As at Auschwitz, the gates of hell are built and torn down by human hearts A wrenching debate about antisemitism in Poland's past leads us, in the end, to ask questions about ourselves

Between Hanukkah and Christmas, the sign over the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp is stolen. Polish police recover it and catch the thieves, who were apparently carrying out a commission from abroad. We struggle to imagine the kind of human being who would want such a thing in his private collection. For all the mass murder, enslavement and torture that has been perpetrated since, Auschwitz remains, for a European of my generation, the symbol of human evil in our time.

This grotesque episode ends a year in which the relations between Christians and Jews in general, Christian Poles and Polish Jews in particular, have again been the subject of debate. The ghosts of a tortured east European past even howled through the corridors of Westminster, as the Conservatives announced their alliance in the European parliament with a group of rightwing parties, mainly from central and eastern Europe, and then put their MEPs under the leadership of Michal Kaminski, from Poland's Law and Justice party.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/23/poland-catholicism-nazis-difficult-past