On not visiting Auschwitz

Is it a good thing that busloads of schoolchildren and hordes of tourists continue to troop through Auschwitz to gape in horror at relics of the atrocities perpetrated there? I have never been to Auschwitz or to the site of any other mass murder of Jews in Europe and I have no intention of visiting such places.

Like millions of Jews worldwide, I too lost relatives in the Holocaust, although my parents were lucky enough to have left Europe (Lithuania, in fact) for South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. Consequently, I was raised in a relatively sheltered and comfortable environment but the grief occasioned by the murders of those of my family ‘left behind’ was always in the air.

The justification for turning Auschwitz into a popular tourist site seems to be twofold: firstly, to induct youngsters into an awareness of the grim reality of the Holocaust and secondly, to strengthen the resolve in older people, whose memory might be fading with time, that such an occurrence must never be allowed to happen again.

In theory, such visits should act like a vaccine against antisemitism but if the recent upsurge in antisemitism following October 7th is anything to go by, the project seems to have barely scratched the surface.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the political manoeuvring around Auschwitz is the drive to eliminate references to the fact that those who perished there were Jews. Instead, the victims are presented simply as part of a larger homogeneous body of persecuted minority groups whom the Nazi extermination machine chose to eliminate. Jews, apparently, do not deserve special mention.

Denial of the quintessentially Jewish character of the Holocaust, incredible though that may seem, has taken root along with other forms of Holocaust denial, and protests against its spread should be as vociferous as those against the many other pernicious manifestations of antisemitism.

My decision not to visit Auschwitz and similar sites is entirely governed by psychological considerations. It does not gainsay my belief that sites like Auschwitz should be maintained, together with other locations, museums and monuments dedicated to the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Personally, however, I have no desire to re-traumatise myself by walking in its shadow. Nor do I see any point in urging young people to go through the shocking ordeal of the visit as a rite of passage.

Perhaps a visit to Auschwitz can be framed as a kind of warning not to let slip our vigilant stance against the forces of evil. But then I am sufficiently steeped in the knowledge of what happened as to not need a booster dose of the vaccine.