Remembering the Holocaust: Generations, Witnessing and Place 9781780936338, 9781474210942, 9781780936970

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Remembering the Holocaust

Remembering the Holocaust Generations, Witnessing and Place Esther Jilovsky

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Esther Sarah Jilovsky, 2015 Esther Jilovsky has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3633-8 PB: 978-1-3500-2513-4 ePDF: 978-1-7809-3697-0 ePub: 978-1-7809-3611-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jilovsky, Esther Sarah, author. Remembering the Holocaust: generations, witnessing and place/Esther Jilovsky. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Memory (Philosophy) 2. Place (Philosophy) 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 4. Collective memory. I. Title. BD181.7.J55 2015 940.53’1864–dc23 2014045843 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To my great-grandparents Zyvia (1890–1919) and Dov Bernhard Hirschbein (1885–1941) Elsa (1881–1942) and Gabriel Jilovsky (1878–1943) who I did not know. And to my grandparents Hanka (1915–2009) and Kurt Jilovsky (1905–2002) and my Dad Martin Michael Jilovsky (1951–1999) who I did know, and who I miss very much.

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Generations, Witnessing and Place 1 Survivor Memoirs of Return: Encountering the Past in the Present 2 The Second Generation: Searching for the Past at Sites of Memory 3 The Third Generation: The Role of Place in Imagining the Past 4 The Paradox of Place and Bearing Witness: Manipulated Topographies, Pilgrimage and Holocaust Tourism Conclusion: If Place Is Not a Witness, What Is? Notes Bibliography Index

viii x 1 26 57 94 121 147 150 188 200

Preface In 2002, I went to Auschwitz. On a hot midsummer day, I left nearby Krakow on a public bus and joined the millions of tourists who now visit this place annually. As the bus bumbled along rural roads and the sun burned down from a cloudless blue sky, contrasting pleasantly with the fresh green grass, I was not yet aware that my great-grandfather Gabriel Jilovsky had made a similar journey in December 1943. Fifty-eight and a half years later, the only thing our journeys in fact had in common was the destination. We both went to Auschwitz, but that is where the similarities end. Here I could describe what happened to Gabriel. I could explain that he was transported to Auschwitz from the Nazi ghetto of Theresienstadt (Czech: Terezín), located in what is now a short drive from his home in Prague. I could explain that although he had lived in Prague since approximately 1915, he was actually from a small town called Liboch in German (Czech: Liběchov), which, incidentally, is not that far from Theresienstadt. I could tell you that he was a businessman; he manufactured postcards and tops for walking sticks, popular with hikers in the countryside of Bohemia. But none of this was evident to me at Auschwitz that day. I was greeted by a car park filled with tour buses. These lumbering beasts, decorated with brightly coloured lettering, stood silently at neat forty-five-degree angles. Hordes of tourists swarmed out of them and headed for the unremarkable looking entrance. As I walked from the bus stop, I overheard a fellow visitor exclaim enthusiastically to her companion: ‘Let’s go see some dead people!’ Along with the hordes I drifted into a non-descript entrance hall, and we settled down to watch a documentary film before entering the camp itself. It was not clear to me then that the car park lies on land which is part of the war-time Auschwitz.1 The confronting black and white footage accompanied by no-nonsense narration soon turned the holidaymakers’ bustling excitement into gasps of shock and horror. The official tour of Auschwitz began a short distance away from the iconic Arbeit Macht Frei gate. I was astounded at how small it looked compared to all the pictures I had seen of it – much like the Eiffel Tower or Buckingham Palace seem infinitely bigger in photos or on television. Our guide began by explaining

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that here the orchestra of Auschwitz was located. I was incredulous. Auschwitz was about torture, death and murder. Not about prisoners in uniform playing instruments.2 Yet, my overriding memory of Auschwitz is a collection of neat, red brick buildings. Walking around Auschwitz I, where former barracks had been fitted out with museum displays of objects taken from prisoners such as suitcases, glasses and hair, I sensed something was missing. Despite the grotesque nature of these things, they were silent. It all seemed so mundane. If a visitor did not know what had happened there, I thought, they could not necessarily tell just from visiting the place. I did not know then that Gabriel had been murdered at Auschwitz. Would I have had a different experience during my visit if I had known? I might have looked more closely at the prisoners’ suitcases in case his was amongst them, for example. I might have tried to recognize his face in the black and white photographs of prisoners. I might have tried to find out what the life expectancy was for a 65-year-old Czech Jewish man newly arrived from a ghetto. I might have imagined his fate. Our experiences with places are shaped by our knowledge about these places. This book arises from my experiences of visiting not only Auschwitz, but many other sites of Holocaust memory throughout Europe. Over the years, I read not only many Holocaust testimonies, but also accounts by descendants of Holocaust survivors who returned to trace their family history. I wondered if it really was possible to understand the past through visiting certain places. And I wondered how these places would shape the future of Holocaust memory.

Acknowledgements Like many books, this one has taken several years to come to fruition. It began life in the cool days of an Oxford autumn and was completed in the balmy days of a Melbourne spring. Over the course of its creation, I benefitted from the help, guidance and support of many friends, colleagues and family members, and it is wonderful to have this opportunity to officially thank them. First and foremost, my sincere thanks go to Zoë Waxman, for her invaluable support, enthusiastic encouragement and gentle criticism of this project since its inception, and who continues to steadfastly support my work. I also thank Robert Eaglestone for his wise counsel and considered feedback which brought a new angle to the project. I thank Peter Longerich for his input and support. I am most grateful for the funding I received to undertake this project. The School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London awarded me the Thomas Holloway Research Studentship and the Overseas Research Studentship, and the University of Melbourne awarded me the Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholarship in order to undertake the initial research for this project. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) awarded me the Research Grant for Young Academics which enabled me to spend dedicated time in Berlin transforming the project into this book. An early version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Journey to Auschwitz’, Colloquy, 15 (2008), pp. 146–62. An earlier version of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared as ‘ “All a Myth? Come and See for Yourself ”: Place as Holocaust Witness in Survivor and Second Generation Memoirs of Return’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, XXV (2011), pp. 153–74. An earlier form of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘The Place of Memory or the Memory of Place? The Representation of Auschwitz in Holocaust Memoirs’, in Karen Auerbach (ed.), Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2015), pp. 120–39. I thank Colloquy, the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies and Monash University Publishing, respectively, for permission to reprint these essays. I am most grateful to those who have taken the time to read over drafts of the manuscript. I thank Shirli Gilbert most sincerely for her unwavering support

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in the final stages, and for her incredibly useful and perceptive comments on the draft manuscript. Alison Lewis was always willing to listen and encourage, and her close reading produced wonderfully insightful feedback on drafts. Karen Auerbach provided unceasing encouragement, and valuable insights into my argument. I thank my colleagues Joe Blythe, Barbara Keys and Nesam McMillan, who carefully read manuscript drafts and provided me with feedback and encouragement to continue. I thank Rosalind Calver wholeheartedly for her wonderfully meticulous and careful proofreading. Thanks to Samuel Koehne for checking my German translation. My colleagues in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, particularly Heather Benbow, Sarah French, Leo Kretzenbacher, Birgit Lang, Leonetta Leopardi, Katie Sutton, Sabina Vakser, Jana Verhoeven and Wendy Yap, have been most supportive and provided me with chai lattes and inspiration as required. My editors Emma Goode and Rhodri Mogford at Bloomsbury Academic deserve huge thanks for always answering my emails promptly and for their long-standing and careful editorial support. Karen Auerbach, Rosalind Calver, Joyce Chia, Anna Dziedzic, Sara Karin Fisher, Jayne Gartner and Fiona Machin never tired of listening to me talk about this book and shared many bottles of wine and pots of tea with me in the process. From the bottom of my heart, I thank my family, especially my Mum Cathie Jilovsky and my sisters Leah Jilovsky Robinson and Rachel Jilovsky, for continuing to provide me with love, laughter and delicious home cooked food. Note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own

