Death Goes to the Disco.

• Author: Groff-Palermo, Sarah
• Position: Poland - Brief Article

With strobes, dancing, and the occasional Jell-O wrestling match, Disco System may not look tike an affront to the dead. However, the new dance club is in Oswiecim (osh-VYEN-chim), Poland, a town better known by its German name, Auschwitz, as the site of one of Nazi Germany's most infamous death camps. In fact, Disco System is only about a mile from the camp, on a site formerly occupied by a Nazi-run tannery in which hundreds of Jewish slave laborers perished. The controversial location pits Holocaust survivors against local citizens over questions of when and if dancing dishonors death.

Though the disco is on private land, its location has angered Jewish groups. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center calls it "a horrible indignity that mocks the...