As Holocaust remembrance passes through a critical juncture—the inevitable passing of eyewitnesses to the disaster—it disperses into every corner of cultural representation. The emergence of Holocaust tourism is symptomatic of that dispersal. The diffusion of Holocaust memory into popular forms of remembrance, of which tourism is only one part, exceeds any simple pilgrim/tourist or concentration camp/theme park binary that seeks to contrast Holocaust tourism with prescribed modes of religious, scholarly, or aesthetically exclusive forms of remembrance. Admittedly, it is hardly surprising that Auschwitz should elicit the “They are tourists, I am not” response with such frequency and intensity. The ethical implications involved in “consuming” such a site loom large, and there are certainly tourists to Auschwitz whose engagement is superficial, even inappropriate. There are others, though, for whom a tour to Auschwitz is the catalyst for deeper reflection about the Holocaust.
Tourism makes reflection possible, but does not guarantee it. One must admit that some tourists will leave Auschwitz with little new insight or interest in further reflection. But the narrative that dominates the accounts by visitors to this site is that of a powerful or disturbing personal experience. Even visitors who complain about the noise or distractions of other tourists insist on the significance of their personal experience.76 Tourists articulate a sense of responsibility to what they have observed and frequently exhort others to follow in their footsteps. Some define their insights more precisely than others, but they share a common theme of having seen something important and having learned from it. The question for the remainder of this chapter is whether their experiences constitute acts of witnessing.
The Tourist and Testimony
Tourism’s heavy reliance on visuality alone might tempt us to think of tourists as “eyewitnesses,” at least after the fact. Much as the liberating forces observed evidence of what had taken place prior to their arrival, tourists come to Auschwitz to view the traces of genocide in its most industrialized incarnation, although the scenes they encounter are vastly different. For tourism to enable a kind of witnessing, however, it must amount to more than a simple act of viewing displays that have been curated by museum staff for the last seventy years. Even if Auschwitz were unchanged from the moment of its liberation in 1945, seeing the remains of destruction would not suffice to grant tourists the designation of “witness.”
“Witnessing” names a communicative act that translates a moment of experience into an utterance that, in turn, is heard by another.77 At stake in the exchange is the veracity of the experience—the witness testifies in order to have an experience of reality confirmed. One becomes fully a witness only when one’s report to a listener has been received and acknowledged. Witnessing is, in short, intersubjective.78 For tourism to Auschwitz to embody witnessing, there needs to be the double articulation of something enunciated and something heard. The idea that the Auschwitz memorial complex conveys testimony about the Holocaust to interested tourists may appear to be a straightforward claim. One can compare a memoir written by a survivor with the evidence of the genocide presented through displays, documents, and narrations by tour guides, acknowledging their similarities in communicating a past experience. But often tourists are called upon to bear witness and produce testimony themselves, and the idea that such testimony can be of value may appear more dubious. As we will see, there is nothing simple about either claim.
To take up the first issue—how tourism to Auschwitz encounters the testimony of eyewitnesses (beyond the excerpts from such testimony that are on display)—it is useful to compare the artifacts, photographs, or even the landscape itself as forms of testimony that, though non-linguistic, engage in a form of communication with their viewers.79 To ponder the nature of witnessing in this larger sense, the reception of written survivor testimony may indicate ways of thinking, not only about written or spoken eyewitness accounts, but also about such non-linguistic components of tourism that, nevertheless, say something about the past.
Survivor testimony is a thriving genre; indeed, Elie Wiesel has even claimed testimony as the genre of our age.80 Whether read as books at home or encountered as videotaped interviews in museums, accounts by survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitnesses promise their readers some degree of immediacy or affective connection to the disaster that dispassionate histories cannot.81 Given the fallibility of human memory, historians are suspicious of the ability of testimony to enrich our factual knowledge about the Nazi genocide. Testimonial accounts nevertheless engage their readers on both a visceral and a metaphysical level, involving them emotionally and intellectually in profoundly troubling considerations about humanity and violence. Tourism draws on the power of such testimony to heighten the sense of immediacy that being there promises.82 Survivor testimonies ask their audiences to listen carefully, to hear not only the account of the past but also the urgency and the struggle inherent in the survivor’s struggle to render the account in words.83 Readers are the audience that survivors require if their testimony is to be received, thus fulfilling the task of bearing witness.
But the intersubjectivity demanded of witnessing emerges as a critical problem in the reception of survivor testimony, some of which draws rather pessimistic conclusions about the adequacy of language to communicate a survivor’s traumatic experiences. If such pessimism has a common origin, it may lie in the survivor accounts themselves. Whether they are Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (also published as If This Is a Man), or any other testament to the ordeal of the Holocaust, survivor accounts typically express the need to remember, and, at the same time, they lament the hurdles to transmitting memories through language. In survivor testimony, witnessing is framed as obligation and impossibility, a Sisyphean task that can never be achieved adequately. We see this predicament in the preface to Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, where the author identifies a gap between his need to speak and his ability to provide a complete account:
I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its origins go back, not indeed in practice, but as an idea, an intention, to the days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to “the rest,” to make “the rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its fragmentary character: the chapters have been written not in logical succession, but in order of urgency.84
Levi makes plain for his reader the therapeutic necessity of convincing “the rest”—which comes to encompass future generations as much as contemporaries who did not experience the camp—even at the expense of a logical progression. The fragmentary account cannot claim even to render Levi’s own experiences exhaustively, suggesting that the experience of Auschwitz itself resists any logically ordered or complete representation; instead, Levi’s need to bear witness appears as a “violent impulse.”
Like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel names a painful gap between the experience of the camp and its representation in testimony. Addressing the urgency to bear witness, Wiesel speaks of writing his testimony itself as a form of trauma, wondering if he composed Night “so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind.”85 Wiesel goes on to identify language as the chief barrier to providing a full account:
Convinced