Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
frequent sites where traumatic experience is articulated, but that does not negate the assumption that one can get at a sense of truth through testimony in combination with other forms of evidence. Let us remember that the origins of the camp memorials stem also from this same sense of bearing witness for evidentiary purposes.
If a tour to Auschwitz enables witnessing, understood as the tourist’s reception today of testimony from those who were there in the past, it must, at the very minimum, involve a communicative act between an absent speaker and a present listener. The most obvious way in which Holocaust museums and memorials present testimony comes in the form of displayed quotations or videotaped interviews from survivors, which are often running on continual loops as tourists move from one display to the next. Survivor accounts are also well represented in most Holocaust museum bookstores. Sometimes, though very rarely now, survivors themselves give guided tours through memorials.98 But the primary voice that tourists hear at Auschwitz is that of their tour guide, who is usually a credentialed, university-trained educator from Poland, who recounts the experiences of the deportees to the visitors, often trying to humanize the victims by giving narrative accounts of specific individuals or groups. For example, the guide may stop at the photo of a prisoner and tell what we know about his or her fate. When the tour reaches Birkenau, the guide may describe the calamity that befell the Hungarian Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the summer of 1944, and for whose arrival the rail spur through the middle of the extermination camp was built. This last example is often the focus of guided tours at Auschwitz because the only known case of a transport photographed from arrival to selection to the march to the crematoria depicts an arrival of Hungarian Jews. The photos, taken by the SS and recovered by a prisoner after the camp was evacuated, allow the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum to illustrate the process of mass murder by placing photos at the spot where they were taken. (These images will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter.)
Of course, that SS photographer did not accompany the doomed into the gas chamber, so it is fair to ask if the examples of testimony presented overrepresent the survivors and perpetrators at the expense of the more than 1.1 million people who were murdered at Auschwitz. Perhaps the closest the memorial site comes to representing the voices of the murdered is to incorporate testimony recovered by members of the Sonderkommando, who were forced to carry out the killings. Sonderkommandos were routinely exterminated after a few months and replaced, since there were to be no eyewitnesses to the gas chambers. Several prisoners wrote detailed descriptions of what they witnessed and buried them in containers on the camp’s grounds, some of which have been recovered. A resistance group at Auschwitz smuggled a camera to a Sonderkommando unit, and a few photographs have been recovered. Some of the few Sonderkommando survivors have recounted the last words they heard from the doomed, as documented in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. But the fact remains that the vast majority of victims were murdered in anonymity, unable to leave testimony in written words. Herein lies the importance of such artifacts as the piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, and even human hair that are on display in Auschwitz I, all of which function as visual testimony of the deportees’ fate.
It is this concern for bearing witness for the dead who could not testify that informs the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s insistence on the “sayability” of Auschwitz, even for those who have been silenced.99 Agamben cites Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel on the problem of the survivor who inherits the burden of speaking for the millions who were murdered.100 Although survivors did not share the terminus of the gas chambers, they can—must—relate facts about the killing.101 Agamben’s aim is not to deny the chasm between the dead and the survivors; like Weissman, he recognizes a distinction between that which a subject experiences in its affective entirety and that which a subject can put into words, which must always be a partial account. He elaborates: “The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”102 That space between experience and testimony is not a void; rather, it is a place for productive potential that calls forth witnessing. Rejecting Laub’s notion of an “event with no witnesses,” Agamben insists that ethics post-Auschwitz require witnessing, the inadequacies of language notwithstanding. While Agamben’s gesture toward a “new ethics” has invited criticism from some, his notion of witnessing as a way to bridge silence and speech recalls what has always been a fundamental attribute of witnessing.103 Testimony, the expression of the personal memory of the camps, is predicated upon that very distinction between experience and its translation into reported facts, a point made very clearly by Weissman.
Tourists may come to Auschwitz with the explicit expectation of a more experiential kind of knowledge (akin to Weissman’s notion of a “fantasy of witnessing”), and some no doubt leave with a mistaken belief that they know “what it was like.” But many others will reflect the experience of Michael, who accompanied his father to Mauthausen, and realize that they can never truly experience the ordeal of a site that is now guided by a trusted staff member, perhaps in the comforting presence of friends or family. Still, there is a knowledge of space that tourists acquire that may indulge a desire to bear witness, much like the one Martin Gilbert conveys in his description of Birkenau at the outset of this chapter. Like Gilbert, one experiences the geography, the landscape, the relation of one locus to another, and one’s own status within a given space, which in turn produces knowledge that can be accounted for in phenomenological terms. The conditions under which tourists encounter that landscape can vary radically and impart different affective dimensions to the experience of a tour. For example, my first visit to Auschwitz occurred on a beautiful, sunny day, and I was not prepared to experience the tree-lined lanes among solid brick structures as superficially pretty. In some ways, that incongruity of expectation and experience made the knowledge of the crimes committed there that much more horrible. In addition to the setting, I found myself as attuned to other tourists as I was to the site itself, which introduced a disconcerting sense of doubling in my perception: I observed the memorial, while also observing how others observed the memorial. Some of the other tourists were teenagers on school trips, a few of whom talked loudly, giggled, or, in the case of one pair, took advantage of their perceived freedom from adult supervision to kiss. Needless to say, such experiences are incongruous with expectations of utter solemnity. I would suggest that such unexpected encounters, rather than undermine the value of tourism to Auschwitz, actually intensify it. Ranging from the minor distraction to disturbing behavior, such disruptions prompt visitors to ask what is appropriate and what is inappropriate at a site whose very existence is obscene to begin with. They place the tourist in a bind between standing by or expressing disapproval, wondering whether one has any right to dictate behavior to others when the traces of brutal coercion—guard towers, once-electrified fences, gallows, and crematoria—are never far away. The comparison is both overblown and, at the same time, all that the reflective tourist has. There is nothing about the experience of visiting Auschwitz, including the most coercive practices common to tourism (queuing up, waiting, moving at a dictated pace, obeying certain prohibitions), that can ever amount to the brutality endured by prisoners, and yet the expectation of respect for the memory of the dead places tourists in a relationship of obedience to authority.
It is this awareness of the camp as authoritarian space that makes Agamben’s work most relevant to tourism. If there is anything truly new in his notion of witnessing, it is the way he links his understanding of the communicative nature of witnessing with an account of the spatial dynamics of power. His focus on the camps as “spaces of exception”—a term he borrows from the political theorist Carl Schmitt—and his reliance on the philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and surveillance allow Agamben to show how discourses of community determine who belongs and who does not and how these discourses are realized in spatial configurations that include and exclude, that reveal and conceal.104 Discourses of exclusion are made manifest in the concentration camp, where those deemed outside the lawful community are relocated to a space that lies beyond the protection of the law.105 By linking the spatial or visual with the discursive, Agamben reintroduces the juridical sense of witnessing, which relates observation and testimony, what I am insisting on as the intersubjective quality of bearing witness.106 We should not forget the ways in which witnesses to the Holocaust continue to provide testimony in a juridical setting to this very day. Beginning with the early trials of the Allies in 1945, through the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, to the