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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 group of Jewish tourists from the United Kingdom on a day trip to Auschwitz in 1999, the art historian Griselda Pollock anticipates Gebert’s misgivings about tourism and describes her reasons for ultimately deciding not to go. Her explanation echoes Gebert’s, but she frames it in more personal terms: “Many considerations constrained me: The short notice, the responsibility for ‘education’ for such a group of British Jewish visitors to these sites, the condition of travel.… Most of all, there was a conviction that I should never go to Auschwitz.”2 In a footnote, Pollock also notes her misgivings about being “taken around by Polish guides, with little special attention or sensitivity to the meaning the site has for visitors who are Jewish.”3 Pollock elaborates on her conviction to stay away:

I am certainly too scared. At a personal level, the terror of being that close to that danger threatens me too unbearably. At a less unpredictable level, I am perplexed at the ethics of going to, visiting, touring a place whose all too real and still powerfully symbolic function was to be a horrific terminus, the end of a line, the factory of death, a place from which none was intended to return.4

Pollock’s reasons for declining the invitation are abundantly clear. Her sense of fear at the proximity to terror identifies an anxiety shared to varying degrees by many who consider such travel, whether they go in the end or not. She articulates the heightened sense of threat faced by many Jewish travelers to the site, who arrive knowing that the place would have meant their own death at another time or that it was the place where friends or relatives were indeed murdered. But Pollock’s understandable existential fears about the horror of Auschwitz are accompanied by other anxieties related to the appropriateness of tourism. By placing the word “education” in scare quotes, she doubts whether a day trip to the camp can truly deepen tourists’ understanding about the Holocaust; by doing so, she reflects a common skepticism toward tourism as insufficiently intellectual. Above all, it is the notion that the tourist enters and leaves, almost casually, that Pollock finds incompatible with the meaning of that site, resulting in her ethical concerns about tourism to Auschwitz.

To be fair, Pollock does not condemn all travel to Auschwitz. She contrasts the day trip she declined with the experience of her son, who traveled to Auschwitz as “part of a planned educational tour of formerly Jewish Eastern European sites, organized for teenagers.”5 Acknowledging the preparation that informs these travels, Pollock suggests a spectrum between tourism and pilgrimage, with educational tours located at some “intermediary subject position” between the two.6 Intertwined in her ethical considerations are two related yet different questions. Alongside the question of whether to go is the question of who should go. Implicit in Pollock’s distinction between tourists and pilgrims is a presumed lack of preparation or inappropriate motivation on the part of the former in comparison to the latter. Her chief concern is that tourists, those unreflecting consumers of mass culture, lack the ability to appreciate the distinction between the site as it exists today and the historical event it commemorates. Pollock positions the “touristic” as the “default condition to which representation will recur unless a crucial distinction is made between the place that can be visited and left, and the problematic burned into Western European culture by what Paul Celan simply called ‘that which happened’, the event.”7 In other words, tourists conflate the place of Auschwitz as it currently exists with its operation as an extermination camp roughly seventy years ago; legitimate visitors, on the other hand, somehow appreciate that the current place is a representation of the past, not the past itself.8 Her characterization consigns the tourist to the superficial endpoint of a spectrum whose other end is the deep historical and ethical awareness embodied by visitors with a legitimate reason for being there. Beyond the stereotypically diminished intellect Pollock ascribes to tourists, there is also a barely concealed exclusivity in her approach to the question of who should go to Auschwitz, whereby only those connected to the site through family history, group identity, or formalized education are ethical actors. All others who travel to Auschwitz are tourists, exemplifying the worst aspects of a superficial, consumerist approach to history. Pollock asks important questions, but her conclusions seem to be based on unflattering—and ultimately unsatisfying—assumptions about tourism, assumptions that are widely shared.

Shared, in fact, by our own group as we planned our trip to Poland. While my colleagues and I asked ourselves many of the same questions about seeing Auschwitz, we ultimately decided to go. Our itinerary had been planned months before Gebert’s admonition, and we had spent considerable time reflecting on our reasons for going well before our meeting with him in Warsaw. Like Pollock’s validation of her son’s visit, we justified ours in the name of education. At some level our trip was based on the belief that there was something to be gained by being there, something perhaps to be learned and subsequently shared with our students and with those who read our work. We knew we wanted to see the place, but first we felt we had to legitimate our gaze.

Without knowing it, our search for a label other than “tourist” had repeated a trope that typifies many academic reflections on travel not only to Auschwitz but also to other places where tourists go. Characterized by the anthropologist David Brown in the formula “They are tourists, I am not,” the distinction between legitimate travelers (scholars, students, pilgrims) and casual travelers exemplifies an almost ritualized exercise in self-justification that my group was reenacting.9 By cleansing oneself of any affiliation with tourism, one legitimates travel by invoking more respectable terms. That is not to erase any distinctions between the anthropologist’s extended immersion in a non-native culture, a historian’s immersion in a distant archive, or a language student’s immersion in a foreign tongue, on the one hand, and the (presumably typical) tourist’s often-cursory encounter, on the other. Rather, it is to ask in greater specificity how they are different, but also how they are the same. What goes unacknowledged in the invocation of the “They are tourists, I am not” formula is that tourism can vary in lengths of stay, degrees of preparation, and impact on the traveler’s life. Furthermore, given the growth of tourism worldwide and the emergence of new forms of it, such as eco-tourism or service tourism, the reliance on stereotypical characterizations of tourists that deny the legitimacy of their travels appears increasingly simplistic.10

Figure 1.1. The gathering point for the tour at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, just outside the main entrance at Auschwitz I, July 2012. Tourists have already entered the terrain once occupied by the Nazi camp, as illustrated by enlarged aerial photos on large placards at the back left. A concession stand and bookstore are at the rear right. Photo by the author.

The remainder of this chapter explores in greater depth the “who” question as it relates to tourism at Auschwitz. If, as Pollock suggests, the ethics of Holocaust tourism asks travelers to consider their subject position, I would argue that dichotomies between the tourist and the pilgrim, the tourist and the educator, or other modulations of the “they are tourists, I am not” formula are inadequate to capture the motives, identities, and experiences of visitors to this site. Such formulations put tourism into an all-too-predictable binary relationship with other roles that are presumed to be more legitimate. I will argue instead for a concept of the tourist that is inclusive of numerous, fluid, and even contradictory subjectivities, ranging from the pilgrim and the researcher to the uninformed and the morbidly curious. To arrive at a more complex view of present-day tourism to Auschwitz, I explore how the site itself has developed over time. The aim is to demonstrate that the space of Auschwitz is itself fluid, meaning that it has developed over time and that it continues to respond to both the ethical imperatives of history and the political/economic exigencies of the tourist industry. This condition of flux is, I contend, apparent to tourists in a number of ways because the memorial openly acknowledges its ongoing evolution.

After summarizing the history of Auschwitz as a memorial, I shift into a discussion of the kinds of insights tourists can gain by visiting Auschwitz today. This approach relies in part on a phenomenology of tourism that emphasizes how sensory perception of the space can produce knowledge. As many scholars have acknowledged, tourism relies heavily on vision, but it would be a mistake to reduce the perceptions available to tourists to sight—smells, sounds, temperatures, and other non-visual sensory experiences shape the tourist’s experience at Auschwitz as well, and not necessarily in expected ways.11 By giving an account of the tourist’s encounter with the memorial space of Auschwitz, I examine how tourists are invited to reflect on their relationship to the Holocaust, both in terms of the event experienced by those who were there from 1941 to 1945 and as a collective memory in the present. I frame this reflection in terms of bearing witness, asking how tourists to places like Auschwitz receive and process testimony from the past. Tourists do not arrive as blank slates but as socially and politically situated subjects with different degrees of historical knowledge who bring expectations to Auschwitz and other such memorials, hoping that they will acquire some new or deeper understanding of the murder of six million Jews. By hoping to access the space of an event that is temporally beyond reach, tourists search for an immediacy they may not find in literature, film, or other media. The degree to which expectations are fulfilled affects the nature of bearing witness through tourism.

