography of Teresa of Avila and read it through the night. She was baptised on 1 January 1922.

For a decade she taught, translated Newman and Aquinas, and lectured widely in Germany on the vocation of women. The Nazi laws of 1933 excluding Jews from public employment ended her teaching post. In October 1933 she entered the Carmel at Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She kept writing behind the enclosure, finishing Finite and Eternal Being and, at the very end, an unfinished study of John of the Cross called The Science of the Cross.

Echt and the bishops' letter

On the last night of 1938, weeks after the November pogrom, the Cologne community moved her across the border for safety to the Carmel at Echt in the Netherlands. Her sister Rosa, who had also been baptised, followed and lived at the convent as an extern.

In July 1942 the German occupation authorities in the Netherlands began deporting Dutch Jews. The Christian churches sent a joint telegram of protest. The Dutch Catholic bishops then had a pastoral letter against the deportations read from every Catholic pulpit on Sunday 26 July 1942. Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart answered the letter with a reprisal aimed precisely at the Church: on Sunday 2 August the SS arrested baptised Catholics of Jewish descent across the Netherlands, including religious in their convents.

Two SS men came to the Carmel at Echt that afternoon and gave the sisters minutes to leave. Witnesses at the convent reported that Edith took Rosa by the hand and said, "Come, let us go for our people." The two were taken to Amersfoort, then to the transit camp at Westerbork. Survivors of Westerbork later described her as composed and occupied with the children in the barrack. On 7 August a transport left Westerbork for the east. The Dutch Red Cross, reconstructing the fate of deportees after the war, recorded the death of Edith and Rosa Stein as 9 August 1942 at Auschwitz.

6. Birkenau in August 1942

Birkenau in August 1942 did not yet have the four large crematoria whose ruins visitors see today. Crematorium II, the first of them, began operating in March 1943. Through 1942 the killing was done in two brick farmhouses at the western edge of the site, requisitioned from their Polish owners, sealed up and fitted with gas-tight doors. The SS called them Bunker 1 and Bunker 2; prisoners called them the little red house and the little white house.

Transports arriving in the summer of 1942 were unloaded at the Judenrampe, the platform on the railway line between Auschwitz I and Birkenau. People selected for death were walked or driven from there through the camp to the farmhouses in the birch woods, made to undress in wooden huts among the trees, and killed with Zyklon B. The bodies were burned in pits nearby, and the ash was dumped in ponds and spread on the fields. Nothing about the arrangement was hidden from the prisoners who worked it.

That is where Edith Stein was killed. The record does not preserve which of the two bunkers took her transport, and no document names her individually at the site; the identification rests on the transport lists and on the Dutch Red Cross reconstruction. She has no grave, no ashes and no marked spot, which is true of the overwhelming majority of the people killed at Birkenau.

Where to stand

The sites of both farmhouses are marked at Birkenau with low memorial stones, reached by walking the length of the camp past the ruins of Crematoria II and III and continuing into the trees beyond Crematorium V. It is a quiet, ordinary patch of woodland and grass with a clearing and a pond. Groups rarely go that far, because the walk is long and the exhibition is behind you.

A Catholic who has come to Auschwitz for Edith Stein should understand that the honest place to stand for her is here, in an empty field, and that thousands of people were killed on that spot in the same weeks and by the same means. There is no shrine, and there should not be one. The absence is the point: she went into the anonymity of the Jewish dead, which is what she said she was doing when she walked out of the convent at Echt.

The rest of Birkenau's history

The camp went on for two and a half more years after her death. The four large crematoria were finished in 1943. In the spring and summer of 1944 the rail spur was extended through the gatehouse so that Hungarian transports could be unloaded within a few hundred metres of the gas chambers. On 7 October 1944 the Sonderkommando, the prisoners forced to work in the crematoria, rose in revolt and wrecked Crematorium IV; the women who had smuggled explosive out of the munitions factory were hanged in January 1945. The SS blew up the remaining crematoria as the Soviets approached and tried to burn the records.

7. Two Canonisations and the Argument About Martyrdom

Both saints were canonised by John Paul II, and both canonisations involved a real argument about what kind of saint they were. The arguments are worth knowing because they show the Church reasoning in public about how to name what happened at Auschwitz.

Kolbe: confessor or martyr

Catholic law reserves the title of martyr for someone killed in hatred of the faith. Kolbe was killed because he volunteered to take another prisoner's place after an escape, and the SS did not select him for his priesthood. On that reading he was a heroic confessor rather than a martyr, and that is how Paul VI beatified him on 17 October 1971.

