Consumers or witnesses? Holocaust tourists and the problem of authenticity

Introduction

In 2014, 1.53 million tourists visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in southern Poland, the highest number on record and tripling the number of visitors in 2001 (Bartyzel et al., 2015: 19). In Washington, D.C., tourists wait in long lines to secure limited passes to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in similar numbers, with 1.44 million visitors in Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 (Bloomfield, 2014: 14). Since its completion, the number of visitors to the information center of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has steadily increased from 360,000 in 2005 to 470,000 in 2014 – a number that does not include the many visitors to the outdoor memorial who do not enter its information center (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2014). Many factors contribute to the rapid and continual growth in tourist numbers to sites of Holocaust perpetration and remembrance over the past two decades: the end of the Cold War has meant increased access to sites that once lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the ongoing process of globalization makes international travel an increasing part of modernity, and finally, awareness is growing that the survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust are dying, meaning that the genocide will proceed from personal, lived experience to historical, collective memory. Holocaust tourists are creatures of this new configuration.

The popularity of Holocaust memorial sites among so many tourists demands an account from scholars that challenges common preconceptions about tourism. What is distinct about Holocaust tourism, particularly in comparison to other forms of travel to sites of calamity? What kind of engagement with the Holocaust does tourism make possible? Does tourism preserve, distort, or even undermine the goal of remembering the Holocaust, formulated in the oft-repeated imperative, “never forget?” Does Holocaust tourism have any value in preventing future genocides? These are big questions requiring an interdisciplinary inquiry from fields ranging from anthropology, political science, and economics to history, memory studies, and philosophy. While this article focuses on a more specific set of questions, it nonetheless draws on an interdisciplinary framework linking the predominantly social-scientific field of tourism studies with scholarship on the Holocaust and its remembrance that draws heavily from the humanities. Are Holocaust tourists best described in terms of consumption, that is, as purchasers in a market that promises an authentic experience of historical trauma, only to offer instead an inauthentic facsimile that tourists naively accept? Does the inevitable commodification of these sites through the sale of guided tours, bookshop offerings, refreshments, and souvenirs eliminate any possibility of a meaningful encounter with the Holocaust as historical event? Are Holocaust tourists no better than macabre thrill-seekers? Alternatively, might we consider Holocaust tourists as active producers of collective memory, historical knowledge, and ethical reflection, who are able to distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic dimensions of their experiences? What is the relationship between those who see themselves as pilgrims rather than tourists? Are these competing characterizations of Holocaust tourism as crass consumers versus reverent pilgrims mutually exclusive, or do they intersect?

These questions come from field research conducted by the author since 2007 at numerous sites of Holocaust perpetration, survival, and remembrance. I spent numerous hours, in some cases over multiple visits, participating in both guided and unguided tours and taking photos at each site. Before and during the visits, I collected information to assess how the tourist experience is structured, including printed tour guides, maps and brochures, educational materials for school groups, and annual reports. While on site, I observed and spoke with other tourists to hear their initial responses to the sites and also perused written testimonials by tourists about their experiences published in newspapers or posted in online travel sites. The places in question include the extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka), other infamous concentration camps originally designated as “labor camps” (such as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Płaszów, and Mauthausen), deportation centers (e.g. the ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow), and museums devoted to the history of the Holocaust (United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Information Center at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, etc.). Part of a book-length study nearing completion, this article offers what Jessica Rapson (2012: 165) calls a “phenomenological” consideration of Holocaust tourism. By that, I mean an account of the ways in which tourists encounter visual displays of artifacts, photos, and documents or configurations of space as steps toward producing some coherent narrative of the Holocaust, and ultimately how they construct their sense of self in relation to these experiences.