Historically, tourists to Auschwitz have embodied multiple and even contradictory identities, both over time and across its terrain. This variety of tourist experiences belies the categorization in so much scholarship of visitors as either tourists or pilgrims (or some other term in a binary opposition). Instead of the stale tourist/pilgrim (or tourist/student, tourist/scholar, tourist/artist) dichotomy, which merely recapitulates the “they are tourists, I am not” scheme, witnessing offers a framework that is especially relevant for Auschwitz and possibly explanatory of its evolution as a memorial site. The focus on witnessing does not magically resolve the tension between the tourist and the pilgrim; instead, it focuses on what the visitor perceives at Auschwitz in relation to the suffering of prisoners, the brutality of perpetrators, or the indifference of others. Since tourists arrive after the event being memorialized, actual witnessing seems at first to be impossible. But if we explore the concept somewhat further, thinking of witnessing as an intersubjective, communicative mode of transferring knowledge, there is some merit in characterizing tourism to Auschwitz as such.12 The claim of witnessing needs to overcome the inescapable temporal gap that separates tourists from the perpetrators and victims. If tourists are called to bear witness, what or who takes the place of the dead whose testimony they seek? The history of the memorial may offer clues that begin to answer that question.

Auschwitz as Memorial and Museum: The Postwar Era

Like other Nazi concentration and extermination camps, Auschwitz has existed as a memorial and museum far longer than it functioned as a center for torture and killing. Obviously the evacuation of the camp by the Nazis and its liberation by the Red Army mark a definitive moment in the site’s history, the end of the Nazis’ largest and, by the end, most developed site of genocide and repression. The Red Army arrived to witness a camp that had been abandoned by the SS, who had attempted to destroy the evidence of their crimes by blowing up the remaining crematoria. But the destruction was far from complete, and many prisoners remained behind to bear witness to what had transpired there. The story of the site since 1945 has been the effort to gather and preserve evidence of what took place there, to create a site for memorialization and education, and to contextualize the Nazi crimes within competing and shifting political narratives. At the same time, Auschwitz has undergone a gradual transformation from a local to a global tourist destination.13

That evolution was not clear from the outset, at least during the Cold War. As the historian Tim Cole points out, Auschwitz was better known on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain than on the Western side for decades after the war. Because different liberating armies reached different camps, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were more familiar names to Great Britain and to the United States, respectively.14 As the Holocaust became an ever-greater part of public discourse in the West, the name of Auschwitz became better known by the 1970s, so much so that by now it has become a “metonymy for the Holocaust as a whole”15 in the East and West alike. The end of the Cold War meant easier access to the site for Western scholars, whose accounts of Auschwitz began to appear in the 1990s.16 As these studies have shown, the archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum serve as an important primary source of documentation about the Holocaust, but they also serve a secondary purpose: They offer an account of the management of the site as a tourist destination, not only conveying facts and figures but also revealing the geopolitical currents the site’s managers have had to navigate over the years.17 The development of tourism has in fact been a constant feature of the place’s postwar history, a force both shaping and being shaped by the memory and remains of Auschwitz since 1945.

Before the arrival of the Red Army on January 27, 1945, the SS had already taken the majority of prisoners on a deadly forced march westward, but some 9,000 prisoners who were too sick or feeble to be evacuated were left behind. In the immediate aftermath of liberation, the camp served as a field hospital and displaced-persons camp for those who remained. Although Red Army and Polish volunteers worked to restore the health of those whom they could save, malnutrition and disease continued to claim many lives. Of the former prisoners who recovered, most were able to leave the camp by March or April 1945.

Meanwhile, as medics and volunteers tended the sick, investigators began to gather evidence of the crimes committed there. As early as November 1942, the Soviet Union had established the Extraordinary Soviet State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Aggressors, a body devoted to prosecuting and punishing perpetrators of Nazi war crimes. It was this body that had mandated the preservation of the camps liberated by the Red Army. Before reaching Polish territory, the Soviets had preserved evidence of the murders committed in Soviet and Baltic territories by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units that liquidated Jewish populations as the German Wehrmacht advanced eastward. In July 1944, the Red Army discovered the Majdanek camp on the outskirts of Lublin, and within a month it had established a museum on the site to bear witness to the atrocities perpetrated there. Among the barracks and mass graves, Majdanek also held ample evidence of the use of gas chambers to murder Jews sent there for extermination.18 Thus, by the time the Red Army reached Auschwitz six months later, it had already made clear its intention to preserve evidence of war crimes for posterity.19 While the first official steps at establishing a museum at Auschwitz date to April 1946, slightly more than a year after the Red Army ’s arrival, the conceptual foundations for preserving the camp as testimony predate its liberation. In other words, the twin purposes of gathering forensic evidence and ensuring memorialization shared the goal of preserving the camp as a form of testimony, a top priority for liberators and survivors alike.20 As a native communist government was groomed for leadership in Poland, Polish agencies began taking over this work in the camps situated within its borders, including all of the Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka). By April 1946, a little more than one year after liberation, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art sent a committee of former prisoners to Auschwitz to begin work on the museum, led by the former prisoner Tadeusz Wąsowicz,21 whom Nazis had imprisoned for membership in the Polish resistance and who was to become the museum’s first director.

While the camp’s liberators needed to preserve evidence for prosecution and punishment of war criminals, the camp’s preservation as a site of commemoration was also always a long-term goal—albeit one with multiple and even contradictory agendas. In the case of Auschwitz and Majdanek, forensics and memorialization were both facilitated by the relatively intact state of the camps, which had been in operation just before liberation, leaving the Nazis insufficient time to destroy the evidence of mass killing. Despite their relatively intact state, there were immediate obstacles to ensuring preservation of the camps. The widespread deprivation across war-ravaged Poland meant that resources were scarce, and some of the physical structures of both camps were dismantled to serve the needs of the living. The wood used to build the barracks was needed for construction elsewhere in Poland, and so in March 1946 the District Liquidation Bureau, the Polish agency charged with the management of buildings and inventory that came into Polish possession after the war, oversaw the dismantling of the barracks at Birkenau.22 Tourists today can see the results of such scarcity at Birkenau and Majdanek, where the vast majority of wooden barracks are gone. At Birkenau, only brick chimneys remain where the majority of barracks once stood. The exceptions are a few wooden barracks at both memorials—some of them reconstructed—and the first barracks built from brick at Birkenau in what was to become the Frauenlager, or women’s camp. Along with the salvaged building materials went other “articles of everyday use” found at the camp, distributed across Poland to families who had lost everything in the war.23 These included utensils, pots and pans, tools, fabrics—whatever was salvageable and practical.

The primary mission of the Extraordinary Soviet State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Aggressors was the preservation of a past that could be used to bring about the swift punishment of the Nazi perpetrators. Trials of accused perpetrators were important for establishing the legitimacy of communism in Eastern Europe as the vanquisher of fascism.24 Of course, this narrative necessitated officially mandated amnesia about the pact between Stalin and Hitler to devour Poland, which had lasted until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941. Given Poland’s victimization at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin, the pro-Soviet agenda did not coincide comfortably with the postwar aspirations of Poles for a liberated and independent state. The competing interests of the Soviet liberators and the Polish survivors of Auschwitz led to tension over whose story would be told—and whose story would be suppressed.25 Soviet oversight of Poland’s new communist government, by no means an expression of Poland’s popular will, ensured the dominance of Polish-Soviet brotherhood in official discourse.26 But Polish national identity could not be so easily suppressed, and Stalin’s imposition of communism reinforced Poland’s sense of victimization at the hands of both Germany and the Soviet Union.27

Polish and Soviet tensions had an immediate impact on the organization of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as its staff pondered which messages visitors would receive. Would the site commemorate Polish resistance to Hitler in heroic terms? Would it acknowledge the other national, ethnic, and religious groups of victims who perished there? Would it commemorate Polish martyrdom or celebrate liberation by Stalin’s Red Army? How would murdered Red Army prisoners of war, the first group to be gassed at Auschwitz with Zyklon B, be commemorated? However these questions were to be answered, it was clear from the outset that the emphasis would not be on Jewish suffering. Nor would the site emphasize the suffering of other groups such as the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so-called asocials (the indigent, prostitutes, and other social outcasts).28 While brief mention was made of these victims, their suffering was to be subsumed into a triumphant master narrative of communist-led liberation.