Introduction Generations, Witnessing and Place

As the events of the Holocaust fade from living memory, the places where it happened become ever more important in transmitting its legacy.1 Visiting sites of Holocaust memory not only consolidates the link between place and event, but provides a three-dimensional, sensory experience not gleaned from reading testimonies, interviewing survivors or watching films. Even walking through a Holocaust museum – whether in London, Washington, Berlin or Jerusalem – does not evoke the connection to events provided by sites where they actually happened. Even though survivors’ accounts describe post-war Holocaust sites as overwhelmingly different to the places they left behind, for others, particularly survivors’ children and grandchildren, such sites can be key to the Holocaust. Together with the many published memoirs detailing trips to familial sites of Holocaust memory, the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, including organized tours such as March of the Living, renders place a significant aspect of both current and future Holocaust memory.2 Place emerges as a central motif in Holocaust narratives. The focus of these narratives on journeys, together with documentation of places such as sites of Holocaust atrocities and pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe, as well as places where survivors and their descendants settled after the Holocaust, means that they bear witness to exile and displacement. This book entwines the study of place in Holocaust narratives with two central themes of recent Holocaust historiography: generations and witnessing. It incorporates recent research on Holocaust memory across generations in order to investigate the role of Holocaust sites for survivors, their children and their grandchildren, who are known as the second generation and the third generation, respectively. Through analysis of Holocaust narratives by each generation, this study illuminates the different ways in which they draw on Holocaust sites to bear witness to the Holocaust. For survivors, choosing to return to sites of traumatic experience is a complex and deeply personal encounter with the past in the present. In their narratives,

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these places silently scream with memory: their testimonies juxtapose the seemingly harmless present places with nightmarish visions of the Holocaust’s sights, sounds and smells. In contrast, visiting Holocaust sites is a new experience for the second generation and the third generation, one that involves linking inherited memories with foreign and distant places. In second-generation texts, Holocaust sites become a crucial point of access to the past which enable this generation to bear witness to the effect of the Holocaust upon their own lives. For the third generation, who are the last living link to the Holocaust, Holocaust sites move into the imaginary realm: it is through fictionalization of places that this generation bears witness to the Holocaust. This book argues that each generation’s use of place in Holocaust narrative suggests an evolution from survivors’ memories to sites of memories in bearing witness to the Holocaust, and that the development of Holocaust sites into tourist attractions continues to shape this transition. The seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 occurred not long before this book was published. Together with the unavoidable fact that the number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is fast dwindling, this brings fresh urgency to the question of how future generations will understand the Holocaust. This book’s study of Holocaust testimony explores what it means to witness and to bear witness to the Holocaust. Its focus on memoirs and novels by the children and grandchildren of survivors as well as survivor testimony illuminates not only how Holocaust memory is transmitted from one generation to another, but recognizes the role of these generations in shaping how the Holocaust is remembered. The vast number of visitors to Holocaust sites in recent times indicates that place will also play a significant role in how these events are remembered and commemorated in the future. By illustrating how the places where these atrocities occurred have shaped each generation’s perception of the Holocaust, this interdisciplinary study addresses a fundamental aspect of both present and future Holocaust memory.

Places of the Holocaust ‘Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events.’3

There were 1.33 million visitors recorded at Auschwitz in 2013, a place associated with horror and suffering which is now commonly known as ‘Poland’s major tourist attraction’.4 The former Nazi death and concentration camp officially

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called Auschwitz-Birkenau, located near the Polish town of Oświęcim, a place where 1.3 million people were murdered and thousands of others enslaved, has become ‘a site of mass tourism’.5 The visits to sites of Holocaust memory featured in memoirs and novels by survivors and their descendants occur within the context of this mass phenomenon, known as ‘dark tourism’, the phenomenon of visiting places related to death and disaster.6 The number of visitors to Auschwitz and other sites has steadily increased over the past decade, even though as long ago as 1993, James E. Young noted that ‘as many people now visit Holocaust memorials every year as died during the Holocaust itself ’.7 Implicit in all such visits is the link between physical sites of memory and the historical events of the Holocaust. This book is concerned with physical locations where events of the Holocaust took place, as well as those of survivors’ pre-Holocaust lives, and it is to these places that ‘sites of (Holocaust) memory’ refer. The literature on this topic however encompasses a much wider definition, including acts of commemoration, memorials and museums. For instance, Young states that sites of memory ‘range from archives to museums, parades to moments of silence, memorial gardens to resistance monuments, ruins to commemorative fast days, national malls to a family’s Jahrzeit candle’.8 Similarly, Pierre Nora describes lieux de mémoire ‘places of memory’ as ‘fundamentally remains’, examples of which include ‘Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, [and] fraternal orders.’9 Thus, a site of memory is not restricted to a physical location but refers to a manifestation of memory which functions as a site of memory for a particular group. This book’s focus on the literary representation of physical sites shows how these places do so. In many ways, sites of memory exist as a substitute for other types of memory. Sites of memory mediate between the memory of something and its manifestation in the present. Indeed, Nora argues that ‘There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’ and that these are prescribed: ‘we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally.’10 In Nora’s reading, sites of memory represent what and how people wish to remember, an attempt to grasp the meaningful past and to make it manageable. His focus on consciously created manifestations of memory to the detriment of spontaneous memory echoes Young’s claim that ‘once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation

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to remember’.11 Building memorials or museums as a way of remembering the past therefore may actually have the opposite effect: to ossify memory while giving the impression of preserving it. Both these interpretations suggest that the function of sites of memory is to take over the process of remembering. As we will see, this has different implications for survivors, the second generation and the third generation. This book’s use of the term ‘place’ refers to both the literal place in question and the idea of it, incorporating theories of landscape developed by cultural geographers.12 The duality of landscape is a key aspect, which is theorized in two main ways. First, it occurs through discussion of the relationship between subject and object – that is, the physical place and the perception of it – and second, through conceptualization of the relationship between place and event. Landscape refers not only to a place but to the way that people see it. John Wylie explains that a ‘landscape is thus not just the land itself, but the land as seen from a particular point of view or perspective. Landscape is both the phenomenon itself and [sic] our perception of it.’13 This is echoed by Denis Cosgrove, who writes that ‘landscape denotes the external world mediated through subjective human experience … Landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world.’14 This emphasizes the duality of the concept: place is not just what is seen, but how it is seen. This is crucial to the representation of place in Holocaust memoirs. The way in which this duality emerges is dependent on specific cultural and temporal parameters. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels note that ‘A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings.’15 Thus, landscape is a type of representation that encapsulates both the representation itself and the reaction to it. This interpretation of place as both the physical place and the way in which it is perceived provides a theoretical foundation for the concept of place in this book. The fundamental aspect of sites of Holocaust memory is the connection between place and event, which shapes visitors’ experiences. The relationship between a place and the events which occurred there suggests a permanent effect on the place. Maoz Azaryahu and Kenneth E. Foote argue that ‘According to Western cultural convention, historical sites provide a tangible link to the past that they evoke. In this sense, the presentation of history on-site only makes explicit that which is implicit in the local landscape.’16 Thus, the mere knowledge of a historical event renders a place significant and entwined with the memory of that event. Furthermore, as David Lowenthal notes, this

