Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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      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.