Since the guiding ideology for any postwar memorial at Auschwitz had to advance a pro-Soviet narrative, the museum’s displays had to conform to a worldview that saw history in terms of class, not religion, race, or ethnicity. The fact that the vast majority of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews, or that Gypsies were also selected on the basis of alleged biological difference, was not acknowledged. Instead of emphasizing the racism inherent in Nazi ideology toward its victims, under Soviet influence the museum portrayed the victims, perpetrators, and resisters in terms of a class-based ideology that sought to overcome ethnic and religious identities. The Second World War (the Great Patriotic War, in the Soviet Union’s parlance) was cast as a war between the capitalist/imperialist ambitions of Hitler’s fascism on the one hand and the international liberation of workers and peasants through Stalin’s communism on the other. The Soviet view blurred the victims’ identities into an international collective united in having suffered under Hitler’s capitalist-imperialist aggression.29

Despite the unavoidable submission to Soviet-guided propaganda, the reality of Auschwitz’s location in Poland, its management by Polish authorities, and its outreach to Polish visitors assured that Polish suffering would dominate the museum’s displays. The first incarnation of Auschwitz as a memorial highlighted the (mostly Catholic) Polish political prisoners interned and murdered there. The prevalence to this day of the word “martyr” at the memorial subsumes the diverse identities of the camp’s victims into a Polish Catholic perspective whereby the camp is interpreted as a site of national persecution cast in distinctly Christian terms. (I shall return to the use of the term “martyr” momentarily.) While Auschwitz’s victims included some 150,000 Catholic Poles, more than 1 million Jews, 23,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet soldiers, and thousands of other minorities were killed there.30 The imperatives of Stalinist ideology and Polish Catholic nationalism converged to de-emphasize the fact that Jews formed the vast majority of the camp’s victims.

The researcher Andrew Charlesworth makes the case that the relatively preserved state of Auschwitz I (the original section of the Auschwitz camp system, also called the Stammlager) facilitated its prioritization of Polish over Jewish suffering. He suggests that the District Liquidation Bureau’s permission to dismantle numerous buildings in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), where the majority of Jewish victims had been murdered, allowed officials to sidestep the unique disaster of Jewish suffering. The emphasis on Auschwitz, Charlesworth points out, served a more sinister purpose of actively ignoring Jewish suffering:

[Of these] six death camps whose primary function was the extermination of European Jewry, … Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka could be deemed inappropriate in that they had been destroyed by the Nazis, leaving little or no trace remaining. This was also very convenient for those who wished to ignore the specificity of Jewish suffering, as these were wholly death camps for Jewish extermination. This left Auschwitz and Majdanek.31

Charlesworth’s implication, namely that tacit anti-Semitism motivated the choice of Auschwitz as a central memorial to Polish victims, is hard to evaluate. While the history of anti-Semitism and the plight of Jews in postwar Poland certainly legitimate this suspicion, there were less cynical considerations to take into account as well, particularly in light of the state of ruin that characterized postwar Poland. As Charlesworth acknowledges, Auschwitz was the most extensive, the most recently operating, and the most intact of the Nazi camps in Poland. That fact alone could be sufficient to explain why Auschwitz was chosen as a memorial facility over other sites. Moreover, the solid brick buildings of the Auschwitz I Stammlager were a premium in a war-ravaged country where standing structures were in short supply, quite in contrast to the readily dismantled or burned wooden barracks found at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) or Majdanek. Furthermore, the fact remains that both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, albeit by different methods and in different numbers. Finally, it is important to resist the temptation to reduce either Soviet-sponsored socialism or Polish nationalism to anti-Semitism, even if both were capable of patently anti-Semitic policies and attitudes.

Despite the emphasis on Soviet communist and Polish nationalist ideologies (and the inherent tensions between them), over time it proved impossible to ignore the anti-Semitism behind the Nazis’ murderous logic. A gradual and much belated shift occurred in the portrayal of fascism, from describing it as a rogue form of capitalism (the Soviet view) to acknowledging the racism inherent in Hitler’s fantasy of German superiority. Today, tourists to Auschwitz are informed explicitly about the genocidal logic of the camp and the system of extermination that evolved there for the purpose of ridding Europe of its Jewish population. Given the inhospitable climate in Stalinist Eastern Europe for acknowledging the victimization of Jews, Roma, or any other group defined as an ethnicity, one must wonder how and when that shift in narrative came about and how tourism has been a witness to that shift.

Even before the war’s end, knowledge about the Holocaust had spread internationally among occupying forces and displaced populations, both of which were on the move. The American and British experience of liberating concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, though technically not extermination camps like Birkenau, made indelible impressions on those troops and the journalists who accompanied them.32 While these camps within the German Reich were not originally established for the sole purpose of murdering Jews, they became the destination of forced marches from the extermination camps as the Nazis moved their prisoners westward away from the advancing Red Army. Of those who survived the death marches, many died in horrible conditions of disease and starvation in the camps liberated by the Western allies.33 In short, the shocking encounters with Nazi camps was an experience shared by Soviet, American, and British allies.

Likewise, the Jewish diaspora ensured that knowledge of the Holocaust would spread beyond the borders of Nazi-occupied Europe. Wartime experiences and continued anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe after 1945 led large numbers of Jews who had survived the Holocaust to migrate to new countries, especially to the United States, Canada, and the British Mandate of Palestine.34 As accounts of the genocide spread internationally among Jewish communities, the local administration at Auschwitz found it impossible to ignore the growing global awareness of what had taken place there, even if that pressure met with considerable ideological resistance from the state. By the late 1960s, the emphasis at Auschwitz on Polish victimization began to make way for a more forthright acknowledgment that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. What is remarkable is that this transition took place at a time when the Communist Party in Poland was becoming increasingly and overtly anti-Semitic. Tourism, particularly in the mode of service tourism and commemorative visits, had begun to relocate the responsibility for Auschwitz memorialization in a more deliberately international context, with groups from other countries demanding a role in shaping remembrance and preservation at the memorial, as we will see below. Tourism thereby played an important role in furthering the process of acknowledging the Jewish victims at Auschwitz, even at a time when the political climate in Poland would seem to have been unfavorable.35

Throughout the Cold War, alternating periods of tension and thaw between East and West had a direct impact on tourism, severely restricting travel across the Iron Curtain at some times while easing restrictions at others. But tourism also exerted pressure of its own to allow access to travelers. Besides the fact that tourism was one of the few ways in which citizens from East and West could get to know one another, the considerable amount of wealth generated by the tourism industry was crucial to the struggling economies of postwar Europe. That was particularly true for the Soviet-dominated East, whose currency had little purchasing power internationally. The fact that tourism brought in the West’s hard currency to the economically struggling Soviet Bloc ensured that the doors could never stay closed for long. And whenever those doors opened, tourism between East and West represented an exchange not only of currency but also of cultural values, despite the strident rhetoric of postwar propaganda.36

Tourists always bring expectations, and the tourism industry has to work to respond and accommodate those expectations while in turn making demands of its own on tourists. The dynamics of tourism as a market, as a circulation not only of goods and services but also of cultural expectations and performances, applies as much to Auschwitz as to any other tourist destination. The dramatic transformations that have taken place at the Auschwitz memorial site are a powerful reminder that tourism cannot be reduced to the passive consumption of displays decided by others. Rather, tourism both responds to and helps influence policies that govern the memorial sites. Whatever other geopolitical factors have shaped access to Auschwitz—and they are considerable—tourism has also played a decisive role, and indeed, one could argue that tourism offered a highly visible stage where geopolitical tensions could find expression. In the years following World War II, tourism became one of the most public arenas in which communist and Polish nationalist narratives at Auschwitz could be challenged by an international public, the grounds on which struggle over access to the site was waged, and the measure by which the gradual opening of Auschwitz to the international community was achieved.37

The Evolution of Tourism to Auschwitz: The Cold War and Beyond

The earliest tourists to Auschwitz were composed of school groups from Poland, whose visit to the site was a mandatory part of the curriculum.38 These school groups saw Auschwitz I, the Stammlager, where the Nazis kept Polish figures whom they regarded as ideological enemies, including Polish Communists and many members of the Catholic Church. The first crematorium was built in Auschwitz I, and an adjacent room that had been designed as a morgue was converted into a gas chamber, even though Auschwitz I was not established originally as a center for extermination on a massive scale. At the Stammlager was the infamous Block 11, where the torture and executions of prisoners, including Father Maximilian Kolbe, were carried out. Other prisoners killed at Auschwitz I included 600 Soviet prisoners of war who were murdered in 1941, gassed in experiments using Zyklon B that led to the use of that chemical as the principal method for mass murder at Birkenau. Since the Polish state after the war exercised a monopoly on school curricula, the intact remains of Auschwitz I provided a powerful teaching moment that could be used to reinforce a sense of Poland’s indebtedness to their Soviet liberators and point to sacrifices made by the Red Army to defeat Germany. At the same time, Polish schools reinforced a sense of Polish national solidarity by emphasizing the martyrdom of such figures as Father Kolbe.