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connection is chiefly created by people rather than the place itself. He writes that ‘If the character of the place is gone in reality, it remains preserved in the mind’s eye of the visitor, formed by historical imagination, untarnished by rude social facts. The enduring streets and buildings persuade him that past is present.’17 Thus, the visitor brings with them a preconception of a site as related to certain historical events and, in doing so, may simply confirm the preconceptions. In terms of sites of Holocaust memory, this means that such sites become meaningful because visitors bring meaning with them. Consequently, as Lowenthal explains, ‘The place of the past in any landscape is as much the product of present interest as of past history.’18 Thus, the inherent link between a place and the events which occurred there is not explicit but dependent on the contemporary, cultural assumptions of visitors. While research on Holocaust sites is in many ways extensive and covers a wide range of themes, until recently there has been little focus on the role of place in Holocaust narrative.19 Research on survivors’ experiences has largely focused on issues of memory, trauma and representation.20 In one of the earliest articles on place in Holocaust literature, Dalia Kandiyoti observed that ‘much of the critical work on the Holocaust has been done in the register of history and not place, time and not space’.21 However, in recent years, this has changed, and the research gaps identified in 2006 by Waitman Beorn et al. are beginning to be broached.22 Tim Cole’s 2003 book Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto for instance focuses on the spatial aspects of the implementation of the ghetto in Budapest in 1944.23 More recently, literary critic Marianne Hirsch and historian Leo Spitzer’s 2010 work Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory focuses on both the continuing memory and physical place that was Hirsch’s parents’ hometown, now located in the Ukraine.24 Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, edited by Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller and published in 2011, explores the intersection of memory, trauma and return in a broader context, not just in relation to the Holocaust, but to other traumatic events including slavery.25 Together with the growing number of articles which analyse journeys to Holocaust sites in literature, my book responds to Kandiyoti’s appeal ‘for an expanded body of literary criticism on the Holocaust, one that treats place as an important category through which to interpret the narrative of the Holocaust survivor’.26 By analysing the representation of Holocaust sites in survivor, second-generation and third-generation texts, it shows the different role of place for each generation, and contributes to the debate about the relationship between places and memory of the Holocaust.

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Sites of Holocaust memory Place is a key concept of Holocaust narratives as well as of Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust narratives are, both literally and metaphorically, journeys. The testimonies of both victims and survivors portray a transformative odyssey that typically begins in the protagonist’s hometown, followed by transport to a ghetto, then to a concentration or death camp, or both. For survivors, the journey commonly concludes with emigration to a new country, often after time in a Displaced Persons camp. It is for this reason that themes of place dominate Holocaust writing, which Kandiyoti notes ‘is rich in the representation of mappings, topographies, wanderings, unbidden travels, exiles, and incarcerations’ and thus form a central component of how the Holocaust is represented.27 Holocaust sites encompass places of pre-war Jewish life as well as those where Jews were killed or imprisoned during the Holocaust. The former includes abandoned synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, while concentration camps, death camps and locations of mass shootings are counted among the latter. The condition and presentation of these sites varies greatly and depends on whether they have become tourist attractions, whether memorials have been erected there or whether they have been simply left to decay. The demise of the Iron Curtain combined with the advent of affordable international travel means that since the 1990s, Eastern Europe has become openly accessible, enabling the development of what is commonly termed ‘Holocaust tourism’.28 Yet, unlike the obvious mediated nature of other representations such as feature films and museums, Holocaust sites tend to be perceived as offering unmediated access to the Holocaust. As a result, visitors to Poland intent on finding evidence of the destruction of Jewish life and culture are confronted with it in abundance. Young notes that ‘a new generation comes to know a millennium of Jewish civilization in Poland by its absence and the rubble of its destruction: dilapidated synagogues, uprooted and plowed-under cemeteries, warehouses piled high with religious artifacts.’29 By discovering Jewish Poland through the tangible traces of its obliteration, visitors contextualize their knowledge of the Holocaust within the frame of what they experience in Poland. Furthermore, as Jack Kugelmass observes, ‘the experiences the visitors remember are likely to be those that enhance an already existing negative opinion. Indeed, they are the experiences these visitors expect to have in Poland … [and] almost a desired part of the trip.’30 For tourists to sites of memory then, their personal experience of Poland can all too easily simply

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confirm their prior knowledge of the Holocaust. The presence of desecrated remnants of Polish Jewish life allows such tourists to concentrate on what no longer exists, rather than engaging with contemporary Poland. It is not surprising that those in search of their heritage are interested in travelling to the places where their forefathers lived and died. For travellers to Poland in search of Jewish heritage, the trip is no ordinary holiday. Such journeys tend to resemble pilgrimages, and visiting the places formerly inhabited by Jews as well as where they were killed gives the perception of an opportunity to broaden knowledge about the Holocaust.31 It is thus about what Kugelmass terms ‘clarity of place’.32 He writes that for American Jews whose roots lie in Eastern Europe, the sense passed down from their parents and grandparents ‘lack[s] the clarity of place that only direct experience can provide’.33 Therefore, he continues, ‘By evoking the Holocaust dramaturgically, that is, by going to the site of the event and reconstituting the reality of the time and place, American Jews are not only invoking the spirits of the tribe and laying claim to their martyrdom, but they are also making past time present.’34 The notion of ‘making past time present’ illustrates the significance of journeys to Holocaust sites. These journeys are about not only finding the places, but also finding the past that happened at these places. An example of this is organized trips for young people, such as March of the Living and trips for young Israelis to Poland, which are based on the connection between place and event.35 In doing so, they use Holocaust sites to become what Jackie Feldman terms ‘witnesses of the witnesses’.36 When it comes to writing about Holocaust sites, the perspective of the author is often explicitly acknowledged even in academic research. This literature promotes the idea that visiting Auschwitz is unlike visiting anywhere else. For example, Cole coined the term ‘Auschwitz-land’ to differentiate between Auschwitz the concentration camp and Auschwitz the tourist attraction.37 Furthermore, many secondary sources contain personal descriptions of the author’s visit to Auschwitz or other sites of Holocaust memory – this book is not alone in that respect. Cole writes of his visit to Auschwitz, and Young cites his own visits even more explicitly, writing that ‘Having posited the visitor’s essential role in the memorial space, it would be hypocritical for me to write about any site I have not visited.’38 These examples suggest that such writing incorporates the duality of landscape: the place and the perception of it are inextricably intertwined. Although visiting Holocaust sites is one way of attempting to become closer to the Holocaust, documenting such a trip both preserves it and communicates it to a potentially wide audience. Moreover, as Marita Grimwood argues, these

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journeys are potentially an opportunity to work through the Holocaust past: ‘Poland is … initially a site of fantasy, a landscape onto which imaginary visions of the past are projected. It eventually becomes a site for the working through of the writers’ relationships to the past and present.’39 While survivor testimony has existed since the time of the Holocaust, the genre of Holocaust memoirs has expanded greatly in recent years, perhaps unsurprising in the contemporary climate of fashionable genealogy and a sympathetic publishing market for memoirs.40 Holocaust texts by descendants of survivors are dominated by second-generation memoirs, albeit increasingly complemented by those with a more distant familial connection.41 Such memoirs tend to not only depict the narrator’s visit to Holocaust sites, but also tell the story of their family members who experienced the Holocaust. Holocaust texts include novels which depict similar stories: visits to Holocaust sites as well as family history, albeit in fictional form.42 Together these texts provide an insight into how Holocaust memory is created and constructed by those descended from Holocaust survivors. When descendants of Holocaust survivors write about the Holocaust, their perspective and authority on the subject emerges from a family connection rather than scholarly expertise.43 While historians privilege history and literary scholars privilege literature as the primary narrative of the Holocaust, neither perspective takes descendants of Holocaust survivors into account.44 In being directly descended from those who experienced the Holocaust, children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors presume an added sense of authenticity not available to those without a direct family connection. While their representations of the Holocaust therefore imply privileged authority through familial lineage, they nevertheless exclude direct knowledge of events. For the second generation and the third generation, visits to sites of Holocaust memory therefore compensate for the lack of direct knowledge.

