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Philosophy and Society
Dragana Stojanović
HOLOCAUST AND THE ETHICS OF TOURISM:
MEMORIAL PLACES IN NARRATIONS OF RESPONSIBILITY
ABSTRACT
The issue of Holocaust tourism might be a quite sensive, but nevertheless
very important topic in the domain of the Holocaust remembrance. As
tourism is oen associated with leisure acvies, it is quite challenging
to put tourism into darker contexts of history and death. Also, dierent
people coming to the Holocaust-related places with dierent moves
make the issue of designing educaonal tours even more complex. This
paper will try to expose quesons related to dark tourism, Holocaust
tourism, aurac memorial places, and to discuss ethical approaches to
the Holocaust memory in the beginning of the 21
st
century. The text
argues for the tourist experience as a memorable and educaonal tool
with an acve transformaonal potenal, which will turn the visitor into
a witness who further contributes to survival of the legacy of the Holocaust
in the future.
Holocaust Spaces as Places of Postmemorial Voids
Holocaust spaces can, broadly speaking, be dened as all the areas or elds
– material or immaterial – that communicate and (re)create narratives of the
Holocaust history and contemporaneity. The material spaces speak through
material remnants of the Holocaust that left us with the places of concen-
tration camps, sites of suering, death and executions, important historical
landmarks, former places of Jewish life left empty, as well as subsequently
built monuments, memorials, museums, and educational sites. However, the
material places prominently communicate through the immaterial content –
testimonies that have been giving us knowledge about the Holocaust times,
and their specic aura, which can be translated as all the ways in which con-
temporary individuals react – emotionally, intellectually, and aectively – to
sites of death, void and atrocity. Saying that these elds communicate stems
KEYWORDS
Holocaust, tourism,
ethics, memorials,
remembrance,
education
Dragana Stojanović: Professor, Singidunum University, Faculty of Media and Communications;
dragana.stojanovic@fmk.edu.rs.
from the basic inability of any space, place, or even a testimony to represent
the Holocaust (Mevorah 2021). This, of course, doesn’t mean that any of ma-
terial or immaterial remnants of the Holocaust are not reliable or not su-
cient to convey the history or memory about the Holocaust; this means that,
even if we had hundreds or thousands of testimonies and artefacts from the
Holocaust times, they still wouldn’t be the direct representation of this com-
plex trauma-intervowen node. Maybe it is precisely why Primo Levi has said
that there are no true witnesses of the Holocaust, for all those who saw it in
its full range perished in it (Levi 1988: 63). Similarly, Susan Sontag reminds us
on the fact that a simple visit to a place, or looking at the document from the
place (such as photograph), can never be a replacement or an immersion into
an experience (Sontag 1993). However, it would not be fair, responsible, nor
ethical to conclude that for this reason we can not know anything about the
Holocaust, or that it should prevent us to speak about it and work on uncov-
ering the remaining or upcoming narratives (Stojanović, Mevorah 2014). All
these narratives, both those existing and those yet to be discussed, make Ho-
locaust historical and ever-relevant factual and discursive complex in the same
time, and lots of unanswered questions continually bring people back to the
Holocaust places where they can visit them and learn about them in dierent,
contemporary ways.
Learning about the Holocaust is not an easy task, even when standing at
the very places of its historical manifestation, nor it is easy to think about the
choice of proper educational methods around the sites of death, disaster and
tragedy. It involves not only the talk about history or factual information, but
also includes particular interpretations created around the site, as well as re-
actions and inner transformations of the people involved in process of learn-
ing (Sharpley, Stone 2009). In the other words, in the Holocaust-related sites
we learn not only about the history or (im)possibility to know it, but about its
echo in present times too. As James Young remarks, “Holocaust memorials are
neither benign nor irrelevant, but suggest themselves as the basis for political
and communal action” (Young 1993: 13). This might be the core of their im-
portance, for even if we might not be able to ll the voids, silences, or devas-
tation points left after the Holocaust, we can let them speak,1 while we try to
encourage visitors to take an active, responsible role towards history, present
times and future.
1 As in: we can let ourselves read them as they are, instead of trying to overcome
them, and we should include them into narrations about the Holocaust in an equal way
as we would do with documented data. These places and points enable us to grasp the
Holocaust as a complex, dicult knot as it is, instead of an illusion of a “complete sto-
ry” that we might create by surpassing these voids. Or, as Alice Rayner says, “to hear
both history and desire in the silence [...], to hear meaning in both the spoken and un-
spoken” (Rayner 2003: 249).