Like Rapson, I contrast a phenomenological approach with the more prevalent tendency within the scholarship of tourism studies to treat travel to concentration and extermination camps, Holocaust museums, and former ghettos as “dark tourism.” John Lennon and Malcolm Foley define dark tourism as travel to places of mass destruction and death that have a strong cultural resonance because of our familiarity with them through the media (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 10, 16–21). Furthermore, dark tourism accesses places where technology was instrumental in perpetrating the disaster, as in the ever-deadlier instruments of warfare or the dissemination of violence-inducing propaganda through the media. Lennon and Foley point out the ways in which the Nazi genocide of European Jews recirculates in documentary images, historiography, literature, and film, while it is an event that reveals the destructive power of technology that culminated in “death factories” such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Dark tourism, Lennon and Foley contend, is a postmodern phenomenon that offers tourists the opportunity to confront their anxieties about technology in an age when technology constantly implicates itself through the reproduction of images of war, disaster, and violence (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 11). Moreover, dark tourism appeals to travelers who hope to resolve the tension between media representations of deadly events and the historical reality of them. While those may seem valuable opportunities for tourists, they occur within the context of an industry that exploits the postmodern appetite for such sites through processes of commodification that ensnare uninformed travelers (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 23). When commodification converts sites of Holocaust perpetration into consumer products, complete with reconstructions, facsimiles, and other alterations to preserve or expand access, the tourist experience is rendered inauthentic (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 62). The anxieties about commodification are hardly unique to dark tourism, but rather reiterate a familiar critique of many popular forms of tourism, whereby the market converts places and cultures into inauthentic commodities, simulacra masquerading as “the real thing” (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981]).

The following pages identify what I find problematic in the consumerist view of Holocaust tourism in an attempt to think past its limitations, without losing sight of what is obviously correct about it. My critique of the consumerist approach to tourism parallels a similar critique emerging in Holocaust studies, where skepticism about the Holocaust as commodified memory has dominated the discourse for decades. Like the dark tourism model developed by Lennon and Foley (2000), the field of Holocaust studies situates a concern for authenticity at the center of its reflection on works of scholarship or art that address the Nazi genocide. If scholarship on tourism frames the question of authenticity in terms of the degree to which the encounter between visitors and native cultures is altered, managed, or commodified (MacCannell, 1976: 17–37), Holocaust studies frame authenticity similarly in terms of historical accuracy and truth (Langer, 2006: 123–141). The invocation of authenticity in both tourism studies and Holocaust studies points to an interdisciplinary opportunity to think more deeply about the way collective memory is produced and managed, and the role of authenticity as a discourse that affirms certain practices while disavowing others.

The equation of commodified representation with inauthenticity ignores other processes that also take place in Holocaust tourism. Education, identity formation and contestation, aestheticizing, and moral judgment are dimensions of Holocaust tourism that happen alongside the purchase of guided tours, bus fares, postcards, and on-site refreshments. Nor does it suffice to consign tourists to a mode of consumption that denies them any subversive or critical capacity. Tourists, especially those who travel to such grim destinations, are active participants in the market, they know how to exercise agency, and many are more skilled at discerning inauthentic from authentic representations than their critics assume.

The remaining pages consider Holocaust tourists beyond the consumerist role that Lennon and Foley invoke, and instead, join other scholars who think about tourists as producers of a sort (Rapson, 2012; Robinson and Picard, 2009). In order to analyze the ways in which tourists to Holocaust memorials exercise agency and become active producers of Holocaust knowledge and custodians of collective memory, I look first at a specific common practice in tourism that requires agency on the part of travelers: photography. Photography becomes a mechanism for producing memory, understood both as personal and as collective. Second, I consider such “memory work” in terms of a specific kind of tourist identity formation, namely that of the witness. Here, I propose that tourists use travel to construct their relationship to history as bearers of witness to the past. In the last section, after considering the ways in which tourists produce not only photographs, but narratives and testimonies that contribute to collective memory, I return to the question of authenticity. If collective memory produces representations of history, and representations are always imperfect, how can we understand Holocaust remembrance as authentic? For surely the ethical imperative to remember demands that representations of Holocaust remain truthful.

Holocaust tourists as memory workers

The idea of tourists as producers relies in part on the theory of Michel de Certeau, whose Practice of Everyday Life (Arts de Faire) challenges the equation of consumption with passivity (Rapson, 2012: 164). de Certeau (1984 [1980]) is dissatisfied with the word “consumers,” which he calls “euphemistic” (p. xii) because of its overgeneralizing tendency, and instead wants to consider “users” as an alternative. Unlike consumers, users are active in a kind of production, much like the reader of a text in reader response theory, where the text requires the reader’s active imagination for the words on the page to have any significance. de Certeau (1984 [1980]) does not want to claim that a reader’s production of a text or a tourist’s production of a photograph has the same force as industrial mass production from the “dominant economic order” (p. xiii). Instead, he wishes to rescue users from their characterization as passive recipients and consider them as active subjects who develop numerous and varied tactics for the use of products generated by the prevailing system. Users take goods produced elsewhere and produce something new with them. The fact that users’ production is not necessarily marketed and sold is further evidence for de Certeau that consumers are adept at creating economies that subvert the dominant order, and doing so in a way that does not result in the alienation of producers from their own labor. ¹

