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 Tadeusz Pieronek.56 The use of crosses to commemorate the murder of notable Catholics at Auschwitz, 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