Testimony and the primary witness The urge to bear witness has been attributed to Holocaust survivors from the time of the Holocaust to recent mass recordings of video testimony.45 The underlying assumption is that the experience of persecution, coupled with losing one’s family, friends and community, and witnessing horrific events such as shootings and torture, means that one has a duty to record these events, either in writing or on film. The large numbers of survivors who have done so has given rise to the tradition of literary criticism on Holocaust testimony and critiques of Holocaust

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representation more generally.46 Witnessing is of course at the core of this book. Bearing witness refers to the act of recording one’s experiences, committing to paper or film or computer those defining moments into a form of narrative. To witness therefore is simply to see, to undergo and to experience. Witnessing an event means observing from within it. The Holocaust survivor or victim as witness has been chronicled since the days of the ghettos.47 Essentially, a witness is somebody who sees or experiences an event.48 The crucial aspect is that they were there, physically present and either a spectator or part of the event that took place. This experience gives rise to the eyewitness, a figure which this book refers to as the ‘primary witness’. Giorgio Agamben distinguishes between a witness’s observation of an event and their experience of it.49 Drawing on the two Latin terms for the concept, he explains that ‘superstes … designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it’, thus emphasizing the experience.50 He writes that the second Latin term, ‘testis … etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party’, which suggests a perspective more akin to a bystander.51 If we take this definition into consideration, then a primary witness is someone who has observed or experienced an event. The ubiquity of the term ‘witness’ in Holocaust studies scholarship means that its definition continues to be widely discussed and debated.52 Famously, Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, wrote that: ‘we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses … we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom … They are the rule, we are the exception.’53 Levi’s claim that the true witnesses were the ones who did not survive the horrors of the Holocaust suggests that witnessing is commensurate with death in the very event which is being witnessed. This interpretation is at odds with most scholarship on Holocaust witnessing however, which touts the widely accepted notion that the concept of the Holocaust survivor as witness emerged in conjunction with the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Survivors were called on as courtroom witnesses, and as Annette Wieviorka explains, ‘The Eichmann trial freed the victims to speak.’54 It was not that they had not spoken previously, but that the widespread broadcast of the trial on television and radio reached a wide audience and created a public perception of the Holocaust survivor as witness. The act of bearing witness therefore means writing or recording testimony. Whether the result is a traditional medium such as a written memoir, a legal statement, a book of poetry or is in a digital format like a video interview, an

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online video or a multimedia installation, the form itself gives us the context in which bearing witness took place. As Wieviorka explains, ‘The moment when a testimony is delivered tells us a great deal about the society in which the witness lives.’55 With that in mind, we must remember that Holocaust testimony is not a straightforward recollection of events, but a mediated representation of memory. Lawrence Langer observes in his research on video testimony that the survivors interviewed ‘were telling a version of the truth as they grasped it, that several currents flow at differing depths in Holocaust testimonies, and that our understanding of the event depends very much on the source and destination of the current we pursue’.56 In other words, both the production and reception of Holocaust testimony are dependent on context: not only where and when a testimony is created, but also who the intended audience is.57 This context includes of course what is included and what is not included; as Andrea Reiter explains, ‘Temporal structuring and selection read a certain meaning into experience.’58 Furthermore, the nature of testimony means that, as Young explains, ‘even though a survivor’s testimony is “privileged” insofar as it is authentic, the factuality of his literary testimony is not necessarily so privileged.’59 Essentially, the representation of experience in Holocaust testimony cannot be separated from the text itself. Holocaust testimony is not only a means for survivors to record their memories, but also shapes others’ perception of the Holocaust. For these nonsurvivors, Gary Weissman’s term for ‘most of the individuals who produce educational, scholarly, literary, and artistic work related to the Holocaust today’, representing the Holocaust means drawing on sources such as historical documents, scholarly research and interviews with survivors as well as their own perspective.60 As Young explains, ‘What is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form.’61 Holocaust texts not only preserve impressions of the Holocaust, but also play a pivotal role in creating Holocaust memory by laying the foundations for future representations. As I have argued thus far, survivor testimony arises when a primary witness bears witness to the Holocaust. This terminology refers to representations that survivors create about their experiences. When it comes to the second generation and the third generation however, it is not so simple. Can the second generation and the third generation also bear witness to the Holocaust? The answer is yes, albeit from their own perspective, which includes the fact that they did not personally experience the Holocaust.

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The secondary witness In contrast to the primary witness, the secondary witness was not there. They were not physically present at the event in question. Yet, a secondary witness who writes about the Holocaust, for example, does so because they have a connection to this historical event: they know, or have known, someone who was there. Bearing witness for the secondary witness means adopting strategies to overcome the lack of physical presence as well as explicitly acknowledging this lack of presence in their testimony, whether through form or content. Indeed, this lack of presence is precisely what lies behind the second generation’s and the third generation’s journeys to sites of Holocaust memory. What they are trying to do, I argue in this book, is find ways to be present. They travel to sites of memory, either literally or metaphorically, because they are looking for a way to be present in the past. In addition to Holocaust survivors, this book is concerned with a specific group of non-survivors: the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. It does not address representations by those without a family connection to the Holocaust, but rather focuses on how the descendants of survivors navigate this connection. It is the particular combination of family history and inherited memory with a journey to Holocaust sites that comprises the secondary witnessing explored in this book. The concept of secondary witnessing – the idea that non-survivors can and do bear witness to the Holocaust – is by no means widely accepted. Weissman, for example, is highly critical of this view, drawing a firm line between what he designates as witnesses and non-witnesses (according to his interpretation, interchangeable with non-survivors): ‘Put simply, the term nonwitness stresses that we who were not there did not witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization.’62 While this is indeed true, it clearly does not stop people from trying to witness the Holocaust from their post-war perspective – which, incidentally, Weissman spends his entire book discussing. Moreover, it is these attempts to witness the Holocaust after the fact that are so compelling, because they force consideration of what the Holocaust actually is. By choosing a term that explicitly precludes witnessing by non-survivors, Weissman dismisses the notion of secondary witnessing and hence lacks a way to classify texts such as second-generation Holocaust memoirs, though he does acknowledge that ‘survivors’ children know a part of the Holocaust that is all in the family’.63 He explains this viewpoint as follows: ‘I believe that such a broadening of the term