Figure 1.2. The crematorium at Auschwitz I, August 2007, with the entrance to the gas chamber that was originally a morgue. The gas chamber was reconstructed to include shower heads to depict the destroyed gas chambers of Birkenau. Photo by the author.

Meanwhile, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) remained beyond the earliest guided tours. Visitors could cover the two kilometers to the site on their own, with no guide to accompany them. With limited resources for managing such an expansive site and few suitable structures in which to install exhibitions, Birkenau remained largely a ruin; the story of Birkenau was instead told at Auschwitz I. The collections of hair, the suitcases and the personal effects of the new arrivals, much of which had been warehoused at Birkenau, were brought to the Stammlager after the war to be shown to tourists. The museum faced an overwhelming task of managing a camp complex that included over forty subcamps, of which Birkenau was the most notorious. Given the infamy of Birkenau as an extermination camp, clearly some arrangement would have to be made to emphasize Birkenau in the geography of tourism to Auschwitz, even if the site did not so easily conform to the ideology of the immediate postwar era. As early as 1957, the museum announced an international competition to erect a monument at Birkenau that would serve as a focal point for memorialization there.39 The monument was not erected until 1967, and even there, the Jewish and Gypsy identities of those gassed on arrival was blurred into the undifferentiated and incorrect number of “four million [sic] people [who] suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945.”40 As James E. Young, a pioneer scholar in the field of Holocaust memorialization, explains, “The figure of 4 million was as wrong as it was round, arrived at by a combination of [camp commandant Rudolf Höss’s] self-aggrandizing exaggerations, Polish perceptions of their great losses, and the Soviet occupiers’ desire to create socialist martyrs.”41

While the Iron Curtain ensured that most visitors to the camp memorial would come from Poland and other Warsaw Pact nations, a gradual process of stabilization in relations with the West during the Cold War brought about the steady increase in tourism to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum from other parts of the globe.42 These groups ranged from church groups from East and West Germany, who began traveling to the site in 1966 as a gesture of atonement,43 to the Israeli-sponsored March of the Living, which has been gathering Jewish participants from around the globe since 1988 to travel to Poland and Israel as a way of identifying with a collective Jewish trauma and its redemption in a Jewish state.44 Meanwhile, school groups and socialist youth organizations from across the Eastern Bloc countries continued to visit the camp as a way of forging solidarity among one another, united in their suffering under fascism, their liberation by the Soviet Union, and their shared project of realizing socialism.

Among the tour groups traveling to Auschwitz from abroad, one of the oldest comes from both sides of a divided Germany. Since the 1960s, the ecumenical Christian organization Aktion Sühnezeichen, or Action Reconciliation, has organized travel by volunteers for service abroad as an effort to acknowledge and make restitution for crimes committed by Germany during the Third Reich. While the organization extended into both East and West Germany, the Cold War made collaboration between both branches extremely difficult. Still, both branches played active roles in the maintenance of Auschwitz and other camps in Poland as sites of remembrance. Among the activities of Aktion Sühnezeichen was the unearthing of Crematorium II and Crematorium III in Birkenau, meant as a way to acknowledge Germany’s perpetration of genocide.45 Aktion Sühnezeichen presented a case of “volunteer tourism,” a term that has emerged in more recent years to describe service-oriented travel. For Aktion Sühnezeichen, the purpose of these trips was conceived as a form of penance, a religiously inflected modality of the German discourse of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through the past).46 The presence of Aktion Sühnezeichen in Auschwitz, and its status as an alternative to compulsory military service in West Germany, merged two discourses of reconciliation in West Germany. The first, a specifically Christian discourse of atonement, sought reconciliation through confession and good works. The other, the political discourse of the Federal Republic, sought to overcome the divisions of the Cold War that had its clearest manifestation in a Germany divided into two states.47 These two discourses were not mutually exclusive; indeed, they informed and enhanced one another.

While Christian-based service tourism was allowed to make inroads into the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, Jewish organizations faced a less hospitable climate. With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the early Cold War years made some accommodation to Jewish remembrance possible. But the period of tolerance toward anything perceived as Jewish nationalism on Eastern European soil was fated to run afoul of the prevailing Stalinist narrative for the postwar era. In Poland, many Jews wished to preserve some sense of a separate ethnic identity that they saw as compatible with socialism, and thus enabled their participation in the Polish government and party offices. That comity came to an abrupt halt in 1968, when Poland purged Jews from the government. The image of Polish anti-Semitism made an unwelcome return to the world stage and positioned Jewish commemorators at Auschwitz in an oppositional relationship to the Polish state. Poland had put itself in the awkward position of suppressing the Jewish remnant within its borders while still having to maintain some openness to Jewish interests in the Auschwitz memorial from abroad.

The fusion of political and religious interests is apparent in another prominent tour group that has been traveling to Auschwitz since 1988. The March of the Living brings Jewish teens from all over the world to Poland and to Israel “to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and to lead the Jewish people into the future vowing ‘Never Again’ ” (original emphasis). Each year its participants go “to Poland on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, to march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest concentration camp complex built during World War II,” after which they travel “to Israel to observe Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.”48 Clearly tied to a narrative of national and religious identity, the mission of the March of the Living is “both universal (fighting indifference, racism and injustice) and particular (opposing anti-Semitism, and strengthening Jewish identity and connection to Israel).”49 It positions the march at Auschwitz as a cornerstone in the establishment of a Jewish future.

The religious studies scholar Oren Baruch Stier characterizes the March of the Living as a form of “memory tourism,” relying on the familiar notion of tourism as pilgrimage suggested in different studies by the anthopologists Dean MacCannell and Nelson Graburn, in which travelers engage in a ritualized commemoration of history. But, as Stier also points out, there is an undeniably secular dimension to this ritual that incorporates what some see as troubling images of nationalism.50 Participating youths frequently wave or drape themselves in the Israeli flag at Auschwitz and elsewhere on the March in a gesture of national pride that underscores the March’s emphasis on the resurgence of the Jewish people despite all attempts to eradicate them. But the contrast between the visit to Auschwitz, framed as the European past, and the subsequent journey to Israel, framed as the land of rebirth, casts a harsh light on Poland. As the anthropologist Jack Kugelmass has described, Jewish youth may experience unwelcome reactions from some Poles they encounter, which they are likely to attribute to anti-Semitism.51 For the young American Jews participating in the March of the Living whom Kugelmass describes, the scant knowledge they have of Eastern Europe as an ancestral home comes into direct contact with Eastern Europe as a living place, and what visitors experience as hostility means that “the mythic becomes tangible.”52 History may become more real to these travelers, but at the same time the present-day experience of Poland gets read through a particular historical narrative that ignores the perspective of present-day Poles, who may understandably resent being equated with the perpetrators and bystanders of the Holocaust. This is the argument by the Israeli anthropologist Jackie Feldman, who points out that the participating youths’ negative perceptions of Poles goes relatively unchallenged because of the minimal contact that the participants have with the local population.53 But Feldman also concedes that some participants may reexamine their impressions as they acquire other travel experiences that challenge such simplistic associations.54

Whatever one may feel about the ritual of commemoration at Auschwitz for specific political purposes, it has been a feature of the site since its liberation. Jonathan Huener explains that the grounds have

always functioned as a stage for public commemorative ritual and political tourism. Its monuments, structures, and open spaces have attracted pilgrims, politicians, and activists participating in any variety of politically charged demonstrations. Polish nationalist commemorative ceremonies on the anniversary of the liberation, rallies organized to condemn American imperialism, Roman Catholic services at the site on All Saints’ eve [sic], or penitential German pilgrimages to the site—such are the ways that Auschwitz has been used throughout the postwar decades.55

However problematic the use of Auschwitz as a “stage for public commemorative ritual and political tourism,” the fact that such commemoration has taken place since the establishment of a memorial reinforces the notion that tourism is not merely incidental to geopolitical shifts but part and parcel of it. The fact that these acts of commemoration remain controversial suggests that tourism becomes not the cause of historical or contemporary geopolitical tensions but, rather, one arena in which these issues are addressed, debated, and perhaps even resolved.

