Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