Materiality that Lives: Memorial Places of the Holocaust
In all the sea of knowledge, it is the experience that shapes the way people
use the facts they learn about. That is why memorial places of the Holocaust,
as palpable spaces that, in a way, connect past with present, are often hav-
ing a key role for perception and reception of the Holocaust as such (Morten,
Stone, Jarratt 2018). That is, also, why these spaces stand out in the map of
contemporary tourism and keep attracting people. Following this odd quality
of attractiveness of the places of mass deaths, Emma Willis faces us with the
thought that memorials might be accused “of not only paradoxically relieving
us of the pain of confronting history, but also of soothing our ‘fears and anxi-
eties’ by suggesting that our ‘useless suering’ has moral purpose” (Willis 2014:
27). Seeking out what was left after the dead, we believe that we can somehow
grasp something about the darkness, or “ll in” the voids that we hear in tes-
timonies or see in the museums (Willis 2014: 19–20). Of course, a simplicist
view of these theses might bring us to the point of dismissing memorial places
as the sites that imbue people with false comfort, but they are far away from
that. Memorial places, as well as responsible, guided tourism visits to them,
are not just empty, blank spaces into which a visitor pours out their imagina-
tion (Reynolds 2018); they can and should be places of education, exchange of
thought, places of discussion, raising awareness, and transformation. However,
often this transformational potential of the Holocaust place lies exactly in its
auratic quality, or at least it presents a rm starting point for learning-trans-
forming, and meaning-making experience of the visitor.
The branch of study that tries to understand how people react to certain
places, their physical qualities and discursive contexts can be identied as psy-
chogeography. Psychogeographical approach might come useful in understand-
ing how visitors react to the Holocaust-related places (especially concentration
camps and death sites), because it tries to explain the eect of geographical
environment on the emotions and behaviors of the individual (Morten, Stone,
Jarratt 2018). If visitors tend to specically value places where something “re-
ally happened” (as opposed to later designed and built monuments, learning
places, or museums), which is often the case, and claim that they can “feel”
them more directly,2 it opens up the possibility to treat these places as auratic
spaces (spaces with a certain “aura”), places that particularly strongly inuence
visitors and induce their emotions, reactions, and, later, thoughts and actions.
Serving as the meeting point between physical representations and imagined
meanings, these places are also heterotopic in a way,
3
which calls for even more
attention when thinking about how to present and communicate them in the
context of tourism of today.
2 Meaning, that they react more prominently on the places where they know the
death(s) occured.
3 In the thought of Michel Foucault, heterotopia functions dierently than a typi-
cal, ordinary space; it is a place or a location with particular meaning or signicance
attached, which interrupts and disturbs the usual continuity of physical and cultural
In case of Holocaust-related places, it is not only the present state of me-
morials and concentration camps that visitors and currators are dealing with,
nor it is just visitors’ imagination, but all the narrational, representational,
interpretational and communicational layers built-in in the meantime, while
camps and memorial places went through intensive changes, both material and
political. Dierent countries, cultural areas, and political streams tried to com-
municate or suppress the Holocaust legacy, for dierent reasons (Frew, White
2013; Willis 2014; Sharpley 2018; Hartmann 2018; Reynolds 2018).4 Typically,
the dierence could be tracked and observed through East:West division, as
during the Cold War there was not much communication between the areas,
and not much visitors crossed the pinpointed political boundary (Hartmann
2018; Reynolds 2018). However, situation greatly changed after Berlin wall fell
in 1989, and more and more visitors from all around the world started coming
to the Holocaust-related places, to former concentration camps and memo-
rials, which even intensied with contemporary new media advertising tech-
niques. Some of the places and camps, like Auschwitz, got to over two milion
visitors per year (Reynolds 2018). Some of the visitors came to learn about his-
tory or heritage, some to nd out more about human behavior in the times of
crisis, and some of them were just visiting cities nearby, and it brought them
to the Holocaust site. Such a diverse audience create a diverse body of tour-
ists, which is challenging to work with, but it is not impossible. Contemporary
tourism deals actively with the Holocaust-related tours, dealing in the same
time with the risks of commercialisation or commodication of that part of
the history (Sharpley 2009; Stone 2009; Seaton 2018; Stone 2018; Reynolds
2018; Morten, Stone, Jarratt 2018; Bird, Westcott, Thiesen 2018). Even bigger
challenge might be how to conduct tours, so the visitors do not end up under-
standing the Holocaust in some simplied way. Tourism related to the Holo-
caust is often discussed under the term of dark tourism, which is, of course,
a broader category, and it brings about more questions than answers both in
academic and professional circles. As in the introduction, where I stressed out
the need to speak about the Holocaust despite the challenges and voids, I will,
similarly, argue for tourism that, despite commercialization and commodica-
tion challenges, can and should work with the topic of the Holocaust, follow-
ing and implementing a highly responsible and educational aproach. But how
do we think about tourism? Is it even appropriate to speak about Holocaust
tourism, as a term and practice? How is it related to dark tourism and isn’t it
already a certain branding, or commodication of this delicate, hard part of
the history? The following part of the text will try to examine these issues, and
to oer paths for further thought on the problems mentioned.
space. Almost similarly to Eliade’s sacred space (Eliade 1959), it is a liminal, contradic-
tive space, imbued with a certain level of sacredness. This makes such a space very at-
tractive to visitors, but it also poses a big challenge in the process of education, since
this enchantment is not easy to deconstruct, and deconstruction of it is necessary for the
visitors to start learning about it and re-questioning old or expected paths of thought.
