Memorial Visits: Auschwitz

This summer I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a human being but also as a memorial and social media scholar. Here is one thought I had about the Auschwitz portion of my visit. 

The entrance to the camp becomes visible long before we walk beneath its arch. The path towards it works well, it prepares us for what we are about to experience, not quite dropping us in head first, but instead letting a queasy feeling build slowly, letting our associations, the stories we carry to this place activate themselves in our minds.

Walking beneath the arch reading “Arbeit macht frei” feels heavy. Being part of a group, I feel like I don’t want to give this one physical object too much reverence, as I realize that what lies within the borders of this camp is so much worse than the entrance. But I carry with me the stories I have read. Of people, mostly Jews, arriving here believing — hoping — that this would be a temporary stop. That, one day, they would return to their lives. The cruelty of that lie might be what hits me hardest. Standing right here, I feel exactly what I expect a "proper" historical site to do: It activates history and — most of all  — emotion in me through the pure spirit of the place, the power of the land and of activation.

Inside the camp, my mood shifts quickly. Hundreds of people are being guided through the memorial in groups. The weather is gorgeous, the grass green, there is a soft wind making the leaves on the trees dance. The buildings look better taken care of than I expected. Something feels off, I cannot feel terror or suffering. 

Auschwitz is both a museum and a memorial and I believe that having both at one site is what dims my experience here (and why my experience of Birkenau was so different). The two have very different purposes. While a museum is mostly about archiving, educating and teaching, a memorial serves to honor the victims, make a statement about a society’s opinion of an event, and how they want to deal with it. It also allows visitors to create a personal connection the the events and people commemorated by visiting the site.

In Auschwitz, the barracks serve as the museum. As we enter many of them, we step into a traditional museum setting: white inlays hiding the original walls, lots of explanatory panels, artifacts behind glass. Our guide rushes us through, we push into rooms past visitors streaming out, we learn some facts about this place, the people who suffered here. But we cannot make any personal connection. It feels like a recitation of the facts and figures we all learned at some point. It is an experience we could have anywhere. 

There is a room with letters sent by people who were imprisoned in Auschwitz. We don’t get to read or hear a single one of them. There is a box with handcrafted items including a Christmas tree but I am not allowed the time to find out who made it, and under which circumstances. I cannot imagine what dangers they might have faced, had it been found or the joy it might have brought, even if just for a moment. 

I notice the emotional detachment of many of my co-visitors as their behavior changes when entering the museum rooms. While outside, in the historical setting, photographs are taken sparsely and respectfully, in here, people let themselves be guided by their phone screens. They record every other artifact, they put something between themselves and the history, they hold their phones in front of other visitors’ faces to get a better shot, they check their Instagram and their e-mail.

Taking pictures can actually increase engagement with historical sites, so it is not disrespectful or distracting behavior per se. However, in this context, I feel it as an expression of being taken out of the context, being taken out of history. We are in a museum now. Standard museum behavior is accepted and required. 

As we walk from barrack 9 to 10, we are told that number 10 housed the women. I stop in my tracks. 

I just read an autobiographical novel in which the protagonist told me of his joy of being moved to barrack 9 because his wife was held right next door. He went on describing the dangers the men went to in order to exchange a few words with their wives across the path between the barracks — the men standing outside, the women behind a window. I look around confused. When reading, the terror had been so palpable that I had pictured a vast distance between the buildings, a barbed wire fence even.

Observing my surroundings, I realize how close the buildings are, I marvel at the absence of a wire of any kind, and it frightens me even more: it becomes instantly clear that the terror in this place infiltrated everything. There didn’t need to be any barbed wire, the people who were kept here knew in their bones what being caught could mean: because they saw it repeatedly, day after day. They understood, with every fiber of their being, that they were not supposed to have any agency, any human connection. They knew what the consequences could be. And yet they needed to talk. They needed to connect.

Our guide quickly moves on and leads us into the the next part of the museum. And I am shattered. 

One purpose of a memorial is for visitors to make a connection to the events and people commemorated. The most human way of doing that is through emotions. Through “feeling like you’re in somebody else’s shoes,” feeling like are just about able to understand what it was really like  — not rationally, but emotionally, physically even. This is not achieved (purely) through a recitation of facts. 

It is a fine line to walk: to let people experience traumatic events without making them feel enjoyable (almost like an absurdly cruel true crime show) or (re-)traumatizing the visitors. However, as humans, we need to feel like we have a personal connection to historical events in order to understand that they affect us and, importantly, to keep talking about them, learning from them, and teaching the next generation not only about what happened but why it matters and what we must learn from it. 

By reciting facts and figures, we might remember the history (and well we should!) But the relevance of it is so much easier to understand and to communicate if we feel personally affected. Memorials can help with that (although they are naturally not the only option): they enable visitors to build a personal connection because they have been there and seen it with their own eyes. They can elicit emotions that a textbook will struggle to communicate through a sheer list of numbers.

Memorials can make visitors go home and feel a need to talk about what they saw and experienced. Ideally, the experience was strong enough for visitors to carry this need to share with them for years to come. Once you feel an atrocity in your bones, you cannot help but share it, be appalled by it on yet another level. 

Visiting Auschwitz reminded me again of the importance of memorial sites and also of art more broadly: they are the methods through which we can build personal connections to the past, they help us not just understand the facts but understand the human reality of those events. And they are what makes us not want to forget, what makes us unable to forget. It is absurd, but some of the most cruel atrocities committed by humans do not gain subjective significance by the sheer number of individuals harmed  — in the case of the Holocaust, that number is so high, it is hard to even imagine. What we need are the individual stories, the human stories, the stories we can connect to. The ones that not only show us "how it was then" but allow us to imagine how it might be now, and why it is so important to make sure it will not happen again.

*This is not me saying that Auschwitz is a bad museum/memorial. If you can, I would absolutely visit. This is just me sharing my personal and professional opinion on what I missed at the memorial site: A connection to individual stories and an experience of the site as the location in which all those stories took place.