Tourism is one arena in which individuals make use of practices and instruments that merit consideration of them as users in de Certeau’s sense. ² The point of such “use” in tourism is varied. Perhaps travelers are in search of some confirmation, whether it be the reality of a place that they know only through media representation (Urry and Larson, 2011) or for an experience of the Other that is sufficiently alienating as to invite reflection and self-reinvention (MacCannell, 1976: 91–96; Nash, 1996: 39–57). Tourists access unfamiliar places to complicate, to resist, or to deepen their experience of the everyday. Among the productions that tourists undertake toward that aim is the creation of material assemblies that help them explore the relationship between travel and the everyday: collections, photo albums, shopping goods, and souvenirs. These material objects can often be indexical, physical manifestations of the more intangible experiences, memories, and stories that tourism also generates. In their drive to produce records of extraordinary experiences, tourists typically resort to the camera as their instrument of choice (Robinson and Picard, 2009).

Holocaust tourists and the authenticity of collective memory

For the role of tourists as active bearers of witness to be taken seriously, one has to confront the considerable bias against tourism that has been in place for a long time in many critical corners. In fact, Holocaust tourism has a double burden: not only does it have to address the skepticism that the field of tourism studies has faced since its inception (MacCannell, 1976: 102–105; Nash, 1996: 3–4) but it also has to overcome the long-standing tendency in Holocaust studies toward the deep mistrust of popular culture in representing the Holocaust. The skepticism about the popularization of Holocaust memory has its origins in the pessimism about mass culture voiced even as the Holocaust transpired by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1988 [1944]) in their famous essay, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Adorno and Horkheimer despaired of a world where logic and reason had led to the disenchantment of life and the conversion of everything and everyone into a commodity, for which the Holocaust is the ultimate expression. In more recent times, critics either implicitly or explicitly delegitimize mass-cultural engagements with the Holocaust by pointing to the economic dimensions of such efforts and their place in the “culture industry.” The assumption is that market-generated representations of history must be mistrusted, since to appeal to the widest consumer base, they must aim for the lowest common denominator. In the extreme case of Norman Finkelstein, collective remembrance of the Nazi genocide has led to the establishment of a “Holocaust Industry,” worthy of condemnation because of its alleged reliance on inauthenticity in service of a political agenda (Finkelstein, 2000). For Finkelstein, authenticity is missing when accounts of the Holocaust are deployed to serve present day political agendas, since in his view such motivations negate any objective account of the past. Consumers in this “industry” are equally inauthentic because they use the Holocaust for moral posturing, rather than to advance knowledge about the past. In short, Finkelstein portrays Holocaust tourists as false pilgrims on a junket.

Even in more serious accounts one encounters, there is a vein of mistrust toward the representation of the Holocaust through tourism, since the past, which is never directly accessible, is often staged through facsimiles. Holocaust tourists engage with inauthentic representations instead of the actual past, but fail to recognize the difference. James E. Young (1993), whose pioneering work on Holocaust memorials has had a profound influence on the fields of memory studies and Holocaust studies, worries that tourists somehow believe they have directly witnessed the past, mistaking the presentation of artifacts at Auschwitz (cans of Zyklon B, female victims’ shorn hair, mounds of suitcases, and personal belongings of doomed deportees) for the very event they signify. Tourists, in Young’s (1993) words, may “lose sight of the fact that they [i.e. the artifacts] are framed for us by curators in particular times and places,” and instead appear to tourists as “parts of a seemingly ‘natural order’” (p. 128). In other words, tourists are naïve consumers of staged history, unable to distinguish between a past event and its aestheticized representation in the present. In a similar vein, art historian Griselda Pollock (2003) worries that the “touristic” has become the “default condition to which representation will recur unless a crucial distinction is made between the place that can be visited and left, and the problematic burned into Western European culture by … the event” (p. 188). In other words the “touristic” is, by definition, the conflation of past event with current place. If authenticity is defined as the promise to have direct access to the past event, then, of course, Holocaust tourism must disappoint. But is that really what tourists expect?

