OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — A scantily clad girl gyrates to techno music atop a podium as bartenders in white shirts and bow ties serve up drinks. Nothing special as discos go, except this one has sparked a furor because of its location: a former tannery where Auschwitz concentration camp inmates worked and died.
Jewish leaders and the Polish government have voiced outrage that officials in Oswiecim — the Polish name for Auschwitz — issued a permit for the System dance club last month.
The disco is a little over a mile from the Auschwitz camp site, which is now a museum.
"The place has a tragic direct connection with the camp," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. Cooper was in Oswiecim this week for the formal reopening of a 100-year-old synagogue.
"We believe that a fundamental error of judgment was made," he told city officials at a meeting.
Locals in this southern Polish city of 50,000 people don't deny the horrors of the Holocaust, but many bristle at suggestions they are insensitive about it.
"People think about Oswiecim as one large cemetery," said Rafal Waliczek, 30, the disco's owner. "It's not true. There are many young people here who want to have fun. And that's the best place for it: a large building with space for parking."
The disco uproar is just the latest controversy over development near the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, where 1.5 million prisoners, mostly Jews, were killed in gas chambers or died of disease and starvation.
Another dispute is simmering over plans for a commercial visitors' center. Relations between Israel and Poland, which is 95 percent Roman Catholic, also have been strained by the erection of Christian crosses on property adjoining the death camp.
Historians say many of about 1,000 Auschwitz inmates forced to work in the tannery died there. It also was used to store hair and property from gas-chamber victims.
But Waliczek says the original building was destroyed after the war, and the factory-like structure housing his disco was built in 1952.
City officials also note that the disco is on private property about 800 yards beyond a 100-yard-deep commercial-free zone around the memorial.
Disco patrons who know of the tannery's grisly past say they do not believe they are dishonoring Holocaust victims.
"Yes, that was terrible, awful, but that was a long time ago," said Paulina Adamska, a 23-year-old student at Hunter College in New York, who was at the disco Sunday to meet old high-school friends during a visit home.
"We must cultivate the memory of the victims, but there are special places for that," she said, sipping a beer at the bar. "Oswiecim cannot become like a large cemetery because then all the young people will leave."
She said System is Oswiecim's only disco, "the only place in this town where young people can meet and dance and have fun."
After a previous investor failed to win approval for a disco at the old tannery, Waliczek received permission under a 1989 city development plan that was amended in the mid-1990s to allow restaurant and entertainment activities at the site.
"Everything was in accordance with law," Waliczek said. "And it's outside the (protection) zone. Otherwise, what's the zone for?"
Oswiecim's vice mayor, Wlodzimierz Paluch, says the city is working on a new development plan but that it won't be ready before next year.
Meanwhile, the city is struggling to cope with post-communist market reforms that have devastated old, inefficient local industries. The largest employer, a chemical plant, had to cut its work force from 12,000 to 2,000 several years ago.
The estimated 500,000 people a year who visit the Auschwitz memorial might provide a needed economic boost, but there are no hotels or restaurants to accommodate them. Some locals worry that controversy surrounding the site might scare off big investors.
"There is less and less work here," said Jerzy Januszczyk, a taxi driver who says he gets only two fares a day compared with about 10 just a few years ago. "We need a big investor, but everybody is afraid about that silence zone. What if they make it wider and tell the businesses to get out?"