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Remembering the Holocaust

witness, as well as similar uses of the terms memory and trauma, contributes to a wishful blurring of otherwise obvious and meaningful distinctions between the victims and ourselves, and between the Holocaust and our own historical moment.’64 While it is convenient for Weissman’s thesis to label extension of witnessing as ‘wishful blurring’, for some people, it is a genuine blurring. For example, second-generation expert Aaron Hass notes that ‘children [of Holocaust survivors] may assume the identity of survivors as though they themselves had been persecuted by the Nazis.’65 By designating non-survivors as non-witnesses, Weissman suggests that their representations cannot convey anything about the Holocaust. But, as the analysis in the ensuing chapters shows, this is far from the case. The terms ‘primary witnessing’ and ‘secondary witnessing’ maintain a distinction between those who were there and those who were not, but still provide terminology to explore representations by non-survivors directly descended from primary witnesses, thereby acknowledging their goal of bearing witness to the Holocaust. In fact, Weissman’s argument goes against the grain of many other researchers, who have coined their own terms for secondary witnessing. From Geoffrey H. Hartman’s ‘witnesses by adoption’ to Feldman’s ‘witnesses of the witnesses’ and S. Lillian Kremer’s ‘witness through the imagination’, the notion of witnessing by non-survivors has been extensively explored and documented.66 Yet, the range of terms for this phenomenon demonstrates a lack of coherence in existing research, showing that although the concept of witnessing by non-survivors is well acknowledged, there is a lack of widely accepted terminology to describe it. Listening to survivor testimony is the principal way in which one becomes a secondary witness.67 It is this direct connection with the primary witness that gives the secondary witness their status, as noted by Alan L. Berger who asserts that ‘listening to tales of a witness makes of one a witness’.68 Similarly, in Ulrich Baer’s German language edited volume, named for Paul Celan’s poem ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’ (No one bears witness for the witness), the term sekundäre Zeugenschaft, literally ‘secondary witnessing’, describes the form of listening witnesses may require to confront traumatic experiences.69 More controversially, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub posit the Holocaust as a ‘crisis of witnessing’, an event too traumatic and incomprehensible to be witnessed as it unfolded, but able to be witnessed afterwards, by giving testimony in the presence of a listener.70 The listener, the secondary witness, is a crucial part of this process: they not only become ‘a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event’, but as Laub asserts, ‘the listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness

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13

before [italics in original] the narrator does’.71 This entwinement of witnessing with trauma overlooks the fact that, as Zoë Waxman has demonstrated, ‘witnesses were aware of the historical importance of their experiences as they unfolded’, and that Holocaust testimony dates back to the very days of the Holocaust itself.72 Moreover, Felman and Laub’s psychoanalytical interpretation of witnessing obscures the role of the primary witness as chronicler to their own life experience. Nevertheless, the presence of another person, a listener, is crucial to secondary witnessing, for it is only through representations of the Holocaust, including testimony of primary witnesses, that the secondary witness comes to know about the Holocaust. The relationship to the primary witness or to representations of the Holocaust is the other crucial aspect of secondary witnessing. It is a onedegree separation – in other words, a direct connection with the primary witness and their testimony. Art historian Dora Apel notes that ‘Because of their distance from the events … secondary witnesses do not deal with the Holocaust directly but in ways that bring to the surface the tensions and discontinuities between the past and the present, ambiguities, impasses and lacunas that are part of the “memory effects” of the Shoah.’73 This interpretation of secondary witnessing encapsulates the indirectness of it, acknowledging that representations classified as secondary witnessing not only present the Holocaust, but the artist’s perspective and experience of it. The role of place in secondary witnessing is evident in Feldman’s study of organized trips for Israeli teenagers to Holocaust sites in Poland. He writes that ‘On their return to Israel, they are defined “witnesses of the witnesses” and entrusted with the task of passing on their experience to their classmates, friends and siblings.’74 It is the experience of visiting Holocaust sites combined with hearing from survivors which in this case creates secondary witnesses. In Jewish tradition, the notion of later generations bearing witness to the experiences of their forefathers is most evident in the Passover Haggadah.75 Berger notes that ‘The distinction between a witnessing generation and those who come after, but are commanded to witness, is firmly rooted in Jewish history and liturgy.’76 By associating the Holocaust with traditional Jewish rituals of remembrance, Berger emphasizes the responsibility of those in later generations to bear witness to what has come before. The testimonies of secondary witnesses analysed in this book are memoirs and novels by members of the second generation and the third generation. Children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, respectively, these writers were born into the aftermath of survival. Whether they literally listened to

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Remembering the Holocaust

their parents’ or grandparents’ story or for whatever reason did not get the opportunity, they certainly absorbed it on some level. The common secondarywitnessing perspective of the second generation and the third generation nevertheless diverges when we consider the difference in distance from the Holocaust, in terms of both familial relationships and temporality. The texts selected for this book, whether fiction or non-fiction, were limited to those deemed autobiographical according to Caroline Schaumann’s sense of the term: ‘the narrator’s (or protagonist’s) gender, age, place of birth, and other significant details coincide with the author’s’.77 Thus, the connection between the narrative, no matter how fictionalized, and the author’s identification as a second-generation or third-generation descendant is evident. Yet, a fundamental question remains, what exactly is being witnessed? This question will be explored throughout the book. As Eric J. Sundquist ponders, ‘it still remains an open question what we have been enabled to witness. In each generation since, the problem of “knowing” the Holocaust has paradoxically become more acute as various modes of second-order witnessing have become normative.’78 This suggests that despite the myriad representations of the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself remains elusive. Nevertheless, primary witnessing forms a useful distinction from secondary witnessing, by encapsulating the distance of the witness. Similarly, secondary witnessing captures representations of the Holocaust by non-survivors, because it acknowledges the intention behind what they attempt to represent.

Generations By analysing Holocaust texts through the tropes of generations and sites of memory, this book combines two central aspects of Holocaust memory rarely investigated together. We have already established why sites of memory form a fundamental part of this study. Focusing on generations recognizes the pivotal part that generational identification has played in the development of Holocaust studies. Indeed, Holocaust survivors form a generation based on common experience. The second generation in particular has shaped scholarship in historiography, literature, memory and trauma studies of the Holocaust.79 As the children of survivors, the primary witnesses, the second generation is of course at the centre of non-survivors who write about and otherwise represent the Holocaust and its effect on their lives. The emergence of the third generation over the last decade means that it is now timely to consider how each generation

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15

writes about sites of memory, and how they thereby bear witness to the Holocaust. This book joins the many cross-generational studies of the Holocaust in the social sciences, a perspective that until now has rarely been encountered in literary criticism.80 Although scholarship in this area does consider texts by Holocaust survivors as well as the second generation and the third generation, it often conflates the various generations or disregards the generational aspect altogether.81 An important exception is Schaumann’s 2008 book, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature, which explores how descendants’ perceptions of the Holocaust are shaped by their genealogical connection.82 Although she uses ‘third generation’ in an earlier article, Schaumann avoids explicit generational terms in Memory Matters, instead defining her categories as ‘two texts that comprise memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, two that consider memories of the narrators’ parents, and two that are concerned with the narrators’ grandparents’ past’.83 Schaumann argues that labelling post-Holocaust generations is unproductive because there is too much ambiguity, yet, I would counter that the strong sense of identification expressed by many members of the second generation and the third generation indicates that it is fruitful to consider texts in this way. Schaumann concludes that ‘Without memories of their own, generations of children and increasingly grandchildren have begun to appropriate and interpret their parents’ and grandparents’ memories, complementing them with reflection and imagination.’84 It is the role of place in this appropriation and interpretation that this book investigates. The structure of this book along generational lines allows the commonalities and differences between the different generations to come to the fore. By identifying as a second-generation or third-generation Holocaust descendant, a child or grandchild of Holocaust survivors asserts that they have a link to the Holocaust through generational ties. Moreover, the term ‘generation’ is frequently deployed in Holocaust studies, particularly in regard to concepts such as trans-generational trauma and transmitted memory, yet it is rarely explained in depth.85

Generations of the Holocaust Karl Mannheim’s seminal 1928 essay argues that generations originate biologically but manifest sociologically.86 He asserts that ‘Individuals who belong to the same generation, who share the same year of birth, are

