For decades, people here have been shopping for bargains on everything from shoes to bananas in decrepit warehouses across the street from the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp.
Now a Polish entrepreneur and a German financier have sparked outrage with their plan to turn the brick and corrugated tin buildings into a mini-mall with fast-food shops, clothing stores and a 200-car parking lot."A supermarket, of all things, in the protected zone around a former concentration camp, is for Jewish organizations simply not acceptable," said Ignatz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
The director of the Auschwitz memorial and the mayor of Oswiecim, where the concentration camp is located, have approved the project.
But Poland's president, prime minister and cultural minister have all condemned it, along with camp survivors and Jewish leaders who consider Auschwitz a burial ground for the 1.5 million people killed and cremated there.
Israeli Knesset spokesman Shevah Weiss asked Poland's president to stop construction of "this terrible, surrealist thing."
But the construction, begun in November, continues. Tin roofs and crumbling brick walls are being stripped away to reveal concrete pillars that will remain and form the structure of the new buildings.
The mall, to open in June, would lie within the 1,600-foot protection zone established by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It would be separated from the barbed wire of the concentration camp by a two-lane road and a set of railroad tracks. The backs of the stores, shielded from view by a gray brick wall and shrubbery, would face the camp.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski complained about the project on national television, and the prime minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, asked the mayor of Oswiecim to withdraw his authorization.
The mayor is a former business partner of the two men whose company, Maja, is building the mall: Janusz Marszalek, 41, and retired German banker Georg Schreg, of Auerbach, Bavaria.
After World War II, the communist state-run Spolem cooperative took ownership of the bleak, flat land across the street from the concentration camp. Spolem sold goods and also rented out space to small traders in the drab buildings near the railroad tracks that carried the 1.5 million people to their deaths and thousands more to slavery and suffering between 1940-45.
When communism ended in Poland, and companies were required to fend for themselves, Spolem ran out of cash and offered to sell the land. Local businessmen asked to open offices and shops at the site, less than two miles from the center of Oswiecim.
"We were running the risk of deep, visible degradation of the area around the museum and needed to find an investor," said Jerzy Wroblewski, director of the Auschwitz camp museum.
After studying the site for three years, architects developed hundreds of pages of guidelines. Buildings could be no higher than the existing warehouses so as not to block the view of a pre-war tobacco factory that the camp's inmates would have seen. And there was to be no entertainment and no advertising.
International Auschwitz Museum Council, made up of Jewish and Polish camp survivors, historians and representatives of major Jewish organizations, approved the guidelines in 1994, Wroblewski said.
The Auschwitz visitor's center already contains a small coffee shop, a post office, a restaurant and book store.
The museum director said he personally approved the mall because it fit within the guidelines. He never asked the council to approve the final plan or sought the opinion of camp survivor groups or Jewish organizations.
"Since the council, which has important Jewish members from around the world, approved the detailed guidelines, and as Marszalek's project sticks directly to them, I issued a positive opinion," Wroblewski said.
But the head of the Auschwitz Council, former Polish foreign minister and camp survivor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, said he thought the approval was "unjustified," and demanded an investigation.
It is not the first time a plan to use the land around Auschwitz has drawn a protest.
The developers' offices are located in a building on the edge of the camp where Roman Catholic Carmelite nuns established a convent in 1984. After complaints from Jewish organizations, Pope John Paul II told the nuns to move out in 1993.
Despite that history, Marszalek said he never considered the possibility of protests over the mall.
"It's a completely different thing," than the convent, he said. "Who could object to it?"