4 More on this topic can be found in the mentioned bibliographical reference.
Holocaust Tourism as Part of Dark Tourism: Fascinaons, Risks,
and Potenals
The very term dark tourism might be quite new, and it might be debated in
academic circles from very recently,
5
but the habit and tradition related to
people being drawn to places connected with death, suering and atrocities
exists for a long time (Sharpley 2009a). As the interest in visiting such places
grew drastically in the late 20th and early 21st century, there has been more
and more talk about dark tourism and its variants both in academic, as well
as professional and practical areas. In this view, dark tourism has been both a
form of tourism and a promotional tool, which brings up the important ques-
tions of the risk of commodication, spectacularization, and commercializa-
tion of death, and these are the questions not to be taken lightly. In the same
time, it is being more and more challenging to understand if dark tourism is a
phenomenon which is tourist-demanded, or attraction-supply driven (Sharpley
2009a). Although not frequently discussed in the academic context, dark tour-
ism continues to attract numbers of travelers, of which we can learn through
online and non-academic sources.6
As Richard Sharpley puts it, the academy turned its attention to dark tour-
ism for several reasons: to divide and dene dierent niches of tourism, to
understand manifestation of a wider social interest in death, and to respond
to the media hype related to this phenomenon (Sharpley 2009a). Dark tour-
ism involves interest in very dierent places – from the houses of horror and
graveyards, to the places of murder, lethal accidents, war, and mass killings.
All the places, however dierent they might be, share the same connection
to the phenomenon of death. Following this logic, in the academic literature,
not only dark tourism, as a term, has been used to explain similar fascination
with mortality. The terminology is still far away from being xed. Besides dark
tourism, the term thanatourism was also used, as well as morbid tourism, black
spot tourism, grief tourism, fright tourism, and even the expression milking the
macabre, which directly points to a danger of commodication and exploitata-
tion of the dead, their families, and local communities connected to the site or
marked event (Sharpley 2009a). As it was already said, dark tourism was not
mentioned a lot in academic research, but some mentions of similar activities
can be found in writings about public executions, or about the dark tourism
in London and Paris in the 19th century (Seaton 2018). Also, it is important to
mention that many writers see historical pilgrimage traveling as a predecessor
of contemporary dark tourism (Seaton 2018; Willis 2014; Reynolds 2018). How
can we, then, identify a dark tourist? Is it possible at all? Would they be con-
temporary pilgrims, spectacle seekers, academic researchers, accidental pass-
ers-by, or persons searching for the answers related to history, death, and life?
5 Richard Sharpley mentions that academic attention to dark tourism began from
1996 (Sharpley 2009a: 6).
6 One of such sources, for example, are websites such as https://www.dark-tourism.
com/, retrieved 29.08.2022.
It is of a great importance to understand the diverse body of tourists, espe-
cially when the delicate topics such as Holocaust is, are included. It is import-
ant not only to understand the motives of the visitors, but also to prepare for
their questions and dilemmas, and to guide them responsibly through the plac-
es that might induce strong emotions such as fright, rage, grief, numbness, or
excitement. It is also important to remember that the visitor’s travel does not
stop at the dark tourism site, and that they are going to go back to their com-
munities where they will continue to live and act accordingly to the impact
that they brought from such a dicult and challenging site. The places of dark
tourism, especially the places of the Holocaust, are particularly challenging for
a visitor, since they highlight social issues of cruelty, violence, discrimination,
extermination, war, dominance, class, race, gender, and so on – and these are
the issues still active in present communities that the visitors live in. Besides
that, if guided responsibly through these sites, visitors may be transformed
and encouraged in such a way that would lead them to the constructive path
of responsible social acting and/or activism, where they would be inspired to
work on the present issues in the society. This might be a potential way to en-
sure that the phrase “Never again”, so many times used in Holocaust-related
speeches and writings to mark the importance of not letting the same or sim-
ilar thing to happen to anyone, anywhere, to become true and enacted.
