The State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau is an interesting place to be. The exhibits at Auschwitz I, in the reconstructed and preserved prisoner barracks, have always made me feel disconnected from the memory of the site. Not only do the exhibits and signs direct and manipulate you attention, they attempt to influence your emotions as well. From the ways they herd you though each hallway, to the descriptions of each picture and artifact, everything is placed for the purpose of inciting a specific emotional response from each viewer. To a viewer who has a very limited understanding of the Holocaust and the events that occurred at Auschwitz, the exhibits provide good information. But they also create a very specific narrative that this innocent viewer would blindly adopt without being able to develop their own experience.
The types of visitors Auschwitz receives are mixed, and can also add another layer of distraction to the educated and curious viewer. Sarah Hodgkinson elaborates on these types of visitors in her article about “dark tourism”, stating that there are three types of visitors: those who have a personal connection to the site, those who are there for education purposes, and those who are simply curious or had nothing better to do. Unfortunately, many people visit the site without fully comprehending where they are and exhibit inappropriate behaviors: couples hold hands and exchange laughter while walking past buildings in which many people suffered, a mother pushes her child in a stroller through a place where many mothers were separated from their own, and a grandfather smiles with his grandson under the main gate of Auschwitz I to pose for a photo.
All of these make the tourist aspect of Auschwitz increasingly apparent to me. The museum tries to educate viewers on what is appropriate and what is not, but that does not take away from the fact that you walk past tour buses, a cafe, a gift shop, and go through a theme-park-style turnstile just to enter the main camp. While millions of people visit the museum each year, the cliche Holocaust narrative of “never forget” has clearly been unsuccessful. The State Museum works tirelessly to provide accurate information to the academic community and its visitors, yet there is still a disconnect between the museum’s mission and the motivations behind the visitors of Auschwitz.
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It’s important to emphasize the “mediated” aspect of the Holocaust in Poland, as Sarah Hodgkinson does in her article on “dark tourism.” Television publicized the Eichmann trial in the 1960s, an American miniseries (Holocaust) popularized the word itself while Spielberg’s film, “Schindler’s List” didn’t necessarily create the Holocaust tourism industry in Poland, but gave it an incredible boost. With such worldwide dimensions, people come to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a variety of reasons. As serious students, we witness Holocaust tourism and its disneyfied aspects and are left dumbfounded at times by tourist behavior.