A closer look at the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Auschwitz Memorial illustrates the point. In recent years, controversies have erupted over Catholic commemoration at Auschwitz in deeply Catholic Poland and anti-Semitic utterances by many Polish Catholic clergy, including Cardinal Józef Glemp and Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek.56 The use of crosses to commemorate the murder of notable Catholics at Auschwitz, such as the Carmelite nun Edith Stein or the Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe, have been a source of ongoing tension. Stein was born into an observant Jewish home in Poland but converted to Christianity in 1922. Pope John Paul II raised her to sainthood in 1998, but Jewish groups argue that she was murdered because she was regarded by the Nazis as a member of the Jewish race, not because she was a devout Catholic. The infamous hunger cell in Block 11 where Maximilian Kolbe starved to death is also presented to the tourist as a site of Catholic martyrdom. Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo for assisting refugees hiding from the Nazis and subsequently sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered along with nine other inmates as collective retribution for three escapees from the camp. The controversies around the canonization of Catholic martyrs during John Paul’s papacy led to an international outcry on behalf of Jewish victims and survivors, whose own suffering had been historically obscured by a Polish narrative of national martyrdom. Perhaps in response to these outcries, some in the Vatican recognized the need to respect the diverse religions of the camps’ victims and to acknowledge the genocide perpetrated against Jews. The shift in the Vatican’s public approach to Auschwitz was marked by John Paul’s 1993 order to disband a Carmelite convent that had established itself on the camp’s grounds in 1984 in a structure that had once been used to warehouse Zyklon B.

The list of controversies is long and seemingly inexhaustible, suggesting that the complexity of commemoration at the camp is unavoidable. But they also testify to the uneasy evolution from a monument chiefly to Polish “martyrdom” to an appropriate recognition of the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews. At present, the commemorative activities at the camp seek to accommodate both of these narratives equally. The camp faces a difficult choice: to allow the victims to commemorate their own suffering in ways that are meaningful to them, even at the risk of historical distortion, or to foreground the perspective of Nazi ideology to explain why different groups, but especially Jews, were sent there. As the camp has evolved, it appears that the memorial has increasingly acknowledged the perpetrator’s perspective, educating the touring public about the ideology that led to genocide and mass murder. This has led James E. Young to worry that the camp may provide an unwitting victory to Nazi ideology, since the artifacts on display “force us to recall the victims as the Germans have remembered them to us: in the collected debris of a destroyed civilization.”57 That is, tourism recollects the Nazis’ intentions at the expense of the lives of their victims. Young is, of course, correct in a sense—Auschwitz is perceived as the embodiment of the Nazi genocide. But in fairness, the camp memorial makes an effort to remind the visitor that each victim had a biography, a family, a hometown. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum includes several national exhibitions, each in a block at the Stammlager, each with a different way of telling stories about the victims deported from their lands.

While I would not wish to ignore Young’s concern about memory as the camps preserve it, I would point out that tourism to Auschwitz has proven perfectly capable of accommodating different ideologies that do not resign themselves to a view of Auschwitz as the last word on the victims. The history of tour groups to Auschwitz and the tensions over the site’s message remind us that memorialization is a process, that the apparent fixity of place can often give the illusion that history itself is somehow static, rather than a process of continual discovery. Indeed, Young himself acknowledges the ability of memorials to adapt.58 The fact that different tourists at different times have encountered different incarnations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum should remind us that tourism is a fluid enterprise, an evolving encounter with places and events that respond to changing contexts. The danger in tourism is that the visitor may not be informed of these changes and may entertain the illusion that the place is unchanged since the event it commemorates. The museum staff therefore has an obligation to inform its visitors not only about the development of Auschwitz from a concentration camp to an extermination camp but also about its continual development as a memorial.

The examples of tourism to Auschwitz presented thus far—Polish-sponsored tourism as a place of national suffering, German service tourism as a form of atonement, or Israeli efforts to instill a sense of unity in the Jewish diaspora centered around the Jewish state—suggest that the motivations for travel to the site are various and sometimes incongruous with one another. But they share a common belief that being there matters, that one’s presence leads to increased historical insight, deeper intercultural understanding, or better knowledge of one’s own place in the world.59 Anthropological studies of tourism explore these beliefs and lead to portrayals of all kinds of tourism as pilgrimage, as modern-day ritual, as a search for transcendence.60 But such labels also raise serious questions, if for no other reason than because the solemnity they grant travelers may be unwarranted. The idea that modern-day tourism’s motivations can be reduced to a single root impulse universal to all humans is an anthropological fantasy that offers no help in accounting for the disparities among travelers and their experiences. While many visitors cast the journey to Auschwitz as a spiritual experience, others see it as a sense of civic duty, while others may go along because of group pressure. Some visitors articulate all of these motivations, moving fluidly from one to another as they negotiate their pathways. Vacationers in Poland, for example, often visit Auschwitz as a day’s excursion from nearby Kraków, to which they will return and resume some more obviously pleasurable mode of tourism after a day they regard as pilgrimage. School groups travel to Auschwitz because they have to—it is an assigned field trip, and students may actually resist the experience of tourism assigned to them. Politicians, dignitaries, and even soccer teams pay their respects at the site on certain occasions. To see Auschwitz—or to be seen seeing Auschwitz—has become such a staple of contemporary travel in Eastern Europe that one is just as likely to comment on its omission as on its inclusion.61 The point is that tourism, including Holocaust tourism, accommodates both lofty and more mundane motivations.

The separation of visitors to Auschwitz into tourists versus pilgrims, tourists versus dignitaries, tourists versus scholars, or other variations of “they are tourists, I am not” is a well-rehearsed strategy for assigning legitimacy to some forms of travel by denying it to others.62 The tourist always becomes the signifier of the shallow, superficial, or consumerist term in a binary that is all too often self-serving. But solemnity and frivolity, abstinence and indulgence, frugality and consumerism often travel as pairs. For example, the presence of a bookstore at a holy site invites the pilgrim’s participation in some form of commercial tourism; by the same token, a non-believer’s participation in a group tour that includes a holy site may produce an attitude of reverence or deeply personal response to a foreign tradition or faith.63 One need only recall the blend of piety and ribaldry in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to recover an image of pilgrimage that is open to playful diversion.64

What is required to demonstrate that one is a serious pilgrim, not a frivolous tourist? Take the case of Adolek “Adam” Kohn, an Auschwitz survivor, whose return to Auschwitz along with his family demonstrates the difficulty in equating pilgrimage with seriousness or decorum. Kohn appears at Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt, and other sites in a video, still available on YouTube, filmed by his daughter Jane Korman in 2009. In the clip, Kohn appears with four of his grandchildren dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit, “I Will Survive.” No doubt the video was intended as an expression of triumph of a family that has lived for three generations despite everything. For Kohn’s daughter and grandchildren, the trip was a visit to sites in Poland and the Czech Republic that had been part of their family’s history—what many might call a pilgrimage.65 The video went viral on the Internet and drew strong criticism from viewers, including some from the survivor community, who understandably objected to the idea of anyone dancing on the victims’ graves.

If tourism is inclusive of solemnity and profanity—and for many, Korman’s video was an illustration of the latter—is it always the wrong side of the coin? If by “profanity” we mean the worldly, as opposed to the sacred, then the tendency in tourism studies to elevate the everyday into an ersatz form of the sacred may undervalue what is precisely not pilgrimage in Holocaust tourism. The anthropologist Malcolm Crick makes the important observation that “there is a problem, however, in elevating notions of play or sacred quest into a general explanatory framework.”66 His statement is a warning to avoid overstating the case for tourism, but I also take from his remarks the need to take the non-religious, non-transcendental aspects of Holocaust tourism seriously. Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the number of visitors to Auschwitz has rapidly grown to over two million per year.67 Most are not survivors like Kohn, or perpetrators, or their descendants. Most are travelers curious about a site whose meaning they perceive as primarily historical.

