RETURN TO AUSCHWITZ

By JAMES O. JACKSON

It is 50 years since Soviet soldiers entered the gate marked ARBEIT MACHT FREI and found some 7,000 starving, sick, pitiful survivors of Auschwitz. Young and gaunt then, aging and gray now, some of them returned last week to remember and to grieve. They walked, once again, down the street of death from the rail spur to the ramps where they saw the last of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. They shuddered before the gas chambers, peered into the wooden barracks, stood in silence amid the ruins of crematoria dynamited by the Nazis in a failed attempt to hide the evidence of the greatest crime. They saw, they remembered, they mourned--and they wondered if the world would ever learn the lessons of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

For despite their solemnity, the observances marking the Jan. 27 anniversary stirred old tensions between Jews and non-Jews. Ceremonies were boycotted, accusations made. Jewish leaders protested the Polish government's initial refusal to include the Jewish prayer of mourning, the Kaddish, in the main memorial ceremony. Polish officials, unyielding, dismissed the complaints as reflecting the ``personal ambition'' of individual Jewish leaders. Some Jews refused to attend the Polish ceremonies; others organized instead a Jewish observance a day earlier, on Thursday. At one point Jewish and Polish demonstrators even clashed, shouting and shoving within sight of the camp's guard towers as ceremonies were being held.

The disputes were dispiriting to many of those closest to the place and its past. ``Auschwitz is too tragic for quarrels,'' said Franciszek Piper, the historian at the Auschwitz State Museum. Maria Konig, a survivor who saw her mother taken away to be gassed at Auschwitz in 1944, once nursed the hope that what happened at the death camp would change the world. ``I know now it was an illusion,'' she said. ``I ask myself today how we have learned so little from the horrible experience of millions, how much we still have to do for the dignity of man.''

Perhaps Auschwitz is simply too monstrous for passions to cool completely; perhaps 50 years' distance is not enough. Auschwitz was by far the worst of the Nazi concentration camps, containing the bones and ashes of the estimated 1.5 million of Hitler's victims who died there--1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles and thousands of others including Gypsies, homosexuals and communists, targeted for annihilation by Hitler's minions. The camp is at once the world's largest cemetery and most gruesome industrial artifact. ``It was an experiment in how to kill the most people in the smallest area, in the least time, for the cheapest price,'' said Kurt Goldstein, a Berlin member of the International Auschwitz Committee. ``It was a killing machine. Persecutions are part of history. But the factory-like systematic extermination of entire peoples, the Jews and the Gypsies, is unique.''

That is why it is impossible to forget. That is why it is so difficult to forgive. ``Although we know that God is merciful, please, God, have no mercy on those who have created this place,'' prayed Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, during the Jewish observance. ``God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here. Remember the nocturnal processions of children and more children and more children, frightened, quiet, so quiet and so beautiful. If we could simply look at one, our hearts would break.'' Wiesel knows. He was 14 when he entered Auschwitz in 1942. Reported by Nomi Morris/Auschwitz

With reporting by NOMI MORRIS/AUSCHWITZ