John Paul II took a different view. At the canonisation on 10 October 1982 he declared Kolbe a martyr, using the phrase martyr of charity, arguing that the system that killed him was built on hatred of everything the faith holds about the human person, and that a death freely accepted in place of another within such a system is martyrdom in substance. Theologians have debated the reasoning ever since. The practical result is that Kolbe is honoured liturgically as a martyr on 14 August.

Edith Stein: killed as a Jew, honoured as a Christian

Edith Stein was beatified at Cologne on 1 May 1987 and canonised in Rome on 11 October 1998, as a martyr. Jewish critics objected at the time, and the objection deserves to be stated in its own terms rather than waved off. She was murdered because the German state defined her as a Jew, and her baptism gave her no protection whatever. To canonise her as a Christian martyr can look like the Church taking a Jewish victim of the Shoah and reclassifying her death as a Christian one, and doing so at a moment when Jewish memory of that murder was still raw and contested.

The Catholic answer is that she was arrested in a reprisal for the Dutch bishops' protest, which makes the Church's public act part of the causal chain, and that the Church honours her without denying for a moment that she died as a Jew. John Paul II's own homily and the later apostolic letter naming her a co-patroness of Europe on 1 October 1999, alongside Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, both name her Jewishness explicitly and refuse to treat her baptism as a departure from her people. Whether that answer satisfies is a question a Catholic visitor should be willing to sit with rather than argue away at the site.

8. Kolbe and the Presses at Niepokalanow

The presses Kolbe founded printed material hostile to Jews in the 1930s, and a page about Auschwitz that left this out would be dishonest. The friary published Rycerz Niepokalanej from 1922 and, from 1935, a cheap mass-circulation daily aimed at ordinary Polish Catholic readers. Historians working on the Polish Catholic press of that decade have documented articles in those pages carrying the standard tropes of interwar Polish nationalist antisemitism, including material about Jewish influence in commerce and public life.

Several things are true alongside that. Kolbe was in Japan from 1930 to 1936, so the daily's editorial line for part of the period was in other hands. His own signed writings speak of praying for the conversion of Jews rather than of harming them, which is itself a position modern Catholic teaching has moved away from, and it is a different thing from incitement. After the German invasion the friary sheltered refugees expelled from the west, including Jews, and he was arrested twice and died in the camp.

The fair summary is that both parts of the record stand. A man can hold and publish views that helped make his country's Jews into strangers, and can also step out of a line at Auschwitz and offer his life for a stranger. Insisting on only one half is what makes the argument about Kolbe so bitter. Polish Catholic devotion has often not wanted to hear the first half; some critics have wanted the second half to count for nothing. Read the whole record.

The content of the Niepokalanow press in the 1930s is a matter of published scholarly study of the interwar Polish Catholic press. This page gives no circulation figures and quantifies nothing, because the estimates in circulation vary and are contested.

9. Whose Place This Is

Auschwitz belongs first to the Jewish people, and every other claim on the ground sits under that fact. About a million of the people killed there were Jews, brought from every country the Germans could reach, and for most Jewish families in Europe the name means the place their relatives ended rather than a site in a history book. A Catholic who arrives with Kolbe and Edith Stein in mind is arriving at somebody else's grave with two names in hand.

The other groups of dead deserve naming too, because Catholic accounts often stop at the two saints and Jewish accounts sometimes stop at the Jewish dead. The Polish political prisoners were the camp's first population and thousands were shot at the Death Wall. The Roma were held in a family section at Birkenau and killed in the summer of 1944. Soviet prisoners of war were among the first people gassed there at all. There were Jehovah's Witnesses, men imprisoned for homosexuality, Poles taken in street round-ups, and prisoners from more than twenty countries.

What this means for a Catholic visitor

Three practical consequences follow.

• The saints do not organise the site. The museum route is built around the history of the camp and its victims as a whole. Cell 18 is one stop on it. A visit planned entirely around two Catholic deaths misreads the ground.
• Christian symbols carry weight here that they do not carry elsewhere. A cross at Lourdes is a cross. A cross at Auschwitz is a statement about whose place this is, and the history of the last forty years proves it.
• The right posture is guest, not host. You have not come to your own martyrs' shrine. You have come to a place where your co-religionists are a minority of the dead and where the Church has, in living memory, had to be asked to step back.

None of this is a reason for a Christian to stay away. Poland's own Catholic hierarchy has said repeatedly that Auschwitz must be visited and taught. It is a reason to go quietly. Our guide to the pilgrimage sites of central Europe places Oswiecim in the wider Polish route, alongside Jasna Gora at Czestochowa and the Kolbe friary at Niepokalanow, and it makes the same point in fewer words.