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Remembering the Holocaust

endowed … with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process.’87 Thus, while generations emerge from common year of birth, they are constructed by social interaction. Mannheim notes that ‘Mere contemporaneity becomes sociologically significant only when it also involves participation in the same historical and social circumstances’, thus limiting a generation to those who grow up in comparable situations.88 His concept of ‘generation units’, which breaks down ‘actual generations’ into ‘groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways [italics in original]’, differentiates between the experiences of particular groups within a single chronological generation.89 For instance, Holocaust survivors could be said to form a generation unit of the broader generation who experienced the Second World War. Ernst van Alphen rightly points out that ‘a second generation presupposes a first one’.90 We can consider Holocaust survivors a generation according to the sociological, political and historical definitions.91 Waxman notes that ‘The majority of those who survived were aged between 16 and 40 years old’, which means that they underwent similar experiences during their formative years, a key aspect of generation formation described by Marvin Rintala and Rudolf Heberle.92 Although given the heterogeneity of survivors’ Holocaust experiences, not to mention differences in nationality, age and religious conviction, one might question how they can be termed a coherent group at all. Accordingly, this book deploys a broad definition of Holocaust survivor, as well as the second generation and the third generation, which emphasizes the choice to identify as a Holocaust survivor or descendant rather than strict criteria. This definition is based on Julia Chaitin’s that ‘a Holocaust survivor [is] defined as an individual, of any age, who had lived under Nazi rule or influence anytime between 1939 and 1945’.93 It thus encompasses a broad range of Holocaust experiences, including those who left Europe as refugees as well as those who remained there during the Holocaust. However, this book broadens the definition to include those who fled Europe after the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933, because these people also generally lost their families, communities and homelands due to Nazi rule.94 The classification of Holocaust descendants does not end with the second generation and the third generation, however. Generations of the Holocaust have been extended by the use of the decimal point. Susan Rubin Suleiman, herself a child survivor, coined the term ‘1.5 generation’, which she describes as ‘child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews [italics in original]’.95 The emphasis is not just

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on common experience, but on the ability to comprehend and process that experience. In contrast to other Holocaust survivors, ‘the 1.5 generation’s shared experience is that of premature bewilderment and helplessness’.96 The formative experience occurred before they were old enough to realize what was happening. This is the reason for what Suleiman terms ‘delayed generational consciousness’, noting that ‘Organized groups of child survivors of the Holocaust began meeting in international venues in the 1980s’, which suggests a much later realization of generational status, relative to the event, than that experienced by adult Holocaust survivors.97 Ruth Kluger, whose memoir Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered will be discussed in Chapter 1, can be considered part of the 1.5 generation. Similarly, in Amir Gutfreund’s novel Our Holocaust, which will be analysed in Chapter 3, the narrator refers to himself as part of the ‘second-and-a-half ’ generation because his parents experienced the Holocaust as young children rather than adults.98 The narrator explains that: ‘We children were not the “second generation” of the Holocaust – we were the second and-a-half generation. That slight shift, just half a rung on the generational ladder, gave us a simpler, healthier life, with parents who smiled, who found it easy to love, to hug, to talk with us [italics in original].’99 The recognition of the second-and-a-half or 2.5 generation enables the children of child survivors to highlight the differences in experience of those whose parents survived the Holocaust as children. Before describing the second generation and the third generation, it is important to acknowledge that some scholars do not distinguish between them but instead favour an all-encompassing term such as ‘the generation after’.100 This practice however overlooks the fact that identifying as part of the second or third generation recognizes the evolution of Holocaust memory as it passes from survivors to their children and grandchildren. Indeed, as Schaumann notes, ‘the response of third-generation writers seems distinctly different from and a reaction to second-generation writing, and both groups deserve singular attention in literary scholarship and research.’101 Other scholars, such as Hartman and Efraim Sicher use ‘generation after’ as a category which encompasses both the second generation and the third generation.102

The second generation The children of Holocaust survivors are collectively known as ‘the second generation’. The murder of six million Jews profoundly affected not only the few

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Remembering the Holocaust

who survived the genocide but also the next generation, born after the Holocaust. As this generation came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, members began to form self-help groups, which indicated the emergence of the second generation as a collective experience.103 Eva Fogelman, who is credited with first using the term ‘second generation’, notes that this occurred as a by-product of the political movements of the period.104 This self-identification as a group was recorded by journalist Helen Epstein, whose 1977 landmark New York Times article and 1979 book Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors are recognized as the beginning of literature on the second generation, although neither actually uses the term.105 In order to contextualize the shared experience of the second generation, let us briefly consider the circumstances they were born into. After liberation, returning home was not a straightforward option for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. As Anton Gill explains, ‘their homes had been taken away from them, their whole families and even their entire community had been slaughtered. There was nothing to return for, to return to.’106 Many found themselves in the Displaced Persons camps dotted around Germany, where they stayed for as long as ten years.107 Some returned to their hometowns, only to leave again due to persecution such as the pogrom in Kielce, Poland, in 1946.108 Others migrated to countries such as then Palestine (today Israel) as well as Australia, Canada and the United States. Amongst this chaos of displacement, many survivors married each other and had children straight away, perhaps aiming, consciously or unconsciously, to make up for their murdered families.109 Some children of survivors, including Lily Brett, were born in Displaced Persons camps. Others were born in Poland before their parents migrated elsewhere. Lisa Appignanesi, for example, was born in Łódź before her family moved to France and then Canada. Others remained longer in Poland, such as Eva Hoffman who lived there until 1959, when she migrated to Canada with her family aged thirteen.110 Some who resided in the Displaced Persons camps stayed in Germany, such as Helena Janeczek’s Polish-born parents. Australia was the destination of choice for those ‘determined to get as far away from Europe as possible’,111 including the parents of Brett and Mark Raphael Baker. Consequently – as with any children of migrants – the second generation grew up in a country foreign to their parents, generally with no grandparents or extended family.112 The trauma, loss and displacement experienced by Holocaust survivors therefore often also affected their children. But how exactly were the second generation affected by the Holocaust? There is no straightforward answer to this question. Despite the wealth of

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19

research about children of Holocaust survivors, it is inappropriate to generalize the experiences of this generation. However, we can group the themes of this research accordingly: psychological conditions including trans-generational trauma, forms of inherited memory, and a sense of affinity with other children of Holocaust survivors. All these aspects are based on a general sense of loss, that something is missing from the lives of the second generation. In order to discuss how the Holocaust impacts on subsequent generations, let us consider Ron Eyerman’s work on the influence of collective memory of slavery on modern African American identity. He explains that: This event [slavery] now identified with the formation of the group must be recollected by later generations, which have had no experience of the ‘original’ event, yet continue to be identified by it and to identify themselves through it. Because of its distance from the event, and because its social circumstances have altered with time, each succeeding generation reinterprets and represents the collective memory around that event according to its needs and means.113

