My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Lieber, made our class of 34 kids stand up. One by one, she read off the list of reasons that people were killed in the holocaust. We were told to sit down when the description applied to us. In the end, I was one of two people left standing. It’s one of those classroom moments that will stick with me forever.
Remembering and forgetting were major themes of the weekend. I am taking a course called “Globalization, Memory, and Visual Culture,” though the middle of those three ideas is the most emphasized. While we do plenty of walking field trips around Paris to discuss the abundance of memorial demonstrations embedded into this city, the long weekend from classes was an ideal opportunity to visit a more profound site of memory: Auschwitz.
A concept echoed by nearly everyone in our group (which included other students from our university who are not in this course) was the sense that most of us went in expecting to feel certain things and were met with a completely different set of feelings and reactions.
Entrance gate at Auschwitz 1.
I was surprised by how self-conscious I felt in that space. I had this moment, while walking around Auschwitz 1, where I was taking a picture and I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it.
“Who is this for? Why are you doing this? What purpose will these serve?”
I couldn’t really answer those questions. I had this sense that I was either trying to mediate the experience and separate myself from it, or create some sort of production for later – the “Look, everyone, I went there!” sort of nonsense – or some other explanation that made me feel like it was time to put the camera away. I didn’t take it out much for the rest of the weekend.
In this course we spend a good deal of time discussing these questions of how one is supposed to interact with memorial spaces. Early on the course, we discussed the possibility of observing people around us interacting with this particular space. I thought about this and looked around at my group, looking for signs of their reactions, how they were responding to it. It almost immediately made me feel as though I was intruding on some profoundly personal territory; it made me feel a little ashamed.
That night a few of us in the course met up with our professor in Krakow. The discussion, inevitably, turned to analyzing and debriefing the visit. The peculiar sensory manipulation afforded by the headphones. How often the word “authentic” was used by our guide. Commemorating the unrememberable. What it means to remember.
The personal experience parallel I couldn’t help but make was measuring this against my visits to the slave castles in Ghana and the various sites of resistance in Ghana and Benin. Auschwitz – perhaps thanks to the holocaust’s proximity to the present, relative to the slave trade – seems a greater exercise in presenting a living history. When we historicize the past we are allowing ourselves, humanity, the option to say, “This is what we once were, but we are better now.” To that end, memorialization at Auschwitz was striking because it encouraged greater vigilance. It was so easy to see that being “better” is an active choice, rather than a forgone conclusion; that history is repeatable. The function of collective memory in this space is to remind us of what we can-but-don’t-want-to be.
Somewhere in this conversation, I had a, “Why is this happening?” feeling similar to the one I had with my camera. The discussion had become so academic, abstract, conceptual, and I just wanted it to stop. I wanted the space to simply feel things. The nature of picking all of those feelings apart requires you to disconnect yourself from them, and that seemed a bit of a disservice to the idea of productively remembering. Much of the lesson is in that visceral feeling that this is incomprehensibly fucked up. I felt as though this, too, was an act of mediating the experience.
Which isn’t to say that I still feel that way or that I am not looking forward to class on Friday when we can have a more in depth version of this conversation without the bottle of vodka on the table…
My general response to questions about my undergraduate semester abroad is: “It was the best thing I have ever done and also one of the hardest.” That’s the answer that I give because it’s easy and because I don’t know how else to summarize something so complicated and personal.
This is somewhat related to my feelings on visiting Auschwitz. It’s complicated and, in many ways, incredibly personal. It’s strange to me, actually, to say that it’s personal. Much like visiting the slave castles, I was struck by this question of what relationship I have to this space, granted by heritage. I think that question not only misses the point, but actively obscures it and does harm to the conversation. While I have a lot to say about representation in memorial spaces – what is being represented, by whom, for whom, and for what purpose – and plenty to say about the kinds of inherited privilege that I possess, this question isn’t really about that. These are fundamentally human problems, not national or cultural issues.
Trying to situate myself in some sort of legacy with any of the actors in these spaces is ridiculous and the greater point, I think, is to say, “This happened. This is the ugly truth of what humanity is capable of.”
This experience made me miss certain people for different reasons. I missed one of my college roommates, who is the only person I know who could have the sort of super-academic-but-maybe-instead-let’s-just-talk-about-our-feelings conversation I so desperately wanted to have. It made me miss my mom because I just wanted a hug. It made me want to go back and thank Mrs. Lieber for being an awesome teacher.
It also, at the risk of sounding horribly cliche, made me incredibly grateful. The weather hovered right around freezing the entire day and that underpinned a lot of what was being said. In my jacket and scarf and fancy layers, I found the temperature intolerable. It was only November, and all I was being asked to do was walk around.
I can’t offer any sort of conclusion to this post. I keep trying to wind this into an ending, but I don’t have one. There isn’t an ending here. That’s the essential idea behind constructing living memories. We don’t simply put something to bed and let it end there; we go forward with it, carrying it with us.