10. The Carmel and the Crosses

Catholic devotion at Auschwitz produced two public quarrels in living memory, and both are part of what a Christian visitor should know before arriving with a rosary and good intentions.

The Carmelite convent, 1984 to 1993

In 1984 a community of Carmelite nuns moved into a disused building just outside the perimeter of Auschwitz I, an old theatre that the SS had used during the war to store Zyklon B. The nuns' intention was contemplative reparation and prayer for the dead. Jewish organisations across Europe, the United States and Israel objected strongly: a permanent Catholic religious house at the edge of the camp, on a building associated with the gas, changed the meaning of the site and pulled a Jewish grave into a Christian frame.

Meetings in Geneva in 1986 and again in 1987 brought together European cardinals, among them Franciszek Macharski of Krakow and Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, with Jewish representatives. The agreement was that the nuns would leave the building within two years and move to a new centre for information, education, meeting and prayer built nearby. The deadline passed with the community still in place. In July 1989 Rabbi Avraham Weiss and a small group climbed the convent fence in protest and were removed, which turned a slow dispute into an international incident. The move was finally settled when John Paul II wrote to the community in 1993 asking them to go. They went, to a house a short distance away, and the centre agreed at Geneva was built.

The crosses at the gravel pit, 1988 to 1999

A large cross used at the papal Mass at Birkenau in 1979 was erected in 1988 in the gravel pit beside the old theatre building, ground where Polish prisoners had been executed. It stayed after the nuns left. In 1998, in the middle of the argument over Edith Stein's canonisation and over the future of that cross, a Polish activist called Kazimierz Switon and his supporters began planting further crosses in the gravel pit, eventually hundreds of them, in a campaign explicitly framed as defending Polish Catholic ground against Jewish claims. The Polish bishops distanced themselves. The Polish government removed the smaller crosses in May 1999 and left the original papal cross standing.

11. Popes at Auschwitz: 1979, 2006, 2016

Three popes have visited Auschwitz, and each visit set a pattern that a Catholic visitor can usefully imitate.

John Paul II, 7 June 1979

Karol Wojtyla had lived the German occupation as a young man in Krakow and studied for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary. He came back as pope in June 1979, on the journey that shook communist Poland, and celebrated Mass at Birkenau before an enormous crowd, with survivors in the front rows wearing their striped uniforms. He walked the memorial plaques at the monument and stopped at the one in Hebrew, saying that no one could pass that inscription with indifference. He spoke of the place as the Golgotha of the modern age. He also went down into Block 11 and prayed in Cell 18, which is the visit that put the paschal candle there. Our profile of John Paul II covers the wider pontificate.

Benedict XVI, 28 May 2006

Benedict XVI came as a German pope, which he named at once. He walked in through the gate on foot, met survivors, and spoke at Birkenau in Italian, saying that to speak in that place as a son of the German people was almost impossible and must be done. His address wrestled openly with the question of where God was, without offering a resolution. He did not celebrate a public Mass on the site.

Francis, 29 July 2016

Francis came during World Youth Day at Krakow and said nothing at all in public. He walked under the gate alone, sat in silence on a bench in the shade for a long time, met survivors and people honoured as Righteous Among the Nations, went down to Cell 18 and prayed there, and wrote a single line in the visitors' book asking for mercy and for the Lord to have pity on his people. No homily, no address, no crowd.

The trajectory across the three visits is toward less speech. That is the practical guidance most visitors need. Whatever you were going to say at Auschwitz, the pope who most recently went said nothing.

12. Visiting as a Christian

Visiting Auschwitz as a Christian is mostly a matter of restraint, and the museum's own rules and the history of the site both point the same way. The practical points below hold regardless of when you go, how you get there or what the arrangements are on the day, and this page deliberately carries no information about tickets, hours, transport or tours, because that information changes and the museum publishes it.

Before you go

• Read one survivor. Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Elie Wiesel's Night, or the testimony collections the museum publishes. Arriving with only Kolbe's story in your head produces a distorted visit.
• Know the plan of the site. Auschwitz I for Block 11 and Cell 18, Birkenau for the ramp, the crematoria and the sites of the two farmhouses. If Edith Stein is your reason for coming, the Birkenau half is the half that matters, and it is the half people cut short.
• Decide in advance not to photograph everything. Photography is restricted in some rooms and permitted in most, and permitted is not the same as fitting.
• Bring children only if they are old enough. The museum sets an advisory minimum age. Take it seriously rather than negotiating with it.

