Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