Tim Cole (1999) has taken the opposite tack in his expression of skepticism toward Holocaust tourism, claiming that tourists to Auschwitz consume the site as a theme park, looking not so much for the reality of the historical event as they are trying to acquire a thrilling experience through representations of the past (p. 111). Cole’s view positions Holocaust tourists as thrill-seekers. They understand that the representation is produced, but they do not mind. While Cole gives tourists credit for recognizing representations of the past as such, he is reluctant to portray them as a critical audience; rather, they appear as consumers of mass entertainment. Even though Cole occasionally refers to tourists at Auschwitz as pilgrims, the thrust of his argument is to emphasize the consumption of an imperfect historical reproduction. Like Young and Pollock, Cole’s account presents tourism as the uncritical encounter between travelers and their destinations, as privileging present-day representation over past reality. The presumed tendency on the part of tourists to conflate present-day representation with past reality makes them vulnerable to inauthentic representations of history.

The dark tourism model of Lennon and Foley likewise formulates a critique of tourists as susceptible to inauthenticity, but takes a different path to that conclusion by way of two kinds of reduction. First, it reduces the Holocaust itself to a mere exemplar of death in a postmodern age, to one disaster among others. By situating the Nazi genocide along other events both before and after the Final Solution, such as the battlefields of World War I or the assassination of President Kennedy, the Holocaust is only a reiteration of a phenomenon already in existence. Their treatment of Holocaust memory ignores not only what was unique about the Nazis’ murder of European Jews but also overlooks the ways in which the Holocaust has become the defining event of the 20th century (Olick et al., 2011: 29–36). Second, Lennon and Foley reduce Holocaust tourists into an undifferentiated consumer mass. Like many accounts by scholars in Holocaust Studies, their dark tourist remains a universalized subject, undifferentiated in terms of nationality, motivation, or familiarity with Holocaust history, and thus more easily portrayed as the straw man of the naïve, usually Western consumer. Such a view leaves little space for tourists to exercise any critical judgment or self-reflection.

Such precepts in tourism studies, Holocaust studies, and memory studies foreclose the possibility of meaningful agency on the part of tourists, who are actually increasingly skilled at recognizing and rejecting inauthenticity or who are capable of embracing inauthenticity with intention at places like Las Vegas or the Epcot Center in Orlando. In fact, emergent forms of tourism – eco-tourism, service tourism, and dark tourism – arise out of a desire to escape the expected inauthenticity of the vacation package or the formulaic family adventure. Indeed, as Émilie Crossley (2012) has argued in the context of volunteer tourism, emerging modes of tourism today seem geared toward the production of an ethically responsible self through the encounter with the hardships of others (pp. 93–94). As an alternative form of travel that places the encounter with the murder of European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators at the center of the experience, Holocaust tourism is likewise a search for authenticity beyond the pleasure-oriented package tour. The frequent invocation of the term “pilgrimage” by some visitors marks this intent, though one need not claim the label to engage in ethical reflection.

Authenticity in tourism addresses a tension between space and time as avenues for accessing the past. While space may offer the promise of proximity to history, time withholds that very promise. Can there be authenticity in tourism if the past is only accessible through representations? Perhaps the clearest formulation of the paradoxical relationship between authenticity and representation in tourism comes from Dean MacCannell (1976), whose notion of “staged authenticity” is a root concept in tourism studies. In MacCannell’s view, tourist markets often deploy the notion of authenticity to attract visitors, often through performances of native culture that may be new creations masquerading as traditional ones. By shifting the emphasis of authenticity from the physical artifacts to the ways in which artifacts are presented, MacCannell insists that authenticity is as much a matter of performance as it is about the preservation of original objects. In other words, “staged authenticity” addresses how encounters between visitors and artifacts are managed by a site’s hosts. These encounters can be produced in ways that feel more or less truthful. MacCannell does not want to argue that historical artifacts are insignificant in tourism, but rather he asks us to understand that even the most authentic artifact is already presented to tourists in a performative context; furthermore, tourists are themselves capable of recognizing the “staged” presentation of artifacts. In tourism, authenticity can never be understood as the unmediated representation of the past. Instead, tourism formulates notions of authenticity based on the degree to which tourists’ expectations are fulfilled, the degree to which the narratives generated through the staging of artifacts are verifiable through the historical record, or the degree to which modes of performance or presentation are commensurable with the significance attributed to the artifacts on display.

