Sir! To the ghetto and then to Auschwitz for only €99 - with return!

To remember and not only to commemorate - Irene Eber, Holocaust survivor

I'm in Krakow, Poland. I've been here for two weeks to conduct research for my dissertation (gulp), and I've tried to embody, as much as is possible in the frame of research, the foreign, keen-to-see-everything and ask-a-million-questions Tourist. At the same time, I'm completely aware of the weight of the time that I tour and the history it holds; that my imposition as a tourist is by necessity in dialogue with this.

Staircase and courtyard in Kazimierz, Krakow made famous by Spielberg's 1993 film, Schindler's List. 

Wherever you look there are signs advertising an excursion to Auschwitz at various prices, nay 'bargains'. Guides stop you at every corner asking if you'd like a tour of the old Jewish quarter or a trip to the sites of the ghetto. Students earning summer pay try to hand you flyers about Schindler's Factory and the local concentration camps. One tourist I spoke to exclaimed how it was all so much less Disneyfied than they were expecting. 

You can get to Auschwitz via bus, train or taxi. We get the train. 

Buy a return ticket to Auschwitz. Arrive at 12 after a three hour journey. Leave at 5. Leave. This way to the Nazi concentration camp. This way to the book shop. This way to the gift shop. Buy some souvenirs to commemorate your stay. 

Three tourists gather together after receiving their headsets and arrange themselves for a selfie. They rearrange themselves after a few shots, perfecting the background: a gate spelling Arbeit Macht Frei. 

A woman poses as her boyfriend takes a picture of her. She stands in a vogue way, slightly pouting her smile and crossing her feet. Behind her lie train tracks eventually swallowed by the gate to Auschwitz-II Birkenau. In front of her stands a survivor bearing testimony to a group of listeners. Happy with the shot, she switches places with her boyfriend. He now poses. 

Artist Shahak Shapira recently gained attention for his satirical project Yolocaust, taking photos posted by tourists to Holocaust memorial sites on social media and replacing the background with historical photos of the atrocities commemorated. The symbolism of what tourists are doing, as interpreted here, hence becomes literal. The results are grotesque, begging the question: why would you pose in such a way (at all?) at such sites? 

Is it because these can only ever commemorate? I didn't cry at Auschwitz the first time I visited. I walked past the glass cabinets of human hair, labelled suitcases and wanton shoes; studied the endless empty, saturated eyes of inmates photographed on arrival, head newly shaved, body newly striped, arm newly tattooed, identity stripped; coughed in the dust of Birkenau's remaining cabins and decimated gas chambers. Why aren't you crying? Shouldn't everyone cry at this place of all places? I cried only when I left and sat in a nearby church surrounded by a display of pre-war pictures. Smiles; parties; weddings. Life. It's life that we empathise with, not death. I can pity death. I can abhor it, detest it, Never Again it. I can't imagine it. I can commemorate it, but I can't remember it. I can, however, more deeply feel the absence of life. 

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau twice on this trip. The first was guided and on the second I caught a train and walked from the station. The first time it felt like a museum and I spent more time observing, rather judgementally, the engagement of others with the camps. The second time it felt like a deserted farm. That stung. That it was a farm of human life. Or death. Both fit. I stood in the middle of a forest where men, women and children had been made to strip and wait for hours whilst the gas chambers emptied, before walking to their own extermination. 

I don't understand. I don't think we should. How could you? Would you want to? But a lack of understanding does not by extension implicate justification for distantiation. Standing in the middle of a Nazi concentration and extermination camp where over 1 million innocent people were murdered, dehumanised and killed in more ways than death and posing for a picture is not a mark of respect or proof that you were there. Were you really there if you only saw it though the lens of your iPhone? When I first visited the camps a few years ago I spent the entire time adjusting the shutter of a camera and framing the site through a lens; it's something I think a part of me will always regret. We can't expect everyone to remember the Holocaust in the base meaning of the action. But surely it's simply not enough to commemorate. Commemoration is at inherent risk of and exposure to musealisation and, as that tourist I spoke to noted, disneyfication. Remembering holds more tangibility. But in a place of absence remembering itself is inherently difficult for those to whom the only presence ever was and is their present.

This tension lies at the core of my dissertation research, and is something I think we'll always have to struggle with; or at least, I hope we'll always struggle with it, against settling for the liminal nature of commemoration.