So who are these tourists that can be expected in the Holocaust-related
sites, what do they seek, and how can a currator lead them through diculties
of understanding the Holocaust and its importance in contemporary society?
The body of tourists that visit Holocaust-related places can not be described
univocally; they all travel with(in) their cultural baloon, which means that each
of them has their own reasons to come, and questions to be answered (Shar-
pley 2018). For some of them, the core of their visit lies in empathy towards
human suering; for others – voyerism and fascination with specic human
behaviors such as war behaviors and torturing (Willis 2014). Most of them will
come prepared and educated about the Holocaust, and they would possibly
seek for the incorporation of a certain past memory in their knowledge, and
they might be drawn to testimonies and experiences. Some would come for a
family heritage, and some motivated with the feeling of responsibility towards
past or future. Some would, although it is hard to imagine, seek a kind of an
interestingly spent time, especially if they came to visit a nearby city, and they
ended up visiting the Holocaust site.
Almost all of them will encounter the issue of death – some willingly, com-
pletely expecting the experience, and some consequently. There has been a lot
of academic discussion around the relation of a human subject to the matter of
death, or mortality, that might be able to explain the very interest of the tour-
ists in visiting the sites of deaths, including the Holocaust sites. Emma Wil
-
lis discusses two paradigms surrounding dark tourism, and the same can be
applied to the Holocaust tourism: the ontological paradigm, which is highly
contemplative, personal and even mystical (Willis 2014: 24), and the political
paradigm, concerned with how a particular issue is understood in relation to
the narratives of power.
The ontological paradigm would include an almost universal drive of a hu-
man being to understand the phenomenon of death. This occurence is often
found under the term of thanatopsy. Also, fascination with the sites of death
can be explained through Julia Kristeva’s views on abject/abjection (Kristeva
1982), where a subject actively seeks to meet its Other in order to conrm the
idea of being safe on the other-from-the-Other (or on the proper, culturally
or existentially recommended) side. In this case, subject seeks to peek into a
site of death, or mass deaths, to reassure themselves that everything is under
control, and that the death is far away, on the other side (the subject projects
the Other side to the site they see). Also, cultural taboos have a similar eect
and function – they work as a censored eld to be desired, and the very di-
mension of desire keeps that eld at a secure distance. In that constellation
desire alone works as a potent buer, meaning that it is continually culturally
encouraged in order for taboo to stay rm. As one of the prominent taboos in
dierent societies is death (and everything related to it, including spaces where
it occured), it is not hard to understand how Holocaust-related places might
prove attractive, or fascinating for some visitors who seek reassurance in their
own safety. In a similar tone of explanation, Ernest Becker mentions a terror
management theory, which stems from a constant living in terror of mortali-
ty and battling it, which is a thing in common for all human subjects (Becker
1971; Becker 1973). Biran and Buda (Biran, Buda 2018) observe an interesting
occurence – that when reminded of death, individuals desire to behave in a
manner that will reinforce and defend their cultural worldview (Biran, Buda
2018: 520). This might prove especially challenging in the Holocaust-related
sites, since the goal of Holocaust education would be a constructive, informed
transformation of an individual, and not withdrawal to the already known ste-
reotypes/prejudices. Some researchers think that what draws visitors to the
Holocaust-related sites, so dystopic in their presentation, is not dystopia in
itself, but utopic thoughts; coming to the sites of atrocity, visitors want to face
the ultimate defeat of humanity, so they could step away from it, in an active
search for building a better society (Cave, Buda 2018). Last, but not the least,
some authors stress the eect of a century turn, following the increased inter-
est of tourists for the Holocaust sites in the end of the twentieth, and in the
very beginning of the twenty rst century (Sharpley 2009a).7
The political paradigm, on the other side, leads visitors to search for their
interests related to (ir)responsible human behavior that echoes strongly in so-
cial and political realm. Among dierent types of political focuses that might
appear at the Holocaust-related sites, the prominent ones would be the inter-
est in human behavior, especially cruelty, the interest in questions of history
7 A century turn would be a phenomenon observed at the end of the centuries, when
people turn to contemplative, often dystopic thoughts about social problems, techno-
logically-induces challenges, alienation, and meaning of life.
related to personal, family, or community heritage, as well as the idea of po-
litical responsibility towards the future. In the end, when we speak about the
Holocaust, we speak about the “past that will not pass away” (Kershaw, in Stone
2009), and it is important to remember that these traumascapes can oer indi-
viduals, here tourists/visitors, an opportunity to extract meaning from seam-
ingly meaningless and devastating, which could become a new moral force of
present times (Stone 2009). If implemented carefully and thoughtfully, tour-
ism can be a massive vehicle for enhancing social and political responsibility
in often perplexed contemporary subject, opening the subject not only to in-
trospection as a form of self-indulgence, but to an active cultural productivity
directed against aggresion, violence, discrimination and oppression, and to-
wards new political and semiological choices (Seaton 2009; Stone 2009). Even
if it happens that the main response of a visitor is simply grief, it can also be
transformed, through the phenomenon of a shared experience, into a powerful
bonding element of generations and geographies, producing the will to create
a dierent world (Frew, White 2013).