We can also apply this definition to the way the Holocaust emerges in a generational typology. It is the ‘recollection’ by the second and third generations upon which their connection to the Holocaust is based. It is not the experience of the trauma itself which creates the generational identity, but the perception of this trauma. The syndrome ‘trans-generational trauma’ describes a psychological condition experienced by some children of Holocaust survivors. It suggests that although the second generation did not experience the Holocaust, living with the aftermath of their parents’ traumatic experiences causes symptoms associated with trauma. Dani Rowland-Klein and Rosemary Dunlop describe trans-generational trauma in the second generation as ‘the presence of generalized anxiety, fear and wariness of others, a sense of having personally experienced concentration camp incarceration associated with vivid Holocaust-related imagery as well as reverse parenting and enmeshment’.114 A striking example of ‘vivid Holocaustrelated imagery’ can be found in the opening paragraphs of Children of the Holocaust. Epstein writes that ‘I saw things I knew no little girl should see. Blood and shattered glass. Piles of skeletons and blackened barbed wire with bits of flesh stuck to it the way flies stick to walls after they are swatted dead.’115 This quotation illustrates the extent to which some members of the second generation have internalized their parents’ experiences. Indeed, such clinical observations formed the basis of a collective identity for children of Holocaust survivors.116 Early works describe the strong sense of

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Remembering the Holocaust

affinity amongst the second generation.117 This is evident in Epstein’s research: ‘I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived. I wanted to ask them questions, so that I could reach the most elusive part of myself.’118 As a child of Holocaust survivors documenting and promoting the emergence of a collective identity, Epstein’s contribution set the scene for the development of the field in the ensuing decades. Even today, much of the literature about the second generation is written by members of the second generation.119 Memory, or more precisely the lack of it, is a common theme in secondgeneration Holocaust discourse. The emergence of theories such as Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ and Ellen Fine’s ‘absent memory’, both of which will be discussed in Chapter 2, indicate the complex role of memory in the second generation’s relationship to the Holocaust.120 They provide a way of articulating the defining features of the second generation: that their life is shaped by traumatic events that happened before they were born, which they will never completely know or understand. So, while the after-effects form the basis of the second generation’s relationship to the Holocaust, this is simply because they did not personally experience the Holocaust. It is for this reason that what it means to be a member of the second generation remains, to a certain extent, elusive. It is this elusiveness that the second generation’s journeys to Eastern Europe seek to address. It should be noted that the term second generation is not without criticism. This criticism mostly stems from those who dispute the claim to the Holocaust by descent. Van Alphen, for example, finds the implication of a direct link to the Holocaust in the term problematic, because ‘The term does not imply that the second generation is a completely new generation, one that differs fundamentally from the generation of their parents. On the contrary, the phrase seems to suggest a fundamental continuity between first and second generation.’121 He thus implies that such continuity is unprecedented or unwarranted, even taking away from the special category of victimhood allocated to Holocaust survivors. However, it is precisely because the term suggests continuity that it is appropriate; it is of course the second generation’s link to their survivor parents which is fundamental for their relationship to the Holocaust. Although some researchers extend the term second generation vicariously, in this book, it is used in a strictly genealogical sense. It, therefore, does not encompass definitions such as those described by Fine, for example, who explains that ‘my use of the expression is more comprehensive, encompassing those born both during and after the war, including those who did not directly participate in the Holocaust but who have come to endure the psychic imprint of the trauma’.122

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Her definition emphasizes a commonality of after-effects of the Holocaust, rather than a familial connection, and it is the direct family connection that is explored in this book. This widening to include vicarious descendants is perhaps symptomatic of the development of collective Holocaust memory, as with David Grossman’s identification with the second generation as an Israeli of similar age.123 Collective memory of the Holocaust in the United States, as described and criticized by Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein, posits the Holocaust as a central element of contemporary American Jewish identity, which leads to people classifying their relationship to it.124 Extending terms such as second generation and third generation vicariously destroys the specificity attached for those who deploy them to describe a familial relationship to Holocaust survivors.125

The third generation The third generation are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Like the second generation, the third generation has been affected by what happened to their Holocaust survivor grandparents. However, in contrast to the second generation, where there is a generally accepted and assumed definition – and even an entry in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust – the definition of third generation is not only more variable, but there is little consensus on its collective experience and attributes.126 The third generation has chiefly emerged in the last decade, which concurs with the formative ages for generational identification nominated by Rintala and Heberle.127 Third-generation groups began to form in the early years of the twenty-first century, and hence, this generation is in many ways at a similar stage to the second generation some thirty years ago.128 The most important characteristic of the third generation is their position as the last living link to the Holocaust. They are likely to be the last generation to know Holocaust survivors and their contemporaries personally. As Schaumann explains, ‘As final listeners to the Nazi past, the third generation is thus crucial in the transmission of history.’129 This frames the way that they bear witness to the Holocaust, encapsulated by James Berger’s typology of generational Holocaust witnessing, where the third generation’s Holocaust witnessing is defined by their lack of contact with living survivors.130 Like the second generation, the third generation has collectively emerged in groups founded by those who identify as third generation. Formed in recent years and with a strong online presence, groups such as New York-based 3GNY and Melbourne-based 3GH, founded in 2005 and 2006, respectively,

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Remembering the Holocaust

define themselves as ‘grandchildren of Holocaust survivors’.131 Similarly, the description of Facebook group ‘Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’, which has over 3,500 members as of February 2015, opens with ‘We are the third generation, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.’132 These groups emphasize the link that the third generation has to the Holocaust. Nevertheless, as with the second generation, the definition of the third generation has been widened beyond the direct descendants of Holocaust survivors. In many cases, it refers to the third generation born after the Second World War.133 While for those without a familial connection, ‘third generation’ may seem an appropriate term, as with broadening the term second generation to include those who identify vicariously, doing so with third generation removes the special significance and identity that grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have in common. In some ways, it is more difficult to pin down the definition of the third generation, because it includes people with either one, two, three or four grandparents who survived the Holocaust. There is therefore much greater variation in family histories and personal identities of the third generation, who may not identify as third generation or even as Jewish. Yet, despite the third generation’s diversity, the existing literature evidences common attributes. The third generation is a crucial link in the chain of Holocaust memory. As Berger explains, the ‘third generation will, in turn, hear tales of their grandparents’ suffering and its effect on their own parents, thereby themselves becoming links in the chain of Holocaust memory and Jewish identity.’134 What this means for the third generation, however, is open to interpretation. In her study of the third generation, Amelia Klein found that ‘some are questioning their role in the chain of remembrance. The baton of remembrance may thus not be passed on smoothly from Holocaust survivors to their grandchildren.’135 The third generation’s position is also defined by distance from the Holocaust. As Nicole Fox explains, ‘They were told survivor narratives by their grandparents and family friends, but they were distant enough from the event that they did not experience a great deal of the everyday trauma that the children of Holocaust survivors experienced.’136 This distance does not mean that the third generation were not affected by the Holocaust, but that the way in which they were affected is shaped by distance. For Jessica Lang, this emerges in the indirect nature of third-generation Holocaust representation. She notes that ‘the historical distance among contemporary authors, their audience and the Holocaust transforms these events from a direct experience … to an indirect experience’.137 As a result, third-generation bearing witness to the Holocaust encapsulates and demonstrates this distance.

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Some second-generation authors write specifically about their children, the third generation and their hopes for this generation to perpetuate memory of the Holocaust. Such descriptions tend, accordingly, to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, and although they usually refer to their own children specifically, they also extrapolate to the third generation as a whole. Rabbi Steven L. Jacobs dedicates his commentary on rethinking Jewish theology to his children, referring to them as ‘grandchildren of the survivors, the Third Generation [sic]’.138 He writes that ‘they, too, are inheritors of this same terrible legacy as their parents; and they, too, must be taught … the awful and horrific details of this terrible tragedy’.139 The stipulation that they ‘must be taught’ about the Holocaust assumes a lack of knowledge and even interest by the third generation. Hass gives a similar view, voicing his concerns about informing his infant daughter about the Holocaust: ‘So I think of Rachel, the third generation. Can I count on her? Can I place that burden upon her?’140 These second-generation views of the third generation emphasize the second generation’s view of the third as entangled with the second, and thus overlook the third generation’s relationship with their survivor grandparents in their own right. The relationship between survivor grandparents and their third-generation grandchildren is central to the third generation’s perspective on the Holocaust.

