Mazowiecki

OSWIECIM, Poland -- Beyond the Death Wall and the prisoners' barracks, past the ruined gas chambers and crematoriums, at the edge of the Auschwitz death camp, is a row of 19 concrete memorials.The memorials are dedicated to the victims of the Nazi killing machine that operated here with such horrific efficiency. But gone now from the memorials are the 19 inscriptions that said in 19 languages that 4 million people died here.The memorials are blank because they were wrong.Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the 4 million cited here for four decades.

WARSAW, Poland -- Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician who became the leader of the anti-Communist Solidarity labor union, was sworn in yesterday as president of the Polish Republic.Mr. Walesa, 47, tense but firm, repeated the oath of office at noon before the National Assembly, or joint session of the two houses of parliament."In assuming the office of president of the Polish Republic, I formally swear to the Polish nation that I will be faithful to the constitution, that I will steadfastly guard the honor of the nation and the sovereignty and security of the state," he said.

Prague. -- Czechoslovakia, soon to become ex-Czechoslovakia, is the economic success among the ex-Communist countries. But this success distracts from the gravity of Czechs' and Slovaks' larger situation, and that of all the south-central and Balkan Europeans. It is the one good thing to be said about a bad scene, upon which the Western governments have turned their backs.The baroque beauty of Prague is shabby, but is being restored. It is for the moment the glamorous city of Eastern Europe, a place where young Americans in particular come, as they went to Paris in the 1920s, before another dark time began.

Paris. -- Part of Serbian national mythology is that Serbs are invincible in battle but always lose their wars. This again is happening. It is a problem of overreaching.Last Monday's shelling of Sarajevo's old city was probably meant by the Bosnian Serbs to subvert the peace proposals Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke brought to Europe, but it proved the act of bloody hubris which was the ultimate overreaching. It at last brought NATO into the war to defend the ''safe areas'' in Bosnia which the U.N. had proclaimed but had mostly, and shamefully, abandoned.

Paris. -- Wars end when they have reached their natural conclusions. This conclusion arrives either when one side is defeated, or when both sides have so punished themselves that both conclude it is no longer worthwhile to go on.The war in the former Yugoslavia has gone on four years because the United Nations has blocked it from finding its natural conclusion. The intervention has prolonged the killing and made the United Nations an accomplice to ethnic cleansing -- as the admirable Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the U.N.'s human rights rapporteur, said last week, when resigning his post in disgust.

Builder Keith Anthony is packing his bags, closing shop on his Stevensville-based building business of upscale homes and heading off this summer with six staff members to Poland to get on what could be the ground floor of the next building boom: Eastern Europe.Mr. Anthony, whose company, 18th Century Consulting, has been building homes priced from $70,000 to $150,000, at first was skeptical about building houses in Poland priced from $30,000 to $50,000. "My garages cost that much," he declared.

WARSAW, Poland -- Amid ongoing controversy, catechism classes have returned to Polish public schools as Roman Catholicism makes a comeback as the state religion.Last month a church-state commission, without benefit of either Parliament or people, agreed to make catechism once again a part of the school curriculum from kindergarten to high school.Theoretically the classes are optional, but there is enormous pressure on children to attend and great perplexity as to what to do with them if they don't.

Paris. -- As the Franco-British-Dutch rapid reaction force is assembled in Croatia, the time nears when it will be revealed as real or sham.Sham has seemed the more likely case, as government officials in London and Paris have decided that the force will act under established United Nations authority, while continuing to speak of the ''withdrawal option.''However, the Europeans' position is open to interpretation as well as to change. The mandates which the Security Council has given U.N. forces in the former Yugoslavia have never been fully carried out. They order U.N. troops to defend and deliver humanitarian aid, and defend designated ''protected zones,'' including Sarajevo.

Brussels, Belgium--At the height of the Cold War, people used to hear: "The Russians are coming!" In the postwar era, things haven't changed much. The Russians and their former Warsaw Pact allies may still be coming. But this time it's with suitcases rather than tanks.Unrest in the Soviet Union and its six former Eastern European satellites -- Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- could send millions of economic refugees rushing across the former front lines of the Cold War in search of food, shelter and jobs.