Speaking of dark tourism again, dierent authors tried to place Holocaust
places into dierent categories of dark tourism. Graham Dann (Dann 1994, in
Sharpley 2009a) analyzes dark places categorizing them in 5 dierent groups:
perilous places, houses of horror, elds of fatality, tours of torment and themed
thanatos, and he places Holocaust-related sites into the elds of fatality, to-
gether with battlegrounds and cemeteries. Here the relation of the Holocaust
to battlegrounds lies in the excessive torture, mass killings and murderous acts
that happened precisely at the site that today can be visited, and its relation
to the cemeteries is connected to the Holocaust places being turned into the
memorial grounds a posteriori. Holocaust sites, thus, do represent “a past that
will not pass away”, and tie history to the present moment, tragedy and trauma
with remembrance and grief, but also with hope. Thankfully to the Holocaust
memorials, people still do talk about the Holocaust, and actively mention all
the atrocities not to be forgotten and not to be repeated. In Tony Seaton’s cat-
egorization (Seaton 1996, in Sharpley 2009a) there are also ve categories of
dark tourism: places of public enactments of death or execution, places of in-
dividual or mass deaths (where he puts Holocaust and the sites of genocide),
memorials, graves and crypts, symbolic representation of death-museums,
and traveling for re-enactment or simulation of death. Here the Holocaust is
stressed as a collective tragedy and political lesson, together with other geno-
cides, reminding of the importance of responsible attitude towards future po-
litical and social directions and acts.
Visiting a Holocaust place can have both performative and performance-like
eect, depending on the characteristic of a visiting event. Speaking about the
ethics of spectatorship, Emma Willis denes Holocaust places as shared eth-
ical spaces of an almost theatrical quality, where we – “by our own emplace-
ment – our appearance – we acknowledge our responsibility towards the dis-
appeared, towards those who have exited” (Willis 2014: 8). By putting ourselves
in the place of disappeared (not instead!), in the place as an actual site, we
understand our role in preventing any future excess similar to that. The visit
then, through commemorative signs and practices, becomes a certain memen-
to mori ritual (Seaton 2018),8 and the visitors turn into one or a couple of the
roles interchangeably, identifying with victims, survivors, their families, al-
lies, pilgrims, witnesses, mourners, bystanders or observers (Willis 2014: 35).
Of course, the full performative potential of Holocaust sites can be reached
only if the visitors are guided through this process, so it can shift from super-
cial role-play into an educational, fully transformative experience, which is
not without its challenges. In the end, one of the goals of such educational
tour would be creating further witnesses of the Holocaust, since if witness is
dened as someone who can give testimony of what had happened (Felman,
Laub 1992; Wake 2009), then all the informed visitors to the Holocaust plac-
es can become secondary or tertiary witnesses who will pass the knowledge
about the Holocaust, as well as tools for overcoming contemporary political
challenges in their microsocial spheres, together with the lesson of never again.
Here contrary to Levi’s thought (Levi 1988), witnessing of the Holocaust does
exist, and it passes from one generation to the other, through the act of learn-
ing. And that is what a responsibly organized touristic visit can do.
The sites related to the Holocaust, as well as Holocaust tourism strate-
gies also function as integrative and transformative practices that work through
embodiment of lived experience. Richard Sharpley provides an explanation
for the integrative quality of dark places, and, consequently, of the Holocaust
sites; according to Sharpley (Sharpley 2009), these sites lead the visitor into
a process of integration – with the objects met at the site, with the context in
which they meet the issue of death, and even with the death itself – so they can
arise as survivors who can tell a tale (Sharpley 2009b). In this process visitors
exchange experiences with the others at the site, and later on, with the com-
munities they belong to and create. As a matter of fact, Sharpley insists on the
importance of community creation at the site, amongst the visitors, and simi-
larly enough, Morten, Stone and Jarrat mention the process of co-creation of
interpretations and meaning-making between visitors themselves, which can
also be seen as an integrating process of experience, knowledge, reactions and
thoughts (Morten, Stone, Jarrat 2009). What is especially important is that vac-
uums, silences and voids also come into this process – in their own right, or
transformed into a substitute – a culture of memorialization (Reynolds 2018).
