(Re)visiting Auschwitz: (Re)encountering the Holocaust in its Landscapes

Abstract

In her essay on ‘Holocaust Tourism’, Griselda Pollock explains why she will ‘never go to Auschwitz’. In part, her resistance stems from broader concerns about Holocaust tourism reducing ‘the death and torture of others, no longer present’ into a ‘spectacle’. But more specifically, her refusal to visit the most notorious of Holocaust landscapes results from an unease ‘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’. For Pollock, ‘to go, to tour and to leave, is to defy that demonic logic, to put “Auschwitz” back in a place with an entrance and an exit.’ While not entirely alone in refusing to go to Auschwitz, Pollock is in something of a minority. In 2012, just under 1.5 million visited Auschwitz either as individual tourists or part of an organised group. A clutch of these organised visits took place in the run-up to Euro 2012, with members of the Italian, Dutch, German and English football squads all visiting Auschwitz. In the case of the England team, their visit followed an opportunity to hear the testimony of two Holocaust survivors: a programme arranged by the British educational charity the Holocaust Educational Trust (hereafter HET) which sends thousands of British teenagers to Auschwitz each year for a similar experience of encountering an Auschwitz survivor and then the site of their incarceration itself. It is clear that, despite Pollock’s protestations, Auschwitz is a site deemed worth visiting by a broad range of individuals and organisations. Moreover, contra Pollock, the act of leaving Auschwitz