Concentration camp memorials and museums: Dachau and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Abstract

It was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience…. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable . – Robert Antelme If memorials to commemorate wars are difficult, commemoration of the horrors of famines and genocides is even more so. The political stakes are equally high – and for survivors and relatives the trauma is too great. Survivors find that they have no words for what happened. Robert Antelme recounts the encounter between American soldiers and former inmates in newly liberated Dachau concentration camp in Germany at the end of the Second World War. The soldiers are, of course, appalled by what they see. But they are unwilling or unable to listen to the prisoners' accounts of what happened, satisfied instead with the verdict ‘frightful’. It doesn't take long for the soldiers to become accustomed to the horror and devastation that they have uncovered. It turns out that ‘most consciences are satisfied quickly enough, and need only a few words in order to reach a definitive opinion of the unknowable’. For the inmates it is more difficult. The encounter with the liberator is their first taste of how difficult telling the story will be for those who know that there is more to it than that. The inmate ‘senses welling up within him a feeling that he is from now on going to be prey to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge’.