On the site

• Keep your voice down and your phone away. A common complaint about visitor behaviour is people treating the ground as a backdrop.
• Do not pose. Not on the rails, not under the gate, not at the Death Wall.
• Pray silently. A rosary in your pocket is fine. A group praying it aloud in the corridor of Block 11 while other visitors pass is an imposition, and at Birkenau it is more than that.
• Leave nothing permanent. Candles and flowers are left at Cell 18 and the Death Wall in an established way. Erecting or fixing any object anywhere on the site is not yours to do.
• Walk the whole of Birkenau. The distance is the information. Groups that stop at the gatehouse have seen a photograph.

After

Most people find the reaction comes later. Plan a quiet evening. Do not schedule a second sight for the same afternoon. If you are travelling as a parish or a school group, give people space to be silent rather than filling the coach with a debrief, and expect that some of the group will want to talk for hours and others will not want to speak at all.

If you are building a wider Polish itinerary around this, our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is is worth reading first, because Auschwitz sits awkwardly inside the ordinary idea of one. You are going to a grave and a crime scene rather than to a shrine, and the difference should shape the whole trip.

13. Praying at a Death Camp

Praying at Auschwitz is permitted, and the Catholic tradition offers a narrow set of things a Christian can honestly say there. The tradition also rules out several things people reach for, and knowing which is which prevents the sort of prayer that consoles the visitor at the expense of the dead.

What a Catholic can pray here

• Prayer for the dead. The Church prays for all the dead and commends them to the mercy of God, without presuming on the outcome and without claiming to know the state of any soul. Entrusting the dead of this place to God's mercy is an act of the ordinary Catholic tradition and it takes nothing from them.
• Repentance. Centuries of Christian teaching about Jews prepared the ground that the racial state built on. That is a matter the Church has stated publicly, and a Christian at Auschwitz has something to repent of that is not merely general human sinfulness.
• Silence. Standing still and saying nothing is a complete prayer. It is what Francis did.
• Psalms. The Psalms are the shared prayer of Jews and Christians and they were written for exactly this. Psalm 44 and Psalm 88 do not resolve anything, which is why they fit.

What to leave alone

• Any prayer that asks God to make the Jewish dead into something else. They died as Jews. Offering prayer that treats their Jewishness as a defect to be repaired is the exact move that has caused every quarrel on this ground.
• Public liturgy without the museum's arrangement. Mass is celebrated in connection with the site through established channels and in designated places. Improvising one in a barrack is not devotion.
• Explanation. The urge to say what the suffering was for, or what God was doing, is very strong and should be resisted out loud. Our guide to the Christian understanding of suffering works through the theology at length, and it is better read at home than deployed at Birkenau.
• Comparison. Comparing your own troubles to what happened here, even privately, even devoutly, corrodes the visit.

Jewish visitors say Kaddish at Birkenau, and if you hear it while you are there, stop walking and let it finish. That is the prayer of the people whose place this is.

14. What the Church Teaches After the Shoah

Catholic teaching about Jews and Judaism changed formally at the Second Vatican Council, and the documents since then are the frame in which the Church now speaks about Auschwitz. A visitor who knows them will understand why the popes behaved as they did on the site.

Nostra Aetate, 1965

The Council's declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, promulgated on 28 October 1965, devotes its fourth section to the Jewish people. It affirms the spiritual bond between the Church and the descendants of Abraham, states that what was done in the Passion cannot be charged against all Jews then living or against the Jews of today, and deplores hatred and persecutions directed against Jews at any time and by anyone. The Catechism carries the same teaching, stating at paragraph 597 that responsibility for the death of Jesus cannot be laid on the Jews as a people, at paragraph 839 that the Jewish people were the first to hear the word of God, and at paragraph 121 that the Old Covenant has never been revoked.

We Remember, 1998

The Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews published We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah on 16 March 1998. It calls the Shoah an unspeakable crime, examines the long history of Christian anti-Jewish teaching and asks whether it made Christians less resistant to the racial persecution, and it ends with an act of repentance for the failures of Christians. The document was criticised by many Jewish readers as drawing too sharp a line between Christian anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism and as protecting the wartime record of the Holy See. That criticism is on the record and a Catholic should know it exists.

Acts as well as texts

John Paul II visited the Great Synagogue of Rome on 13 April 1986, the first such visit by a pope in the modern era, and spoke of Jews as elder brothers. In March 2000 he prayed at Yad Vashem and left a written prayer of repentance in the Western Wall. Benedict XVI and Francis both visited synagogues and Yad Vashem in turn. Our guide to Judaism sets out Jewish belief and practice in its own terms and then explains the Catholic relationship to it, and it is the right background reading for this visit.

None of that undoes anything. It is the Church's own account of where it now stands, and standing in the yard of Block 11 is a good place to know what your own communion has said.