As for the transformative potential of Holocaust places and Holocaust tourism,
besides concentrating on the danger of trivialization, exploatation, and com-
mercialization of the Holocaust sites in the process of incorporating them into
a touristic oer, we should think more actively about these spaces as morally
8 On the other hand, Rudi Hartmann warns that Holocaust remembrance practices
should never be fully and mechanically ritualized, since this would carry a danger of
encapsulation of the ritual in a form that is there “just to be done” (Hartmann 2018).
Holocaust remembrance practices, in the other words, should always strive to adapt to
new generations, new questions and new causes with the same or a similar message.
and emotionally transformative, and that potential might persuade us to think
again about tourism not as a commercial, but as an educational tool (Stone
2009). Pleasure-oriented idea about tourism does often portray dark-themed
places as bizzarre or spectacular, but if we conceive tourism in a completely
dierent way and step out of our comfort zones in merging history, education,
tourism and visitors’ interest or even fascination, we might be surprised by the
results we will get (Biran, Buda 2018). The experiential learning, so prominent
in auratic spaces of the Holocaust, carries high interpretative and educational
value, and brings intergenerational learning, transmission of history and iden-
tity narratives out. It shapes visitors’ perceptions of Self and Other, increases
overall cultural capital, and provides memorable sensory, emotional, cogni-
tive, behavioural, and relational values that replace old preconceptions and
expectations (Roberts 2018). These experiences can also empower community
members to address social issues and human rights (Frew 2018). Of course, it is
not all that simple; one can never know how an individual would react to the
horrible scenes of the Holocaust. One can become more empathetic, or on the
contrary, less sensitive. That is why a carefully guided tour and a responsible
touristic guide – an educator or a currator, plays a key role (McKenzie 2018).
Sometimes the most aecting monuments are those that are invisible – the
empty spaces voided of people and their future, where something or someone
has been but is not anymore, and those spaces turn out to be a linking point to
visitors’ thoughts, associations, experiences, and future actions (Willis 2014).
As Willis claims, monuments and memorial places should stimulate visitors’
inventiveness in the most productive way, not leaving them scared, mute, or
helpless, but encouraging them to act according to the gained responsibility
towards the future (Willis 2014). The center of tour’s gravity should move from
memory and remembrance to witnessing, learning and active transformation
which will be present inside the visitor, and in the activities they will pursue
after the visit. Or, as Daniel Reynolds would say, “the knowledge that tourists
seek is embodied in space, and the fact of embodiment is, I argue, central to
the experience of Holocaust tourism” (Reynolds 2018: 31).
Holocaust and the Ethics of Tourism: Challenges and Soluons
Often it is hard to even think about the Holocaust in the context of tourism,
but reason might not lie in character of the Holocaust as a traumatic complex
of events, but in the way we think about tourism. In the other words, it might
not be that the Holocaust is somehow “inappropriate” subject for the matters
of tourism, but that we see tourism as something that should deal only with
cheerful and light topics, designed for an easy vacation (Seaton 2018). However,
tourism has not always been interpreted this way – since modern times, there
are materials, diaries, and notes of the travelers that surely exhibited their mo-
tivation for learning about history and culture while traveling (Towner 1984).
If tourism, following this line of possibility, were to be seen as an educational
tool (Biran, Buda 2018), then it might as well be well prepared and needed for
ethical, responsible introduction of a visitor to the topics, scenes, testimonies,
and messages of the Holocaust. In the end, tourism provides interpretations of
the seen/experienced to the visitors, and as Freeman Tilden says, interpretation
can exactly be seen as “an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings
and relationships [...] rather simply to communicate factual information” (Til-
den 1977: 8). Hence, tourism can be understood as an educational interactive
tool that gives chance to a visitor to understand what they have seen, to share
their thoughts with the other visitors, with the guide, and later, with their own
community, and to be transformed for the better of a future society.
Although this formula seems pretty much clear, in the case of Holocaust-re-
lated tourism there are still a lot of challenges to be mentioned, discussed,
and overcome. First of all, fast-adapting industries of nowadays, among them
tourism as well, are often concentrated on numbers, hoping that they would
constantly grow. In tourism we speak about numbers of visitors, or numbers
of places being opened and marketed. However, Holocaust tourism might be
and should be dierent. With the Holocaust tourism, it should be important
to take note on the quality of the tours, and on the eect that the tour makes
on the visitor, and the quantitative element should ideally be put aside. Also,
being an ethically and politically charged site of memory, every Holocaust site
should be consciously, responsibly, and appropriately marketed, so not to be-
come kitschied
9
or commercialized, which could easily happen if one applies
simple marketing strategies supercially, aiming at quantity instead of quality.
