San Francisco (JTA) — In the past two years, the number of visitors to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland, has nearly tripled to an unprecedented 1 million people annually.
These astounding statistics comprise an international phenomenon — one that highlights the continued significance of Auschwitz as a memorial site, a museum and now a growing tour destination.
But the unanticipated influx of visitors seriously taxes the Auschwitz Museum’s resources, challenges the integrity of the visitor experience and begs the question of who is coming and why.
Today’s visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau primarily are students and casual tourists with no direct lineage to the Holocaust or its history.
In previous eras, visitors had intimate ties to this most horrific of all the Nazi death camps. They came to seek information about relatives, to mourn and to remember.
As we mark the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the growing generation gap and historical distance from World War II pose new questions about how to attend to the disparate needs of visitors as well as accommodate the overwhelming rise in numbers.
What is our responsibility to keep that history alive, accurate and thoughtful? How can the gaps in age, cultural history and knowledge be bridged? What is the visitor experience like today?
Wrong tone
Imagine arriving to the site of the notorious death camps, disembarking from your vehicle in the exact spot where hundreds of thousands of innocent prisoners entered.
Then imagine the potential for a contemplative visitor experience being abruptly interrupted, as your line of sight can’t help but go to the vendors that crowd the sidelines of the gate’s entrance.
This placement of the vendors sets the wrong tone and detracts from a mood of respectful reflection, which is so necessary for one’s initial encounter to this portal of the past and the horrors it represents.
Once a visitor arrives, the museum offers optional guided tours led by experienced and trained tour guides. While these are required of large group visits, they are not enough. There is a general lack of preparation for most casual visitors and a dearth of educational orientation for school groups.
This might help to explain the unfortunate reaction of some young people, who joke around when confronted by such tangible evidence of brutality as mounds of human hair and piles of children’s shoes.
Visitors, especially young people, need to be prepared before they come. Greater attention to education should include seeding new curricular programs throughout the world.
Only a few countries — including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands — make teaching about the Holocaust mandatory in school; while a few American states, including California, provide guidelines for Holocaust education in high school history and social studies curricula. These efforts must be expanded.
The current Polish government keeps the Auschwitz site functioning and has ensured that the message taught there is historically correct.
But the museum is woefully under-funded and relies disproportionately on increasing tourism to raise revenue without developing content or capacity.
It’s time to take the numbers seriously, and respond with professional studies and assessments of visitor demographics and experiences.
Past efforts spearheaded by the Polish government and private philanthropy were aimed largely at preservation, with little or no attention to interpretation, including education.
We need to examine where visitor interest is coming from now. For example, the first March of the Living tours set an important precedent for bearing witness to the death camps, but they created a distorted view of Poland as a vast cemetery for Jews.
Lacking is the valuable interchange of people-to-people encounters, so vital to creating reconciliation and overcoming hatred. As more casual tourists include the Holocaust sites as part of their overall tour of Poland, it is critical that their experiences reflect the truth of the past, as well as present-day efforts to come to terms with it.
In response to the need to tell a more comprehensive story of the death camps, some philanthropists are encouraging activities to develop educational tours and cultural resources.
With such concerted efforts, more can be done. Let’s start with relocating the concession stands.
Other logistical changes should include providing alternative transportation and entry points to both Auschwitz and Birkenau, with special attention to revised signs, interpretive materials and educational programs that point to the sanctity of the site.
Most significantly, the grounds themselves must be maintained as places for deep contemplation, personal reflection and transformation for a new generation who will pass on the lessons that must never be forgotten.
Tad Taube is chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, president of the Koret Foundation and honorary consul for the Republic of Poland in California.
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