The notion of authenticity as performative has found Holocaust memorial sites a difficult terrain in which to take root. One of the chief allegations against tourism to Holocaust museums and concentration camp memorials remains precisely the inauthenticity of the experience they offer. Even if critics acknowledge tourists’ awareness that they are visiting representations of history, not the past itself, they still insist on characterizing sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum or any other camp memorial as simulacra. The reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz is occasionally cited as a prime example of inauthenticity in Holocaust tourism (Cole, 1999: 110–111; Dwork and van Pelt, 1996: 363–364). The worry is that any reconstruction that does not reproduce an original in every detail will lead to misunderstandings about the Holocaust, potentially lending unintended support to those who would deny it. Ultimately, it would seem that any staging of the Holocaust as historical event is suspect. If one were to subsume the Holocaust into history through conventional strategies for representing the past in historiography, literature, film, the arts in general, or tourism, then one risks upsetting the long-held understanding of the Holocaust as unprecedented, as beyond representation (Agamben, 2002 [1999]; Felman and Laub, 1992; Friedländer, 1992; Wiesel, 2006 [1958]).

In fairness to those who insist that tourism at camp memorials is inauthentic, it is important to acknowledge that at places like Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, or Sachsenhausen, very little exists exactly as it did in 1945. After all, some camps, especially the Vernichtungslager, were designed to be dismantled quickly, as was done at the Operation Reinhardt camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka), thereby hiding evidence of the crimes committed there. Other sites, like Sachsenhausen or Dachau, were not preserved as memorial sites until the 1960s and thus underwent either drastic change for other uses, or suffered neglect. Many buildings at camp memorials have required extensive renovation, and others are complete reconstructions. Meanwhile, decades separate the historical events of the Holocaust from the museums that now document the genocide, most having been established after the 1980s during what some in the field of memory studies refer to as the “memory boom” (Huyssen, 1997: 60; Olick et al., 2011: 3, 21). So if by “authentic” we mean “as was,” then that goal must remain elusive for Holocaust tourists. Indeed, like other modes of tourism, there is very little in Holocaust tourism that is not always already mediated in some fashion. But what of the performative nature of authenticity?

A less skeptical consideration of travel to camp memorials suggests that tourism, in fact, plays a key role in ensuring that sites of Holocaust remembrance portray the history they commemorate authentically. The evolution of the camp memorials shows that many have undergone a continual process of refinement in their exhibitions, a process that continues into the present. During the Cold War, the camps were often the stage for propaganda displays celebrating the liberators. Camps under the Soviet sphere of influence emphasized the heroic liberation by the Red Army and celebrated communism’s victory over fascism. Meanwhile, the camps on the western side of what became the Iron Curtain used the camps to champion democracy over totalitarianism, a doctrine that equated fascist with the subsequent communist dictatorships in the East. Since the growth of Holocaust tourism and the increasingly global nature of Holocaust memory, the pressure on the camps to abandon blatant propaganda by the liberators, and instead to focus on the victims and perpetrators, has grown. This has come to include increasing documentation about the liberators’ failure to prevent the genocide or to offer safe haven to many refugees. Tourists are the witnesses to this progression, perhaps even its guarantors.

The example of Auschwitz-Birkenau demonstrates this point perhaps most evidently. Recognizing the significance of tourism as a propaganda tool, the Soviet Union had decided even before the war’s end to preserve the relatively intact site as a document of communism’s ultimate liberation from the evils of fascism. After passing into the care of the Polish Ministry of Culture and Arts in 1946, the memorial’s message continued to emphasize Soviet liberation and Polish victimization, not Jewish suffering (Huener, 2003: 32–58). But as the Holocaust proceeded into global memory, survivor groups began demanding that the memorials acknowledge the racist ideology that drove the genocide. By 1952, the International Auschwitz Committee, which was established by survivors “to let the world know what happened in the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau,” (International Auschwitz Committee, 2006) played an increasing role in directing the management of the camp, steering the exhibitions increasingly away from Cold War propaganda to an acknowledgment of the victims and survivors. Tourism was not so much the engine driving this evolution as the forum in which this evolution took place and a resource that attracted funds necessary to make it happen. The different agencies and policies that shaped – and continue to shape – the exhibitions at Auschwitz-Birkenau clearly had tourism in mind when deciding how best to perform acts of commemoration and formulate educational opportunities on site.

