A macabre circus has come to the sleepy corner of the Polish town of Oswiecim. Cars and tourist buses whiz past, their passengers stretching for a glimpse of the spectacle. On the pavement, the supportive and the curious meander beneath the baking midday sun, eager to see for themselves what the fuss is all about. A portable television studio has arrived in the hope of catching a stunt-loving mediasavvy New York rabbi, rumoured to be en route.
Towering above them all stands the main attraction, a 26-foot "papal" wooden crucifix planted deep in cement amid a burgeoning field of smaller crosses against the blood-chilling backdrop of a wooden look-out post and an ageing concrete wall topped with rusted barbed wire. This is the perimeter of Auschwitz I, the founding element of the AuschwitzBirkenau death factory, infamous home of the Holocaust and the resting place of some 1.5 million victims, an estimated 90 per cent of them Jewish.
The result of this awkward juxtaposition is an international conflict that has reverberated around Jerusalem, Washington and Warsaw, set back what were improving Polish-Jewish relations by years, and revealed afresh a stubbornly resistant vein of anti-Semitism in Poland. One American Jewish organisation is proposing an international boycott of Poland. Israel's two chief rabbis have called on Pope John Paul II to personally intervene.
Behind the sharpening fracas proudly sits Kazimierz Switon, a veteran nationalist who is threatening to douse himself in kerosene and cast the match if the Church does not categorically state in writing that the central "papal" cross will not ever be moved to appease Jewish opposition.
More than 220 further crucifixes now stand in its "defence" - beech, flimsy plywood, each scrawled with the name of its donor. Many are adorned with rosary beads or crudely moulded plastic christs. All have been brought in response to Switon's call for one to be planted in memory of each of 152 Polish Catholics executed at this war-time gravel pit by Nazi soldiers in 1941.
"I'll set myself on fire. If they try to move that cross, I'll bind myself to it and they can pull me out with it," crows the bearded 67-year-old, sitting with his henchmen amid a pile of garden furniture. "If they allow this cross to be moved, then Poland no longer exists. Jews want to imprison our nation, make slaves of us. Eighty per cent of our politicians are Jews or, worse still, Jewish servants destroying the Polish nation at their command."
Not the Polish Catholic primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, nor even the Pope can persuade him to end his protest now. He says: "The Church is us, the rank-and-file, not the hierarchy. I have the support of the people." That support includes a group of shaven neo-Nazis from the Polish city of Wroclaw who were the latest to take their turn in erecting a cross amid the ever more cluttered field. It also includes the ageing, who prop up their rusty bicycles, and cluster in song under parasols outside the gravel pit's perimeter fence for daily prayer in defence of the cross.
Among them is Maria Jadziala, (76), a lifelong inhabitant of Oswiecim. She remembers the putrid smell of burning bodies from Birkenau, when the Nazis chose to burn the bodies of Jews in open mass graves, so overworked were the crematoriums.
Despite such first-hand experiences, she paces the pavement, fuming that the Jews could launch what she sees as an all-out attack on Poles' most precious cultural symbol: "These crosses are our symbol, our faith, our fatherland." The support also includes Jan Bartula, Switon's vitriolic sidekick, who offers guides of the site to visiting journalists to whom he delivers a carefully rehearsed, face-contorting rant.
"You're standing on Polish soil soaked with the blood of murdered Polish patriots," he bellows. "No one's going to tell us how big this cross is going to be, be it two metres or eight. When Jews talk of the Holocaust, I ask myself why there were 17 colonels, majors and generals of Jewish origin in the SS," he spits. To him, Bolsheviks, capitalists, they are all simply Jews.
The conflict over the crosses is a spill-over from an earlier clash between Poles and world Jewry over the presence of a Carmelite order of nuns in a building immediately adjacent to the gravel pit. After the personal intervention of the Pope, the nuns were eventually persuaded to vacate the site in 1993, but not before the now famous 26-foot crucifix, a legacy of a 1979 papal mass, had been imported to the site in a marked sign of defiance towards Jewish organisations.
Despite the cross's presence at the gravel pit, in the years that followed there appeared signs of a thaw in traditionally frosty PolishJewish relations, with Poland at last demonstrating that it could act as a dispassionate custodian of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. What promised to be a divisive dispute over the construction with German money of a supermarket opposite the main entrance to the Auschwitz museum was defused when the developers were persuaded to build a visitors' centre.
