Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
through a variety of representational strategies, some more capable of engendering reflection than others. It is time to see in tourism a sincere effort on the part of many travelers and their hosts, if not all, to engage with a topic that is so ubiquitous in Western culture and that challenges many basic beliefs people have about themselves, about the nature of good and evil, and about the value of human life in all its diversity. In tourism, I locate an effort by many travelers to claim agency in relation to Holocaust memory. Holocaust tourists are searching for truth amid a sea of representations about the twentieth century’s most notorious event. The knowledge that tourists seek is embodied in space, and that fact of embodiment is, I argue, central to the experience of Holocaust tourism. By going directly to sites of perpetration, they are looking for a sense of immediacy to history, even though their encounters are ultimately mediated through strategies of memorialization. When visiting museums in places that are remote from the site of perpetration (such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC), tourists are nonetheless exploring a spatial reality that is very distinct from that which surrounds the exhibition. The fact that tourists can never inhabit the Holocaust itself, only its traces and its representations, opens the door to questions about absence and presence, about the past and the present. The embodied encounter with the traces of mass murder also motivates reflection on the physical and the metaphysical and about the ephemeral materiality of one’s own body, one’s temporality, and the possibility—or impossibility—of finding transcendence or redemption in sites of extreme suffering. These are the stakes that are foregrounded in the subsequent chapters.
Organization of the Book
The organization of this book is both thematic and geographic. Part I, “Tourism at the Camp Memorials,” takes up tourism to concentration camps, paying special attention to those that were specifically designated as extermination centers. The camps have epitomized the Nazi genocide in the public imagination, even though many victims of the Holocaust perished in ghettos from starvation and disease or faced death by mobile killing squads near their own villages.66 Here we consider the experiences of memorial space that tourists encounter during their visits. Part II, “Urban Centers of Holocaust Memory,” moves increasingly outward from the camps as the epicenters of mass murder. It examines how the Holocaust is represented to future generations, looking at four urban centers of Holocaust remembrance. The first two are Warsaw and Berlin, both sites of Holocaust perpetration, although in very different ways. The second two are Jerusalem and Washington, DC, where the Holocaust has been memorialized in museums and archives in two nations that each lay claim to the history of the Holocaust—again, in very different ways. By looking comparatively at four national capitals with different degrees of connection to the Holocaust, we can consider how these sites vary in their strategies for collective memory.
Ultimately, this book engages with a broad range of perspectives—historical and theoretical, documentary and fictional, academic and informal—to produce a more differentiated account of Holocaust tourism. The aim is not to generate a unified theory of tourism and Holocaust remembrance but, rather, to lay a foundation for a more nuanced, less disciplinarily bound approach to both. In attempting such a discussion here, I participate primarily as a humanist, albeit one who is hoping to learn from and contribute to the work of social scientists, historians, and a diverse audience of tourists. I draw on both my own experiences and those of other visitors to Holocaust memorial sites, not with the aim of quantifying particular responses, but to give some sense of the range of responses that Holocaust tourism can elicit. If the balance of the arguments here seems to emphasize the positive features of Holocaust tourism, that is because such arguments are much harder to find elsewhere, and by presenting them here, perhaps I can contribute to a more reflective, less reactive discussion. At the same time, the productive contributions made to Holocaust memorialization through tourism are inextricable from the commercial practices that accompany them and that point to the problematic ethics of travel and spectatorship. The arc of this book’s argument ties the phenomenon of visits to Holocaust-related sites to other discussions about Holocaust understanding and representation. In doing so, it demands a serious look at tourism itself as a mode of representation and interpretation and thereby claims tourism as an object of study not only for anthropologists, sociologists, and economists but also for philosophers, literary critics, and art historians.
By bringing tourism into the realm of Holocaust studies, this book also represents an effort to move beyond some of the more dogmatic, doctrinal aspects of research into the Nazi genocide that have had the unfortunate consequence of preempting certain lines of inquiry, at least until recent years. Those doctrines, which we will explore in greater detail throughout the volume, include such notions as the impossibility of representing the Holocaust; the cautions against comparisons of the Holocaust with other genocides; and the insistence that the Holocaust offers no redemptive potential through aesthetic production, no ultimate meaning that can be salvaged from such senselessness. In many ways I embrace these doctrines and have certainly been stamped by them in my own development as a scholar, but at the same time I believe it is necessary to recognize their limits and, frankly, their shortcomings for generating Holocaust remembrance in an era after the survivors have gone.
Ultimately, Holocaust tourism represents the emergence of an evolving way of grasping human experience that can range from the simplistic to the sophisticated. By examining the phenomenon, perhaps it is not too crass to hope that Holocaust tourism can continue to confront the full range of human capabilities, from the brutal to the noble.
PART I
Tourism at the Camp Memorials
1
Listening to Auschwitz
A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At a certain moment they moved among us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad Italian.… And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.
Everything was silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream sequences. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It was disconcerting and disarming.
—Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (1996), describing his arrival at Auschwitz in January 1944
It is a stunningly beautiful sunny day with a light refreshing breeze. The mountains in the distance—which we came through yesterday on the train—can be seen through a light mist; just as the prisoners here could have seen them.
—Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey (1997), describing a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1996
In June 2007, a group of colleagues and I traveled to some of the most important Holocaust memorials in Europe, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. For most of us, myself included, it would be our first trip to Poland, let alone to an extermination camp. A few days before our tour of Auschwitz, we met in Warsaw with Konstanty Gebert, a prominent Polish journalist and a member of the local Jewish community. Gebert was known for his antigovernment activism during Communist Party rule, and since the end of Communism he has worked persistently to improve relations between Poland’s majority Catholics and its estimated 20,000–30,000 Jews, about 5,000 of whom live in the capital today.1 While discussing his ongoing work with us, Gebert ended our conversation with an unexpected admonition about our itinerary: “Don’t go to Auschwitz,” he told us. When we asked him to elaborate, he expressed dismay at the conversion of the most notorious death camp into a tourist destination. He shared with us his concern that many tourists were poorly prepared for the visit and thus unable to appreciate either the spiritual or historical import of a site that was, in essence, a massive cemetery. He referred also to the heavy traffic of noisy school groups and vacationing tourists arriving in caravans of buses that, in his view, brought irreverence to a place of immeasurable suffering. The presence of tourists in all their vulgarity was, for Gebert, inappropriate to the site’s significance as a cemetery, a place that demanded piety and respect.
In an article describing an invitation to lead a