Bird, Westcott, and Thiesen (Bird, Westcott, Thiesen 2018), as well as Brent
McKenzie (McKenzie 2018) and Daniel Reynolds (Reynolds 2018) also mention
another issue with the Holocaust tourism, that has to do with the immaterial
quality of the travel in contemporary culture imbued with material values. In-
tangible nature of travel experience are almost provoking selling material items
on the site. Tourists do love memorabilia, and often they regard souvenir as
an object that would help them remember or recall the past experience (Cave,
Buda 2018). In case of some other tourist destination, not related to trauma
and tragedies, it would be easy to think of postcards, magnets, mugs, or any
other “pick and choose” souvenir solutions. In the case of the Holocaust, it is
not that easy. In the case of Holocaust tourism, of course, a wish to remember
would not be a problematic issue per se, but as for the souvenirs, there are at
least two challenges present: trivialization and commercialization – of death,
of the dead, of such a massive tragedy, and of the survivors and their families.
However, some Holocaust places do oer souvenirs, but it would mostly be
books, postcards, or, in case of applying multimedia technology, recorded les-
sons or other educational content related to the Holocaust, and the prot is
often clearly connected to further educational investment in the working sta,
or to another Holocaust remembrance cause (Reynolds 2018).
9 Sharpley and Stone (Sharpley, Stone 2009: 125) mention the term kitschication
when describing the practice of shallow sentimentality and materiality as a “kitsch
package of tragedy for mass consumption”.
Another challenge of the Holocaust-related tourism would be in such a di-
verse body of visitors. As it was already said, dierent people come for dif-
ferent reasons, and it is often a challenging task for the currator or a guide to
provide a transformational, emotional and informative tour for a visitor with
or without a lot of previous knowledge, for an accidental visitor and a person
who came to know more about their heritage, or for a person who came to
face the issue of personal or collective responsibility for the historical events.
In all the cases it is of an utmost importance to keep relating to all the visitors
as human persons with all their/our aws, and to provide a tour that would
somehow relate to all of them. One of the techniques might be in shaping
the tour in such a way that it stays personal and relevant to a visitor, focusing
more on particular human lives, pathways, and responses to the Holocaust, in
all the cases of victims, perpetrators, or bystanders (Hilberg 1993), keeping a
close eye on the message provided. The goal would not, thus, be to “justify”
the crimes that happened nor to generalize the perpetrator, neither to pres-
ent victims as passive and objectied, or bystanders as cold and disinterest-
ed. The goal would be to lead visitors carefully into a world of trauma, uncer-
tainties, and fear, both personal and collective (as it was the case in the years
of the Holocaust), and to show them that it did happen, and it might happen
again if we don’t recognize that we could all over again end up in similar posi-
tions (of perpetrators, victims, bystanders), and possibly for any reason (Wil-
lis 2014; Lennon 2018).10 What is important here is to direct visitors from the
past to the present, in order for them to recognize their social circumstances,
and to give their contribution in preventing, to the extent they can, any rec-
ognized tactic of discrimination, power imbalance or misuse, or any contem-
porary politics of exclusion.
There are also some logistic and security-related challenges that surround
mostly huge Holocaust remembrance places, such as former concentration
camps. For example, it is highly debatable if the numbers of visitors to the
concentration camps should be tracked, or if the ticket should have a number
on it, since it could remind to the strategies of numbering the prisoners during
the Holocaust (Hartmann 2018). There is a similar issue with the crowds vis-
iting former concentration camps; as Daniel Reynolds says, tourists are chal-
lenged to put the values of tolerance into practice as they share limited space
with one another, and yet and unfortunately, crowds have been the usual part
of concentration camp daily life (Reynolds 2018: 10). Another issue comes with
the video monitoring, or any kind of monitoring at all; it can prove very nec-
essary, for it ensures safety of the visitors, sta, and the site, and on the other
hand monitoring is yet another technique used on victims and prisoners during
the Holocaust, so it might be problematic in itself.
There are also quite some challenges with the issue of the gaze of visitors,
and with guiding their interest in mass deaths, while ensuring dignity of the
10 Which might mean that the bystanders could become victims this time, or vice ver-
sa in any way in this perpetrator-victim-bystander triangle.
site and of the victims, and of the local communities too. Local communities
are often concerned with how they, or their past, might be seen in the light of
the Holocaust tours; that is why it is important to address this issue properly
throughout the guiding, and to avoid any type of generalisation or misinter-
pretation (Sharpley 2009; Hartmann 2018). There is also a risk of a heritage
dissonance (Bird, Westcott, Thiesen 2018). Heritage dissonance happens in a
case when there is a discord or a conict between history as heritage, and its
interaction with the commercial and/or marketing tone of tourism. Another
case might be if a conict is rooted in the presented historical layer, mean-
ing that with the Holocaust-related sites there is often the case of a layered
narration. A typical example would be a concentration camp that was rst a
site of the organized extermination of the Jews, then for the other perceived
enemies of Nazi regime, and then after the war it was labeled somewhat gen-
erally, as a martyrdom place of local or national heroes.
