Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