One of the more critical accounts of tourism to Auschwitz comes from the historian Tim Cole. Like Pollock, Cole rightly situates travel to Auschwitz within the context of broader cultural representations of the Holocaust, reminding us that tourism is not hermetically sealed off from other forms representation, such as cinema, literature, or history books. He discusses the problematics of Holocaust remembrance in our media-saturated era and effectively points to the ease with which popular culture can misrepresent history while commercializing it—a familiar approach to Holocaust remembrance within mass culture.68 Cole ultimately consigns tourism to the unethical body of practices, alongside Hollywood films or sensational novels, that distort Holocaust memory in an effort to profit from it. In his book Selling the Holocaust, he provides numerous examples of questionable tourism related to the Holocaust. For example, he describes the phenomenon of “Schindler Tourism,” in which travelers to Kraków visit the neighborhoods depicted in Steven Spielberg’s famous film, allegedly without appreciating the distinction between Hollywood and history. In particular, he deplores the Schindler tour for reinforcing the film’s oversimplification of the Holocaust into “a story of ‘good versus evil’ ” that displaces attention from the Jewish victims to the heroism of an atypical German “savior.”69 Another tourist destination that Cole finds problematic is the highly visited Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which also perpetuates the myth of a young teen’s optimism in the face of disaster, as foregrounded in her diary. The attention to Anne Frank, whose diary Cole characterizes as “the canonical ‘Holocaust’ text,” tends to lead its many readers to celebrate her perseverance while in hiding at the expense of confronting her terrible demise in Belsen after her deportation.70 These criticisms derive from familiar critiques by the scholars Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, and others, but Cole applies them to tourism without exploring the ways in which tourism is distinct from the arts.

Having consigned several popular examples of Holocaust remembrance to the status of sellouts, Cole goes on to paint travelers to Auschwitz as duped consumers of a distorted history. While he reserves legitimacy for those he calls pilgrims (including himself), he portrays others as visiting a Holocaust theme park, which he dubs “Auschwitz-land”:71

Walking through “Auschwitz-land” we do not see an authentic past preserved carefully for the present. We don’t experience the past as it really was, but experience a mediated past which has been carefully created for our viewing.… At “Auschwitz-land” we perhaps unwittingly enter a “Holocaust theme-park” rather than a “Holocaust concentration camp”.

We visit a contrived tourist attraction, which offers that which a culture saturated with the myth of the “Holocaust” expects to see. “Auschwitz-land” both plays a part in creating and perpetuating that myth, and depends upon the myth for its continued popularity. A tour round “Auschwitz-land” is about the consumption of a familiar landscape.72

Cole certainly has company in his concerns for the perception of Auschwitz as a “theme park,” but his formulation of what he calls the “Holocaust myth,” which leads him to put the word “Holocaust” into quotations marks, is ill advised.73 To be fair, Cole does not mean to imply the irreality of the genocide, as some might presume; rather, he points to the ubiquity of its literary and filmic representations. And if by “contrived” he means the lengths to which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has gone to preserve and even to restore certain structures, then he is correct in some superficial sense, although the camp hardly presents itself as a Holocaust reenactment à la Plimoth Plantation or Sturbridge Village.74 If the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is not a functioning concentration camp any more, why must it be a theme park? Cole’s characterization of tourism to Auschwitz presents tourists as so unsophisticated that they cannot distinguish between a carefully managed monument and a simulated killing center.75

As Holocaust remembrance passes through a critical juncture—the inevitable passing of eyewitnesses to the disaster—it disperses into every corner of cultural representation. The emergence of Holocaust tourism is symptomatic of that dispersal. The diffusion of Holocaust memory into popular forms of remembrance, of which tourism is only one part, exceeds any simple pilgrim/tourist or concentration camp/theme park binary that seeks to contrast Holocaust tourism with prescribed modes of religious, scholarly, or aesthetically exclusive forms of remembrance. Admittedly, it is hardly surprising that Auschwitz should elicit the “They are tourists, I am not” response with such frequency and intensity. The ethical implications involved in “consuming” such a site loom large, and there are certainly tourists to Auschwitz whose engagement is superficial, even inappropriate. There are others, though, for whom a tour to Auschwitz is the catalyst for deeper reflection about the Holocaust.

Tourism makes reflection possible, but does not guarantee it. One must admit that some tourists will leave Auschwitz with little new insight or interest in further reflection. But the narrative that dominates the accounts by visitors to this site is that of a powerful or disturbing personal experience. Even visitors who complain about the noise or distractions of other tourists insist on the significance of their personal experience.76 Tourists articulate a sense of responsibility to what they have observed and frequently exhort others to follow in their footsteps. Some define their insights more precisely than others, but they share a common theme of having seen something important and having learned from it. The question for the remainder of this chapter is whether their experiences constitute acts of witnessing.

The Tourist and Testimony

Tourism’s heavy reliance on visuality alone might tempt us to think of tourists as “eyewitnesses,” at least after the fact. Much as the liberating forces observed evidence of what had taken place prior to their arrival, tourists come to Auschwitz to view the traces of genocide in its most industrialized incarnation, although the scenes they encounter are vastly different. For tourism to enable a kind of witnessing, however, it must amount to more than a simple act of viewing displays that have been curated by museum staff for the last seventy years. Even if Auschwitz were unchanged from the moment of its liberation in 1945, seeing the remains of destruction would not suffice to grant tourists the designation of “witness.”

“Witnessing” names a communicative act that translates a moment of experience into an utterance that, in turn, is heard by another.77 At stake in the exchange is the veracity of the experience—the witness testifies in order to have an experience of reality confirmed. One becomes fully a witness only when one’s report to a listener has been received and acknowledged. Witnessing is, in short, intersubjective.78 For tourism to Auschwitz to embody witnessing, there needs to be the double articulation of something enunciated and something heard. The idea that the Auschwitz memorial complex conveys testimony about the Holocaust to interested tourists may appear to be a straightforward claim. One can compare a memoir written by a survivor with the evidence of the genocide presented through displays, documents, and narrations by tour guides, acknowledging their similarities in communicating a past experience. But often tourists are called upon to bear witness and produce testimony themselves, and the idea that such testimony can be of value may appear more dubious. As we will see, there is nothing simple about either claim.

To take up the first issue—how tourism to Auschwitz encounters the testimony of eyewitnesses (beyond the excerpts from such testimony that are on display)—it is useful to compare the artifacts, photographs, or even the landscape itself as forms of testimony that, though non-linguistic, engage in a form of communication with their viewers.79 To ponder the nature of witnessing in this larger sense, the reception of written survivor testimony may indicate ways of thinking, not only about written or spoken eyewitness accounts, but also about such non-linguistic components of tourism that, nevertheless, say something about the past.

Survivor testimony is a thriving genre; indeed, Elie Wiesel has even claimed testimony as the genre of our age.80 Whether read as books at home or encountered as videotaped interviews in museums, accounts by survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitnesses promise their readers some degree of immediacy or affective connection to the disaster that dispassionate histories cannot.81 Given the fallibility of human memory, historians are suspicious of the ability of testimony to enrich our factual knowledge about the Nazi genocide. Testimonial accounts nevertheless engage their readers on both a visceral and a metaphysical level, involving them emotionally and intellectually in profoundly troubling considerations about humanity and violence. Tourism draws on the power of such testimony to heighten the sense of immediacy that being there promises.82 Survivor testimonies ask their audiences to listen carefully, to hear not only the account of the past but also the urgency and the struggle inherent in the survivor’s struggle to render the account in words.83 Readers are the audience that survivors require if their testimony is to be received, thus fulfilling the task of bearing witness.

But the intersubjectivity demanded of witnessing emerges as a critical problem in the reception of survivor testimony, some of which draws rather pessimistic conclusions about the adequacy of language to communicate a survivor’s traumatic experiences. If such pessimism has a common origin, it may lie in the survivor accounts themselves. Whether they are Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (also published as If This Is a Man), or any other testament to the ordeal of the Holocaust, survivor accounts typically express the need to remember, and, at the same time, they lament the hurdles to transmitting memories through language. In survivor testimony, witnessing is framed as obligation and impossibility, a Sisyphean task that can never be achieved adequately. We see this predicament in the preface to Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, where the author identifies a gap between his need to speak and his ability to provide a complete account:

I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its origins go back, not indeed in practice, but as an idea, an intention, to the days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to “the rest,” to make “the rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its fragmentary character: the chapters have been written not in logical succession, but in order of urgency.84

Levi makes plain for his reader the therapeutic necessity of convincing “the rest”—which comes to encompass future generations as much as contemporaries who did not experience the camp—even at the expense of a logical progression. The fragmentary account cannot claim even to render Levi’s own experiences exhaustively, suggesting that the experience of Auschwitz itself resists any logically ordered or complete representation; instead, Levi’s need to bear witness appears as a “violent impulse.”

