Will Heaven

Originally published in The Catholic Herald - 10th January, 2010 edition

Perhaps I should have carried on with the leftovers of Christmas television. Or hunted down a board game. But instead, with a few friends, I sat down last week to watch The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, a film (based on the book by John Boyne) about the family of a Nazi concentration camp commandant who, though the place is not explicitly named, has recently taken charge of Auschwitz.

The film centres on the friendship between two eight-year-old boys – one a Jewish inmate called Shmuel, and the other, Bruno, the son of the commandant. They meet secretly every day to talk through the mesh of the camp’s fence, confused by their circumstances, but beautifully loyal to each other to the end.

So its historical inaccuracy is stark: there were no eight-year-old boys alive in Auschwitz, because Jews who could not work (mostly women, children, the elderly and the ill) were gassed to death on arrival. The film’s other conceits – mainly that Bruno does not know what “a Jew” is and that his mother is oblivious to the genocide overseen by her husband – contradict what we know about Nazi Germany, and detract from its overall message.

And yet: it was a deeply moving film which effectively communicated the horror of the Holocaust and the hateful ideology which inspired the murder of six million Jews. All the more powerful because its main characters were children. Jan Romein described the diary of Anne Frank as “a ‘de profundis’ stammered out in a child’s voice”. Though it is fiction, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas shares that particular intensity. Despite its flaws, I recommend watching it.

The very next day, while the film continued to occupy my thoughts, I was reminded again that the Holocaust is not ancient history. An article by Professor Robert S Wistrich in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, voiced disapproval of Pope Benedict’s recent declaration of Pope Pius XII as Venerable. Prof Wistrich finds it deeply unsettling that Pope Benedict identifies with Pius XII’s “heroic virtues” given the controversy surrounding his alleged inaction during the Holocaust.

Sad though his concerns are, it would be foolish to dismiss them out of hand. While it is natural for Catholics to jump to defend Pius XII, the accusation that he was indirectly complicit in the destruction of the European Jews is a profoundly serious charge, and one which – if not properly answered – could reverse the work done by Pope John Paul II and others to improve relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. It has particular potency now, given the Williamson debacle last year.

John Cornwell’s view that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” has now been discredited. And there is no evidence to suggest that the wartime pontiff was anti-Semitic. Some, such as Rabbi David G Dalin, even argue that Pius XII should be considered a “Righteous Gentile” because of the work he did to save Jews during the war by placing diplomatic pressure on Nazi Germany.

But the truth is that some difficult questions remain. Yes, a large number of Jews were hidden by the Church in Rome during the Nazi occupation. Yet the total six million dead aside, 1,000 Roman Jews were deported directly to Auschwitz in 1943, never to return. Could the Pope, as the leader of the Catholic Church, have done more to save any of them?

The answer is perhaps in the million or so documents relating to Pius XII’s papacy, which will be released by the Vatican in 2014 at the earliest. Before then, care must be taken not to rush towards his beatification and to ensure that Catholic-Jewish dialogue remains a clear priority. Pope John Paul II described the Jews as “our elder brothers” – he was right, and a family row would be calamitous.

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