Welcome to Theresienstadt. 150,000 people were imprisoned here, including tens of thousands of children. Roughly 90,000 prisoners went on to their deaths by cattle car in the Treblinka and Auschwitz murder factories. 33,000 starved painfully to death, died of illness or were murdered in individual acts of brutality by the SS. The Nazi concentration camp and ghetto are also known by their Czech name, Terezín.
SouvenirsCould we interest you in a souvenir fridge magnet? We have a number of designs. The German "Bier Stein" magnet with the Star of David on it is a classy reminder of your visit. It's actually the Star from the garden of remembrance: look you can see the stones under it that Jewish visitors have left as a sign of respect. Or, the one with the cycle sign showing "this way to Terezín" might look nice in your kitchen back at home. They're a bargain: £1.60! You could buy one as gifts for your friends and family.
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| Theresienstadt Souvenirs |
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I wish it were all a bad, tasteless, unthinkable joke. But it's not. I'm just back from there and Auschwitz with a group of students on a holocaust education tour. As you enter the car park at Theresienstadt you are greeted by a sign with SOUVENIRS in large letters and an advertisement for the crystal shops. Only after that sign has greeted you, do you see the one directing visitors to the Jewish ghetto (left) or the small fortress with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign on it (right). The souvenir shop has a two metre sign announcing it sells Bohemia Glass, Souvenirs, Jewellery, Playing Cards and Militaria. "Militaria" at a place where the SS killed thousands of civilians.
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| Playing cards at Theresienstadt |
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I've long been unsettled by the weight of tourists descending on the camps. The backpackers' bible "Let's Go" apparently used to tell people that if they had time for only two things in Munich, they should make it out to Dachau, and the Hofbräuhaus. There we have the
Munich Experience in a nut-shell: a concentration camp and a tacky tourist beer hall. It's become a tick-box item: a must for any visitor on a tour of Europe to visit the nearest convenient Nazi killing site.
I wonder about the motivations of those who come: is it genuine remembrance, is it a spiritual pilgrimage, is it to learn, is just to say you've been, or is to satisfy a ghoulish curiosity. I'm sure for many it's a combination of all those things, though I doubt many would own up honestly to the latter two. I fear for most the visit is
a bit like Disney in reverse: you're not going to be thrilled and made happy; you're going to be upset. I guess it shows that you are a sensitive being, who cares. Then in the evening, it's back to the beer.
LearningIn terms of the didactic value, I'm well aware that people learn in different ways. There's absolutely nothing in the museum at any of these sites that you couldn't learn by watching a TV documentary, looking on the internet, reading a book, or visiting one of the excellent exhibitions at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Museum in DC, the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, or our own superb Imperial War Museum in London. I think it's fair to assume that if anyone is bothering to go out to a camp, they're familiar with the background. It's not that likely they'll come away saying "Wow, the Germans murdered 6 million Jews. I just didn't know that!"
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| "Fallen Leaves" at the Jüdisches Museum Berlin |
For some actually being there, and seeing the place, might have an effect that the other methods of learning don't. If we're really honest though, that has to concern a very few people. Let's consider what there actually is to see. In most of the camps (I've taken groups to 10 different ones myself, over the years, from Westerbork to Treblinka) there's a big empty space, sometimes huge memorials, and a visitor centre/museum. The wooden buildings were long since pulled down, and the extermination camp gas chambers were almost all destroyed by the Germans at the end of the War. In Dachau or Buchenwald the barbed wire has been nicely replaced with fresh supplies, and the watch towers are always kept newly painted. At Birkenau everything is covered in grass, where before there was mud. At Bergen-Belsen everything is gone: the place is turned over to nature and there are mounds where the dead lie.
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| Giant Menorah at Mauthausen |
I'm not sure what the few iconic "sights" that remain at the camps actually teach anyone. We're all so familiar from photographs with the train lines with the watch tower behind it at Birkenau, or the
Arbeit Macht Frei signs at Auschwitz, that I wonder if it makes the slightest difference to anyone, in terms of actual learning, to see them in real life.
The same goes for the piles of shoes, spectacles or mounds of hair. Yes, you're aware that these things each belonged to an individual, whose life was so brutally cut short. But you already knew that. I fail to see what viewing some of them in a room actually adds to understanding. The picture below is powerful enough. It is undeniably poignant and needs to be seen. However, you are viewing it on the Internet, or can see it in any book. You don't need to go to Auschwitz to get any better comprehension of the vastness, or of the personal nature, of the crime.
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| Shoes | |
We can't imagine what the camps looked like in 1942 or 1944: the piles of dead bodies, the selections, the crippling hunger, the illness, the human excrement, the desperation and the cruelty. We wouldn't want to see them as they were, so what does visiting the santitised version actually add to our knowledge of the time, and the personal lessons we can learn from the period?
Dignity and RespectThese places are both killing places and cemeteries. At Dachau this summer I watched a teenage boy standing in the centre of the
Appelplatz where prisoners were forced to stand for hours in baking heat or freezing cold to break their spirits. He was taking selfies. It took him a long time to get the lighting and reflection right. I do hope he got the right balance of "cute" and "upset" for his Instagram. Perhaps a mournful tear was involved.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, followed closely by Treblinka, where at least 800,000 were murdered. I know two Auschwitz survivors personally, both of whom lost close family there. Even disregarding the behaviour of idiots such as the guy above, I find it hard to see how the dignity of those who died can be preserved with the sheer weight of people coming out to some of the camps. I stood at the exit of Auschwitz I last week, watching group after group of teenagers came out, plenty of them laughing and goofing around. It didn't use to be like this: you had to really "want" to go to any of the camps in Poland. Nowadays there are cheap flights, easy access and all the commercial operators described below.