Like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel names a painful gap between the experience of the camp and its representation in testimony. Addressing the urgency to bear witness, Wiesel speaks of writing his testimony itself as a form of trauma, wondering if he composed Night “so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind.”85 Wiesel goes on to identify language as the chief barrier to providing a full account:

Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language.… I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.86

Wiesel bemoans the inadequacy of language to convey what he and others experienced, and in doing so he negates his own testimony’s capacity to convey his experiences to others:

Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.87

For Wiesel, the obligation to bear witness becomes itself a kind of trauma because it seems doomed to fail. Wiesel registers this double traumatization not only through expressions of helplessness but in the very representation of his own consciousness as split. To underscore the impossibility of transferring knowledge through testimony, Wiesel portrays a disjuncture between the narrator of this passage and the younger self who wrote Night, referring to himself not as “I” but in the third person (something Wiesel does with some regularity in his prose). And yet that double traumatization mirrors the double articulation of bearing witness—Wiesel must become his own listener, since only one who has experienced what he did can receive his message.88

The prevalence of trauma as a category for approaching Holocaust survivor testimony suggests that tourism, to the extent it relays the experiences of camp prisoners, must overcome the same inadequacies of communication. Trauma theorists posit a breach between the survivors’ experience, one the one hand, and their ability to convey that experience coherently to those who were not there, on the other. This breach is often expressed in terms of the Holocaust’s unspeakability or its incomprehensibility. Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst and himself a Holocaust survivor, likens the Holocaust testimonial’s survivor/reader relationship to patient/analyst relationship in trauma therapy. In laying out a psychoanalytic framework for thinking about survivor testimony, Laub describes a communicative structure involving a wounded speaker and a sympathetic listener. The project of remembering is fraught, and so the patient and therapist must work together to confront a past that seems to elude comprehension even by those who experienced it.89 In fact, Laub advances the incomprehensibility theory one step further, arguing that the Holocaust was an event without witnesses, an alarming notion he introduces as a “theoretical perspective” meant to explain the unique aspect of the trauma experienced by the Nazis’ victims. Laub claims that “what made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.”90 The unfamiliarity of the event was so radical, in others words, that the ability of the human mind to observe and remember was hopelessly compromised.

In response to the trope of incomprehensibility that accompanies so much thought about survivor testimony, the work of the Judaic and literary studies scholar Gary Weissman offers a useful intervention. Countering Wiesel’s contention that only those who experienced the Holocaust directly can understand it, Weissman suggests that “perhaps just the opposite is the case; perhaps because it is a historical concept comprising myriad events which no one person experienced directly, the Holocaust can only be understood historically.”91 That is, if it is the case that the Holocaust lies beyond the witness’s ability to relate testimony in a comprehensive and coherent manner, then it is up to the listener to put that testimony into a historical, explanatory context that reaches beyond the experiences of the individual survivor. Weissman distinguishes between the Holocaust as the individual experiences of all those caught up in it and the Holocaust as an event with discernible components that can be learned as a set of facts: “The Holocaust and a survivor’s Holocaust experience constitute related but distinct objects of knowledge. It is one thing to understand the antecedent conditions of the Holocaust … and quite another to understand ‘what it was like’ to live and die at Auschwitz-Birkenau or in the Warsaw ghetto.”92 The trope of incomprehensibility encountered in so much survivor testimony and its reception makes the mistake of conflating these two objects of knowledge. To know the experience of another person as though one experienced it oneself may be impossible no matter how harmless the event. But as Weissman points out, it is perhaps that cognitive distance that creates an opportunity for a different kind of knowledge, one that he calls “historical.”

Weissman’s reminder that receiving testimony does not require a direct transfer of experience is useful in getting past the debilitating trope of incomprehensibility. Understandably, survivors express anguish about being heard and understood, but that neither silences their expression nor bars their audience from listening and drawing conclusions about the event. The absence of a direct transfer of experience is not a failure to communicate. While written survivor accounts may arouse the empathy of their readers and speak to a yearning to experience secondhand that which the survivor has endured (hence the term “fantasies of witnessing”), Weissman also rightly comments that “no degree of power or monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s.”93 Indeed, it is the awareness that the survivors are passing that produces a hunger to claim as personal memory that which must become something else when the survivors are gone.94 That something else is collective memory, which, in a strict sense, is not memory at all, but remembrance. The hunger for experiencing from a safe distance what victims and survivors endured makes such experience impossible a priori, but Weissman does not conclude that testimony therefore loses its purpose. The “fantasy of witnessing”—the mistaken belief that there is a way to comprehend the survivor’s experience in its fullness—still enables the compassionate reception of another’s testimony within a historical framework.

Weissman’s admonition not to confuse the reception of witness testimony with experiencing trauma also helps explain the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, which may be motivated by similar “fantasies of witnessing.” In fact, he opens his volume with an account of a son who accompanies his father, a survivor, to the Mauthausen camp memorial in Austria, where the latter was interned. Hoping to know somehow more directly what his father experienced by visiting the site, he is instead disappointed by the normality of the place. He does not encounter abject horror; “instead, he felt distanced from the actuality of what had occurred decades ago in the places where he stood. In response to this feeling, Michael’s desire to experience what Mauthausen had been for his father in 1944 gave way to a more basic effort to feel, to experience something, whatever would enable him to overcome his sense of estrangement from the Holocaust past.”95 (Perhaps Michael’s estrangement is not so different from the experience of some prisoners, as Weissman suggests. Primo Levi’s description of his arrival at Auschwitz recounts a sense of surprise that he is not immediately confronted by the “apocalyptic,” instead encountering a semblance, however brief, of the familiar.) Tourists like Michael hope through proximity to find a sense of immediacy that they cannot find by reading survivor testimony, even if they are the children of survivors.96 But the inability to experience the horror begets something equally important to the transmission of testimony, and that is an act of imagination—in Michael’s case, about what it must have been like for those who suffered. “Finally it was hearing stories of how prisoners suffered and died in the quarry, told at the very scene of the crime, that enabled him to come closest to something of the missing horror, however fleetingly.”97 (We will explore in the following chapters the ways in which Holocaust tourism invites its participants to engage in a more difficult act of imagination—identification with the perpetrators.)

Weissman’s distinction between historical knowledge and experiential knowledge reminds us that we should not discount knowledge that is “merely factual”; instead, we should acknowledge the role such knowledge plays in the act of testifying to experience. Surely the job of Holocaust museums and memorials is to ensure that historical knowledge, too, is transmitted on behalf of the victims. In court cases, where testimony has its primary locus, the jury’s task is not to take on the identity of the victim, to endure the victim’s experiences, but to find truth. Courtrooms are 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 recent cases against former SS guards in Germany charged as accessories to murder, witnessing continues to fulfill a desire for justice to redress the Nazis’ crimes.107 Indeed, the juridical sense of witnessing and the desire to comprehend the space in which abuses of power unfold coincide. It is no trivial matter that the judges in the first independent efforts to prosecute camp personnel in West Germany, the Frankfurt trials of 1963–1965, traveled to Auschwitz to tour the grounds for themselves before reaching their verdicts.108

Agamben’s awareness of power as unfolding not simply in discourse (ideology, law) but also in perceptible space has clear implications for tourism’s capacity to bear witness. Tourists temporarily inhabit structures and places imbued with cultural significance and arranged in ways to communicate particular messages: An art museum may showcase a national heritage, a historical movement, or the evolution of a particular artist; journeys into the wilderness promise to take the tourist away from civilization into pristine nature; and beach resorts encourage travelers to break free from their routines (and to spend money in the local economy). In the case of tourism to Auschwitz, travelers encounter a space conceived for the exercise of power by one group of human beings over others. The guided tour directs the visitor’s gaze to the spatial configurations of a violent authority that excluded individuals from the human community by including them in a space designed to de-humanize them.109 At the same time, the way in which tourism directs the gaze, and the ways in which tourists may or may not comply, offer a pale reflection of that interplay of power, discourse, and space.

