Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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