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 from his remarks the need to take the non-religious, non-transcendental aspects of Holocaust tourism seriously. Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the number of visitors to Auschwitz has rapidly grown to over two million per year.67 Most are not survivors like Kohn, or perpetrators, or their descendants. Most are travelers curious about a site whose meaning they perceive as primarily historical.
One of the more critical accounts of tourism to Auschwitz comes from the historian Tim Cole. Like Pollock, Cole rightly situates travel to Auschwitz within the context of broader cultural representations of the Holocaust, reminding us that tourism is not hermetically sealed off from other forms representation, such as cinema, literature, or history books. He discusses the problematics of Holocaust remembrance in our media-saturated era and effectively points to the ease with which popular culture can misrepresent history while commercializing it—a familiar approach to Holocaust remembrance within mass culture.68 Cole ultimately consigns tourism to the unethical body of practices, alongside Hollywood films or sensational novels, that distort Holocaust memory in an effort to profit from it. In his book Selling the Holocaust, he provides numerous examples of questionable tourism related to the Holocaust. For example, he describes the phenomenon of “Schindler Tourism,” in which travelers to Kraków visit the neighborhoods depicted in Steven Spielberg’s famous film, allegedly without appreciating the distinction between Hollywood and history. In particular, he deplores the Schindler tour for reinforcing the film’s oversimplification of the Holocaust into “a story of ‘good versus evil’ ” that displaces attention from the Jewish victims to the heroism of an atypical German “savior.”69 Another tourist destination that Cole finds problematic is the highly visited Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which also perpetuates the myth of a young teen’s optimism in the face of disaster, as foregrounded in her diary. The attention to Anne Frank, whose diary Cole characterizes as “the canonical ‘Holocaust’ text,” tends to lead its many readers to celebrate her perseverance while in hiding at the expense of confronting her terrible demise in Belsen after her deportation.70 These criticisms derive from familiar critiques by the scholars Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, and others, but Cole applies them to tourism without exploring the ways in which tourism is distinct from the arts.
Having consigned several popular examples of Holocaust remembrance to the status of sellouts, Cole goes on to paint travelers to Auschwitz as duped consumers of a distorted history. While he reserves legitimacy for those he calls pilgrims (including himself), he portrays others as visiting a Holocaust theme park, which he dubs “Auschwitz-land”:71
Walking through “Auschwitz-land” we do not see an authentic past preserved carefully for the present. We don’t experience the past as it really was, but experience a mediated past which has been carefully created for our viewing.… At “Auschwitz-land” we perhaps unwittingly enter a “Holocaust theme-park” rather than a “Holocaust concentration camp”.
We visit a contrived tourist attraction, which offers that which a culture saturated with the myth of the “Holocaust” expects to see. “Auschwitz-land” both plays a part in creating and perpetuating that myth, and depends upon the myth for its continued popularity.