One could cite similar developments at other camp memorials. To give one example, Bełżec has been transformed from a birch forest with a single, lonely placard installed only in 1963, to a new installation that recovers the footprint of the camp, dedicated in 2004. Sobibór has been undergoing extensive archeological work since at least 2009 (Pempel, 2014). So given the progression at these and other camp memorials over time in terms of their representations of the Holocaust, we should not be in such a rush to be rid of the notion of authenticity in tourism, even as we acknowledge it as staged in Erving Goffman’s (1959) sense of performance (pp. 17–76). Instead, we may view authenticity itself as a kind of artifice that has to be managed and maintained. In the context of Holocaust tourism, the notion of the authentic is central to the experience of place – one travels to Auschwitz or to Bełżec to see the very ground on which the crime was committed. Whether a modern-day monument or a well-preserved historical relic, the site requires the maintenance of modern technologies to preserve and present them to tourists. Authenticity is better understood as transparency and accuracy about the processes in place to maintain the sites, to document the condition of the camps at their various stages of development before, during, and after the Nazi’s implementation of the Final Solution.

Tourists play a role in that process through their collective experiences, whereby they link different sites of Holocaust memory together into a comparative network consisting of the experiences of other tourists, as well as accounts of the Holocaust found in other media. This comparative network, in turn, ensures that Holocaust memorials remain answerable to a wider, international public, that they resolve inaccuracies, contradictions, or omissions within and between sites. Holocaust tourists, I would argue, offer themselves as custodians of the memory work that the memorial sites have begun. For that memory work to have any meaning beyond the place of suffering, it must rely on the memory work of tourists to carry on that project, to stitch different Holocaust memorials together into coherent representations, and to generate a discourse that allows for accountability of these sites to a touring public.

Conclusion

The claim advanced here is that Holocaust tourism presents opportunities for travelers not merely to consume history as a ready-made product, but rather to step into the role of makers of historical knowledge about the Holocaust. By drawing on theoretical concerns from sociology, anthropology, Holocaust studies, memory studies, philosophy, and visual culture and by testing those concerns against on-site observation of tourism at sites of Holocaust remembrance, I follow Jessica Rapson’s call for a phenomenological examination of tourism as a way of bringing the subjectivity of the tourist into the consideration. I argue that tourists bear witness to the past and to its present-day traces and disperse knowledge about both. One tool that enables tourists to bear witness is the technology of photography, which in the context of tourism becomes a means for generating a critical agency. Tourists also develop linguistic representations of the past when they recount their tourist experiences to others and share what they have learned. This is not to say that tourists are the sole bearers of collective memory about the Holocaust, nor does every tourist realize the potential for bearing witness and producing ongoing knowledge about the past. But tourists play an undeniable, even indispensable role in Holocaust memorialization, particularly in an increasingly global era when tourism is the world’s largest industry (UNESCO, 2003). As they recount what they have learned or seen at memorials and museums, tourists take on the project of Holocaust remembrance, and their accounts of travel may inspire others to follow in their footsteps. Their own testimony, however secondary to that of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, ensures that the commemorative work that memorial sites undertake is not in vain, but rather is championed by those who visit them.

Holocaust tourists undertake a form of travel that encourages critical self-reflection, perhaps more so than other modes of travel. Toffler’s (1980) notion of the “prosumer” or de Certeau’s (1984 [1980]) idea of the consumer as “user” are efforts to account for the kind of subjectivity that tourists in general create for themselves. The case of Holocaust tourism makes especially clear the possibility of agency on the part of tourists. In some cases, tourists develop a critical relationship to the organizations that manage sites of Holocaust remembrance, who in turn have responded with greater adherence to the historical record. Holocaust tourists speak back to power by challenging the caretakers of memorials to account for the authenticity of the sites they oversee and to provide transparency to their visitors about the ways in which they represent the past through staged performances. If Holocaust tourists are adept at nurturing a critical understanding of authenticity at Holocaust memorial sites, as I contend, then perhaps a more fully interdisciplinary approach to tourism studies, one that links social-scientific and humanistic inquiry, can ask what kinds of subjectivity other tourists produce and whether these subjectivities are equally capable of generating a critique of authenticity.