11
In case where only
one of this story is presented during the tour, there would be a strong possi-
bility of creating a heritage dissonance and oering an incomplete narrative,
which should never be a case. It is for sure an uneasy terrain even today, but it
should nevertheless be discussed and included in the Holocaust-related nar-
ration. As for the visitors’ gaze, it can never be fully avoided, since visitors do
come with their own fascinations, expectations, or interests (Sharpley 2009b;
Seaton 2018; Reynolds 2018). However, it is important to take this interest as
a starting point, and turn it together with the gaze, to the disillusioned, con-
structive view of the past, as well as of present social issues, problems, and
solutions. In the end, it is important to weigh well between a “hot” approach,
that would include focus on the emotional or aective response in the visi-
tors, and the “cold” approach, which would give them a necessary knowledge
for responsible intellectualization of the experienced (Roberts 2018). The ex-
cessive accentuation of either of them would lead to an imbalanced message,
impossible to deliver further if the visitor is overwhelmed with emotions, or
impossible to transfer emotionally, if the “cold” approach was too much ac
-
centuated. Only an informed and personally touched visitor would be able to
pass that witnessing further, and to ensure the continuation of the [never again]
Holocaust message to their community, or to the next generation.
Closing Remarks and Further Topics
The question of ethics of the Holocaust tourism, of course, doesn’t end with
the exhibited examples, challenges, and solutions; quite the contrary – they
only open more topics to be thought through, analyzed, and written about. The
extensive and sensitive Holocaust legacy certainly requires a responsible, edu-
cational approach led by dierent researchers, formal and informal educators,
historians, and touristic specialists and guides, working interdisciplinary and
11 This was the case of quite a few concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Buchen-
wald, and many more, especially in Eastern Bloc countries and regions (Hartmann 2018).
interrelatedly. It is important to bring together the contributions of the disci-
plines that traditionally carried the knowledge about the Holocaust in a mind-
ful and appropriate way, in order to design the best ways of learning about the
Holocaust in contemporary times. This does not, of course, mean that the dis-
ciplinary denitions and boundaries should be abandoned, but it does include
an approach that would be less compartmentalized, and more teamwork/think
tank oriented. It is especially important not to divide tourism from the aca-
demic and educational context nor to ignore it, since if successfully inspired
with methodologies and research techniques stemming from the elds of his-
tory and education, Holocaust tourism can prove crucial for the future Holo-
caust-related learning.
Another important topic that exceeds the dimensions of this paper, and that
should be addressed at one point is the change that the third and the fourth
post-Holocaust generation brings, together with the new media and Web 2.0
oriented world they nd themselves in. Informational, digital, and participa-
tory turn already changed the face of everyday reality, and together with that,
of the Holocaust-related tourism too. The issues of making seles at the Ho-
locaust-related sites is already a topic widely discussed, and VR tours, aug-
mented reality, gamications, and QR learning systems are already a part of
the expected oer of Holocaust educational tours and sites. It is a matter of
time when using contemporary technology at the Holocaust-related places will
become a norm, and, in this light, it is important not to delay further academic
and professional discussions about it. Hopefully this step would also bring a
crossing and connection point between dierent generations, which could con-
tribute to importance and survival of the legacy of the Holocaust in the future.
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Dragana Stojanović
Holokaust i eka turizma: memorijalna mesta u naracijama
o odgovornos
Apstrakt
Pitanje turizma Holokausta može bi prilično osetljiva, ali ipak veoma važna tema u domenu
sećanja na Holokaust. Kako se turizam često povezuje sa akvnosma u slobodno vreme,
prilično je izazovno stavi turizam u mračnije kontekste istorije i smr. Takođe, različi ljudi
koji dolaze na mesta vezana za Holokaust sa različim movima čine pitanje osmišljavanja
edukavnih tura još složenijim. Ovaj rad će pokuša da razotkrije pitanja koja se odnose na
mračni turizam, holokaust turizam, auračna memorijalna mesta, kao i da prodiskutuje eč-
ke pristupe sećanju na Holokaust na početku 21. veka. U tekstu se zagovara turisčko isku-
stvo kao nezaboravno i edukavno sredstvo sa akvnim transformacionim potencijalom koje
će poseoca pretvori u svedoka koji dodatno doprinosi opstanku nasleđa Holokausta u
budućnos.
Ključne reči: Holokaust, turizam, eka, memorijali, sećanje, obrazovanje
