Pilgrimages: Remembering the Holocaust through Travel

The Holocaust stands within European, and Western, memory as a landmark event in the twentieth century, and has played a significant role in the development and shaping of traditions of memorialising violence.

While such questions have provided a framing, journeys to the sites of the Holocaust have become a central form of representing and embodying mem­ory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such journeys, pilgrimages or tourist ventures stand at the intersection of many of the questions surrounding embodiment, space, and memory, which shape mem­ory studies and violence studies today. All of these aspects come together in pilgrimages to former sites of violence, as journeyers both remember what occurred and reflect on the ways in which memories and histories continue. The journey itself plays a key role in remembering violence, asking travellers to change their perspective - to become something new and gain new knowl­edge - through the process of embodied movement.

Travels, by those acting as tourists and memory-keepers, to sites of death, disaster and trauma are not unique to the Holocaust, with sites as diverse as the Killing Fields in Cambodia, Ground Zero in New York, and the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali drawing tourists interested in affective travel in order to remember and bear witness.^[1094] Yet the notion of a pilgrimage of remembrance to a historical place of violence attaches most closely, perhaps, to those seeing themselves as descendants of the victim group, with large numbers of individuals, families, and school and community groups travelling to the former homes of their compatriots.^[1095] But like any form of memory or memorial, such journeys necessarily condition the memories created, passed on and retained. Amongst the remembering there is as much forgetting.^[1096] Auschwitz is both, as Tim Cole noted, ‘A site of mass tourism and a site of pilgrim­age'; those who journey there can be considered ‘tourists of guilt and righteousness: guilt at an almost pornographic sense of expectancy of the voyeurism ahead.

But it is evident that, for many, visiting such sites, or ‘traumascapes', in Maria Tumarkin's terminology, engages those making the journey within notions of trauma. To be present at a site, to sit with its hauntings, is potentially to be present with memories of trauma. A site then can act as a form of testimony, testifying to a space and place of violence, and to the ways in which its past traces continue into the present. In these trauma-laden spaces, past and present collide while also remaining deter- minably apart. The traumatic memory and history they contain is, for those in the following generations, a postmemory: as Marianne Hirsch explains, these memories raise the question of how ‘we [are] implicated in the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness?' This postmemory is structured by both a belatedness and a sense of being entangled; it is both linear and disruptive. Like Michael Rothberg's conception of ‘multi­directional memory', which places memories of different events together in a manner which ‘borrows' and is ‘productive', postmemory is one of the new structures through which memories of Holocaust violence are given meaning for new generations.^[1098] Building collective Holocaust mem­ories - through pilgrimage and narration - is never an isolated project. Remembering such mass violence is embroiled in ongoing questions of politics and ethics, drawing in questions, for instance, of what an embo­died memory involves, how feminist narrations come into play, and what a multilinear memory looks like.