By emphasizing spatiality, the tourist to Auschwitz becomes a witness by encountering the scene of a crime and confronting its arrangements of space.110 This experience of space includes an understanding of the relationship of the camp to nearby surroundings—at Auschwitz, the camp’s adjacency to a center of population is startling. One is forced to accept the simultaneity of brutality and everyday life side by side. Did the locals know? Did they intervene? This encounter with Auschwitz as a physical space where people still live and work may confound, shock, even disappoint the tourist who expected something more overtly extraordinary or terrifying. In this way, tourism encounters Agamben’s “aporia of Auschwitz”—that is, of the incommensurability between experience and facts. Tourism requires the visitor to do the work of witnessing to seek whatever comprehension is available, even if that comprehension can never be considered complete. The museum and memorial are physical manifestations of the facts, not the reenactment of imprisonment and extermination, and as such they impart a form of historical understanding combined with an experience of sharing the space with one’s contemporaries.

The doubling of perception mentioned above, the duality of listening to the past and to the present, is not only an unavoidable aspect of historical tourism, it is also one of its most important mechanisms by which tourism enables reflection. While the primary communication between the site and the visitor conveys testimony from the past, there is a continual act of communication focused on the present. From the moment the tourist arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the museum complex begins to speak not only about the extermination but also about the manner of tourism that is expected. Along with the usual indicators guiding the visitor to the ticket windows and restrooms, there are signs that announce the site’s expectations of decorum from its visitors. One may not smoke on the grounds, one must dress properly, and most important, one must behave “appropriately” (a vague notion, to be sure, and not always heeded).111 The first conscious communication the tourist has with Auschwitz comes in the form of directives: where to go and how to behave. These initial messages set the parameters for the communicative experience of the tour, establishing a code shared by the speaker and the listener that stems not only from a basic notion of respect for the victims who perished but also from a belief that tourists are there to bear witness.

These directives help regulate an encounter that can be quite chaotic. The reception hall, which was built by the SS as the “intake” facility, is often crowded, and the lines to purchase tickets and to wait for the tour to commence become tangled.112 Numerous guides conduct simultaneous tours, with many languages competing for the attention of their respective groups. The guide first takes an assigned group, which can range in size from five to thirty members, out of the reception area to the infamous entry of the prisoner’s camp, marked with the motto “Arbeit macht frei” in wrought iron. For larger groups, the guide speaks into a microphone that plays on headsets distributed to the group’s members. The group is led through several of the “blocks”—the two-story brick buildings that once served as prisoners’ barracks, administrative offices, interrogation and punishment cells, and the “hospital” where many were killed by lethal phenol injections into the heart. The museum has converted these buildings into a series of themed exhibition spaces: One block explains the evolution of the camp from a deserted Polish army base into the Nazis’ largest center for extermination. Another depicts the living conditions of prisoners in the camp. A third focuses on forensic evidence of genocide, including physical traces of victims (ranging from piles of eyeglasses and prosthetics to the hair shaved from women’s heads). Tourists are exhorted not to use flashes in these interior spaces. There are five blocks that house the permanent exhibition, all told.113 The amount of information conveyed to the tourist is vast, with the guide’s narrative accompanied by explanatory signs and contemporary documents, photographs, maps, and artifacts on display. Among these are maps that show the evolution of particular spaces, including photos that reveal the condition of the camp upon liberation, so tourists can observe what has been rebuilt. Crematorium I, with its reconstructed gas chamber and furnaces, is typically the last stop at the Stammlager.

After the tour of the Auschwitz I Stammlager, which typically lasts about ninety minutes, the group travels to Auschwitz II (Birkenau), located about two kilometers to the northwest. The contrast between the two sites is stunning. While the tour begins in the fairly compact area of Auschwitz I, often under crowded conditions, it recommences at the vast expanse of Birkenau. Many visitors express shock at Birkenau’s enormity, which encompasses an area of approximately 350 acres, dwarfing the 50 acres of Auschwitz I. Fences and guard towers extend out to the northern and western horizons. The guide usually takes the group from the so-called Gate of Death, which sits on the eastern boundary of the camp, along the rail spur that bisects Birkenau. To the south of the track, one sees the smaller but relatively intact Frauenlager (women’s camp) and, to the north, mostly ruins of the wooden barracks that were dismantled after the war for building materials. A row of wooden barracks has been reconstructed near the Gate of Death, showing visitors the three-tiered bunks on which prisoners were forced to sleep as many as twelve to a platform only three meters wide. The group walks along the rail spur to the so-called Judenrampe, built for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, where the guide explains the selection process. Finally, the guide brings the group to the ruins of the gas chambers at Crematorium II and Crematorium III, adjacent to a memorial erected in 1967.

Figure 1.3. Part of the men’s camp in Birkenau, with the chimneys marking the spot of former barracks, August 2007. An intact barracks stands beyond the barbed wire fence to the left of the frame. Photo by the author.

At the end of three and a half hours, the group has experienced the space of the camp and heard many stories about the prisoners and their killers. Their mobility through the space where these accounts are set allows tourists to establish a historically informed relationship to a very real and present place. Given the dual awareness of spatial proximity and unbridgeable temporal distance that tour groups encounter, in what sense have they borne witness to the Holocaust? Surely the forensic sense of listening to the testimony, however mediated through the museum, applies to tourism at Auschwitz, which seeks to convert the experience of touring the space into historical knowledge. The degree of success of this kind of witnessing depends on the authenticity of the memorial space.114 That requires that the museum acknowledge any changes to the place, thereby allowing visitors to appreciate what has been altered, restored, or neglected. The tourist encounters not only the evidence of the Final Solution but also the absence of evidence—its loss through destruction or attrition, or its replacement through (openly acknowledged) reconstructions, or its not having yet been retrieved. Tourism presents its participants with speech and silence, with presence and absence, and calls upon the tourist to bridge that gap. Tourism presents the visitor with the challenge of understanding the relationship between trauma and its representation, between experienced event and spoken testimony. Rather than be satisfied with the idea that the Holocaust is beyond comprehension, Holocaust tourism—indeed, the Holocaust itself—demands room to acknowledge that there is a referent, an event that discourse points back to even if it cannot perfectly portray it. The point here is not to overcome silence and absence; rather, it is to point out the ways in which they are the very objects of witnessing the Holocaust.

If we insist on bearing witness to testimony as parallel with an analyst’s listening to a traumatized survivor in the context of therapy, then the contribution of tourism has to be qualified. While psychoanalytic theory may help elucidate survivor testimony, tourists do not engage in great depth with individual experiences. Instead, tourism at Auschwitz is a collective enterprise, presenting multitudes of victims and experienced with crowds of other tourists. The time will come when there are no living survivors, so it is only collectively and transgenerationally that we can still speak of tourism as listening to traumatic memory. In the context of a collective trauma (a term I use with caution so as not to equate individual experience with collective memory), tourism plays a salutary role inasmuch as the very presence of visitors affirms the reality of the past and thus resists the damaging voices of Holocaust denial. Tourism may function as a kind of collective therapy that answers a sense of collective trauma, an inheritance from the past that demands reckoning.

Over the history of Auschwitz as a tourist destination, the camp has come to represent the Holocaust on an international scale, reflecting the diverse ethnic and national origins of the victims and perpetrators. The stories of the Holocaust have dispersed along with the survivors around the globe, and tourism at Auschwitz involves speakers and listeners from many parts of the world. Tourists themselves travel to Auschwitz with their own stories about the genocide and its impact on their family or community, sharing this knowledge with other travelers and tour guides, who in turn become the mediums through which these stories are passed on further. As both primary and secondary witnesses, tourists encounter not only the direct evidence of the past but also its preservation and presentation in the present. They see the spatial remains of the Holocaust at the same time that they see its memorialization. Furthermore, they encounter one another. Tourism bears witness in a general sense to the memory of the Holocaust and, more specifically, to itself and its participants as stewards of that memory. While not all visitors may embody this realization, the tour to Auschwitz imposes an ethical imperative on visitors to remember, to acknowledge the crimes of the past and also the obligations that the past hands down to the future. The mirror that tourism holds up to visitors in the form of other visitors is a reminder of that commitment.

At the end of the tour, when visitors share their photos and impressions with friends or colleagues, tourism recirculates testimony about the crimes of the Final Solution heard on site. Tourists convey their travel experiences in words and in images, posting on travel sites or social media, writing in journals, or sharing photos and postcards. It is that ability to witness Holocaust remembrance through images that I wish to explore further in the next chapter.