Then, in December last year, another simmering conflict ended with the removal of crosses and other religious symbols from the Birkenau death camp in belated compliance with a 1978 UNESCO accord on the Auschwitz-Birkenau site. Better Catholic-Jewish relations were being fostered in the meantime by a Polish Pope's instigation of a debate on historic antiSemitism within the Catholic Church, and the establishment both in Poland and elsewhere of new channels of communication between Judaism and Catholicism.
It was in this new spirit of tolerance that, earlier this year, a government official responsible for contact with the Jewish Diaspora suggested the gravel-pit cross would be moved in deference to Jewish sensitivities. The response from the nationalist Catholic constituency was thunderous.
Daily prayers were hastily organised at the site of the cross. In mid-March, some 400 protesters registered their outrage in Warsaw.
Political support was lent by Solidarity veteran Lech Walesa, as well as 130 Catholic MPs who signed a petition demanding the cross stay put.
Yet it was an uncompromising Sunday sermon by the hot-blooded Polish primate, Cardinal Glemp, which truly set the heart-rates of Jews racing. "The Polish people were crucified on the cross," he told his congregation. "That's why they love that cross, that symbol of love in suffering, whether it be in the Gdansk shipyard, Warsaw, or in Auschwitz . . . the Eiffel Tower is not liked by everybody, but that's no reason to move it."
Poland's chief rabbi, Menachem Pinchas Joskowicz, responded immediately: "Auschwitz is the place where my family perished, my fellow prisoners - my nation died there," he said, adding that Judaic law forbade Jews from praying in the sight of the cross. The cardinal, he said, "must respect the Jewish religion".
The country's Solidarity-led government, dependent on support from right-wing Catholic MPs in parliament, firmly buried its head in the sand and said it was a matter for the Church. A dignified way out of the conundrum may have been found even then, were it not for the arrival at the site of Switon. An anti-communist veteran who created his own free trade union in 1978, the Silesian-born radical has struggled in independent Poland to find his own place in mainstream politics, flirting with a number of ultra right-wing fringe groups. In 1995, he attracted much attention when he published a list in which he "unmasked" Polish politicians of Jewish origin.
The dispute over the cross offered him a direct route back into the limelight and a unique chance to hijack a quasi-religious debate on symbols and rally around the many malcontents of the new capitalist Poland to an age-old anthem of Jews in the woodwork plotting against an often-duped nation. He set up camp on June 14th, and if his 42-day hunger strike failed to catch the world's attention, his call for the planting of 152 more crosses at the gravel pit certainly did.
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum branded it a provocative act by extremists. Then came word of a request for the removal of all crosses from the site from the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Cardinal Glemp went wading in once more: "This land is Polish and attempts by others to impose their will is seen as impinging on the sovereignty of the country," he gushed, adding that escalating tension over the cross resulted from "continual molestation from the Jewish side".
A few days later, thanks, some say, to a rumoured word from the Pope himself, a newly remorseful Glemp was recanting his words as it appeared to have at last dawned on both Church and state what considerable damage the dispute was doing to Poland's international reputation.
In late August, the Polish Episcopacy demanded all crosses erected during Switon's campaign be removed. The crosses, the Polish Church's highest council said, amounted to political provocation and "compromised both the memory of those murdered and the good name of the Church and the nation, in the meantime painfully wounding the sensitivities of our Jewish brothers".
The government, meanwhile, used a legal loophole to revoke the tenancy rights to the disputed site of Mieczyslaw Janosz, the man who had willingly granted Switon and his colleagues the right to set up camp under the cross. None of this, however, amounts to a resolution of the conflict just yet. The government - ever more dependent on back-bench support from Catholic nationalists - appears reluctant to sanction the forcible eviction of Switon and his crosses from the site, despite majority public support for him to go.
Nor are there signs that the increasingly unwelcome international debate is likely to evaporate, even once the radicals are gone. Both Poland's ecclesiastic and secular authorities have taken the opportunity recently to re-state their opposition to digging up the original 26-foot "papal" cross - the core of Jewish discomfort. As the country's chief rabbi has said, to AuschwitzBirkenau's Jewish victims, "it doesn't matter whether it's one cross or a thousand".
Jan Parcer, deputy leader of the Christian Association of Auschwitz Families, an organisation that groups together Catholic survivors of the Nazi camp, is just one Pole who has become deeply saddened by the whole sordid affair.
"Auschwitz should be a place of pilgrimage, where younger generations can learn. It should be about bringing people together, not about fighting," he says. "No one should be allowed to make a circus out of a cemetery." Scorning all condemnation from his deckchair and tent, Kazimierz Switon remains, for now, the star-struck ringmaster.