Auschwitz as a whole is simply sinking under the weight of all the visitors. This was a weekday, off-season, in October. The guide told me that sixteen tour buses just from Norway were booked in the following day alone.
1.33 million visitors came last year, which was a 12% increase on 2012. 1.4 million are expected this year. That's nearing 4000 on average (roughly 100 tour buses) per day, with more coming on a busy peak season day. Auschwitz-Birkenau is apparently now Poland's single biggest "visitor attraction".
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| March in, collect headphones, do tour, back on bus. Repeat. |
There is very little opportunity to afford the victims any form of personal respect or dignity, or to have individual reflection, when you are being shoved around in groups at the site with a set of headphones on. Groups stand close to each other, jostling shoulder to shoulder, as the guides provide their often robotic commentary (I understand why they don't hardly ever show human emotion: working in this environment a strong detachment is a necessary defence mechanism).
Unlike somewhere like Pearl Harbor, there's no attempt to limit tour numbers: everyone just piles on in to hear the stories of atrocities, individual cases of murder, or to file inside the one remaining gas chamber. No one is sure whether the scratch marks in the walls are original or not. I wonder whether a system of regulation, i.e. a limited number of places being available on any day at any camp, wouldn't be a very sensible solution.
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| Buses arrive every couple of minutes to the death camp |
The only opportunity you have to breathe is at the vast terrain of Auschwitz II (Birkenau), but most of the commercial tours allow you only 15 minutes there. That might explain why few bother to go all the way down to the location of the actual gas chambers and cemeteries. Or, perhaps, it's simply they agree with the girl I overheard who wanted a golf cart because it's just a bit too far to walk.
CommercialisationVisits to the camps can be lucrative businesses it seems. In Cracow you can hardly go anywhere without seeing posters for operators offering "all inclusive" trips out to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Given entry to the camp is free, that is a little puzzling. The museum does charge a fee for its guides, but it's only £55 total for a group of 30, for the full 3.5 hour tour. That works out at £1.80 a head. The "excursions" from Cracow are charged out at £25 upwards, with transport provided on a 50 seater coach. Trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau appear alongside fun tours of the Old Town and the Wieliczka Salt Mines. It's a must for any stag or hen party in town - and again,
would that were some tasteless joke.
In Germany the camps are, at least, apparently far more mindful of the acute criticism they would attract if items such as the Terezín fridge magnets were permitted to be sold in the concentration camp car parks. For some unfathomable reason, the town of O
święcim (present day Auschwitz) has no such qualms about allowing a huge pizza, burger and other fast food complex to be built and exist
directly opposite the main entrance to the camp car park.
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| The bus on the right is in Auschwitz I car park |
Wait for it... why there's even a set of amusement machines inside. After all, we all need to have a go on a pin-ball machine, having heard how painful and terrifying a death it was being crammed into a dark gas chamber, breathing rat poison into their lungs for 20 minutes, until they collapsed down dead upon the bodies of their elderly parents or children. This is well under 100 metres from the entrance to Auschwitz I camp. Just across from here there's a souvenir shop. A set of 20 postcards of the camp is only £3.00 and you can buy lots of other stuff from around Poland too!
This commercialisation is grotesque. It leaves me feeling sick writing about it. O
święcim and Terezín are towns where the inhabitants were expelled from their homes at gunpoint by the Germans, when the camps were built. It is their right to come back and to bring their families up here, work here, and make their living here. That could be done without the municipal authorities permitting fast food restaurants or tacky gift shops in such sensitive locations, so close to the sites.
Personal IronyI'm aware of the enormous irony of this post, given the fact that I personally lead students on tours of the camps and have done so now for 20 years. Every year, however, I become more and more uneasy with the fact that the camps are becoming tourist sites.
It is enormously and critically important that this chapter is never forgotten, which is ultimately I suppose why I keep on coming. I can see the "positive" argument for so many people wanting to come here. It's better I guess than the opposite, which would be no one caring and no one being interested in the subject at all.
Some visitors may get something profound out of their visit: if only one person in a hundred reflects on the nature of their own prejudices as a result of coming to a camp and does something about it, then that is a good thing. I still can't get away from the feeling, though, that the vast bulk of visitors will learn little here that they didn't know before, or that I couldn't communicate without an actual visit.
More importantly, the sheer volume of them is utterly destroying the dignity of a place that means so much still to survivors, their descendants, and the family members of the victims. I'm part of that and I'm very troubled by it.
Closing the CampsOne aspect of the
ongoing crime that the 3rd Reich committed when it perpetrated the holocaust was the fact that it built many of the camps on foreign soil. The Germans came to Poland, for example, created killing centres, murdered millions, and then left. The Poles are now stuck with this in their country, and the obligation to keep up the buildings in all likelihood for eternity. I don't envy them that at all.
For the first time in my life, for all the reasons above, I find myself having sympathy with the view others have expressed that when the last survivor dies, thought should be given to closing the camps and letting them go back to nature. The chapter must clearly never be forgotten, but it can be kept open very effectively through museums, lessons, documentaries and books.
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| May their souls rest in peace |
All photos are my own.
