Holocaust Tourism: The Strange yet Familiar/the Familiar yet Strange

Abstract

On 31 August 1940, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, received a telephone call from the SS, requesting that he make provision for ‘some tourists’ to visit the synagogue. It was an unusual enough request to make it into the pages of his diary, although after the creation and closing of the ghetto, it seems that the trail of German tourists continued. On 30 April 1941, Czerniakow met with members of the SS and ‘tourists’ from the Wehrmacht, who he ‘briefed … about the Community’. Later a fellow council member led the group on a ‘guided tour’ of the ghetto (Hilberg et al., 1979: 192, 227). Three-quarters of a century after Czerniakow received ‘tourists’ to the synagogue and ghetto, contemporary western tourists to Warsaw are still directed to these places. For guide books such as the Rough Guide to Poland, the Nozyk Synagogue — ‘the only one of the ghetto’s three synagogues still standing’ — should be the ‘first stop on any itinerary of Jewish Warsaw’ (Bousfield and Salter, 2005: 106). Twenty-first century visitors to Warsaw are also encouraged to visit the array of monuments erected on the site of the former ghetto as well as the surviving fragments of the ghetto wall (Bousfield and Salter, 2005: 107–9). The guide Let’s Go Eastern Europe offers its clientele of largely American student backpackers a ‘Warsaw Ghetto Walking Tour’ (Let’s Go, 2005: 522).