A fourth generation? There has been very little mention of a fourth generation of Holocaust descendants to date – though it is referred to by Melvin Jules Bukiet in the Introduction to his edited volume Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – because average lifespans mean that the third generation are generally the last generation to have known survivors personally.141 This is because in most Western countries – including those where the majority of Holocaust survivors settled after liberation (Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States) – the average time in which a generation reaches maturity and reproduces is approximately thirty years.142 Given that most Holocaust survivors were aged in their twenties and thirties in 1945, and the baby boom that followed in the Displaced Persons camps, they were likely to become grandparents in the 1970s or 1980s, and potentially great-grandparents not until the second decade of the twenty-first century – sixty-five years later.143 As the average lifespan in these countries hovers around eighty, many would not live to see their great-grandchildren, or if they did,

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Remembering the Holocaust

they would pass away while the children were still very young. Therefore, it is the third generation who are likely to be the last generation to know, or have known, survivors personally. While considering the future of Holocaust memory, it is worth pondering the existence of a fourth or even a fifth generation of Holocaust descendants. Yet, while these generations potentially exist, they will differ from the second and third generations because they will lack the living link of a personal connection. If such generations do exist, now or in the future, they will emerge in a fundamentally different form, perhaps akin to African American identity based on slavery, where the link is with the myth and history rather than a living person who actually experienced the event.144 Thus, survivors, the second generation and the third generation, form a coherent entity of continuity in a way that will prove impossible to future generations. Simultaneously, they show the development of Holocaust memory from personal experience, to closeness, to distance. Accordingly, this book covering the first three generations provides a map of the three direct generations, which together form what we can term ‘the first phase of Holocaust memory’.

The place of memory: Witnessing across generations This book draws together analysis of place and generations in Holocaust witnessing. The study of testimony begins with a close reading of three survivor memoirs of return in Chapter 1. It shows that for survivors, sites are not mute as landscape theorists claim but instead seem to almost literally scream with traumatic memories. The three diverse examples of survivor testimonies which include a visit or visits to Holocaust sites decades later are Return to Auschwitz (1981) by prominent Polish-born and England-based survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon; Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (1991) by Hungarian-born American academic Judith Magyar Isaacson; and Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) by Vienna-born America-based Germanist Kluger.145 The recording of a return to sites of memory by Holocaust survivors, all of whom lived through the Holocaust at a relatively young age, gives a particular insight into the role of such sites in contemporary Holocaust memory. In Chapter 2, we will discover what happens when members of the second generation visit places which have so pivotally shaped their parents’, and by extension their own, lives. For the second generation, for whom the most

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significant event in their lives happened before they were born, visiting the places connected with it paradoxically both brings it closer and isolates it in the past. This chapter analyses six works written by children of Holocaust survivors who describe a journey to sites of memory relevant to their family’s history. It discusses memoirs The Fiftieth Gate (1997) by Australian academic Baker and Lektionen des Verborgenen (Lessons of Darkness) (1999) by German-born Janeczek as well as Brett’s 1999 novel Too Many Men.146 What these three texts have in common is the presence of the protagonist’s Holocaust survivor parents on the journeys to Eastern Europe. The chapter also analyses three memoirs where the narrator embarks on the trip without their parents: Canadian writer Appignanesi’s 1999 book Losing the Dead; English journalist Anne Karpf ’s 1996 volume The War After: Living with the Holocaust; and Jewels and Ashes, Australian storyteller Arnold Zable’s 1991 memoir.147 Each of these narratives describes the secondary witness’s search for their parents’ past, the journey of discovering their family’s pre-Holocaust history, as well as the fate of those murdered in the Holocaust, thereby bearing witness to the Holocaust. In Chapter 3’s examination of third-generation texts, we will see how fictionalization comes to dominate the narratives as bearing witness moves a step further away from the Holocaust. The chapter analyses memoirs For Esther (2000) by Alex Sage, a survivor testimony featuring a fictional granddaughter, and Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002) by Andrea Simon, which features her grandmother’s imaginary voice.148 It then discusses two wellknown novels: Everything Is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer and Our Holocaust (2006) by Gutfreund.149 The focus on sites of Holocaust memory interwoven with the fictional elements in these texts reveals a distinctly thirdgeneration way of bearing witness to the Holocaust. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the sites of memory themselves. Presenting an analysis of the site of Auschwitz, it extends the findings of the first three chapters by exploring how such sites construct contemporary Holocaust memory. Its discussion of the site of Auschwitz, as well as sections on pilgrimage and Holocaust tourism, illustrates the development of Holocaust sites since the Holocaust. It concludes with a discussion of Shimon Attie’s 1994 photographic work The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter, to show how the question of representation is entwined with witnessing and place.150

1

Survivor Memoirs of Return: Encountering the Past in the Present In 1978, Kitty Hart-Moxon returned to Auschwitz. Unlike the more than one million visitors who now visit this site annually, she was not there as a tourist.1 From April 1943 until November 1944, she had been a prisoner and slave labourer at this infamous Nazi death and concentration camp. A Polish Jew – she was born in Bielsko, Poland in 1926 – Hart-Moxon (née Felix) survived the physical and emotional trauma of imprisonment together with her mother Lola Felix. Auschwitz was not the only place of incarceration for them during the Holocaust however; due to the Nazi regime, they were also interned in the Lublin Ghetto and concentration camps Gross-Rosen and Bergen-Belsen. HartMoxon and her mother were liberated by American troops at a camp just outside of Salzwedel, Germany, in April 1945.2 In September 1946, mother and daughter emigrated to Britain.3 And it is from Britain that Hart-Moxon’s famous return took place. She explains that ‘In 1978, Yorkshire Television invited me to return to Auschwitz to make a short documentary about the experience.’4 The resulting ninety minute film entitled Kitty – Return to Auschwitz, directed by Peter Morley, begins and ends with shots of Hart-Moxon speaking at her home in Birmingham, much like the thousands of other video testimonies of Holocaust survivors.5 But what makes this video testimony so different is its location in situ: the vast majority of the film was shot on location at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Hart-Moxon gives her testimony, the viewer can see the places she is talking about, captured on film in 1978. Yet, it is precisely the viewer’s ability to see these places which makes it clear how different they are from the ones that Hart-Moxon remembers from her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau. These differences are not only evident in the film, but also in Hart-Moxon’s 1981 written testimony Return to Auschwitz. Written after her journey back to Auschwitz – Hart-Moxon notes that ‘This [experience] in turn inspired the writing of “Return to Auschwitz” ’ – this narrative also emphasizes the significant

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differences Hart-Moxon noticed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau of 1978 compared to her time there as a prisoner during the Holocaust.6 For example, in Return to Auschwitz, she recounts the following conversation with her son David as she guided him around Auschwitz-Birkenau for Morley’s documentary: You see grass. But I don’t see any grass. I see mud, just a sea of mud. And you think it’s cold? With your four or five layers of clothing on a bright crisp day like this, you feel the cold? Well, imagine people here or out beyond that fence working when it snowed, when it rained, when it was hot or cold, with one layer of clothing.7

This exchange emphasizes the vast discrepancy between a survivor’s memory of the Holocaust and the site of these memories thirty-four years later. We discover that mud has become grass and extreme weather is now ‘a bright crisp day’. The rhetorical questions and imperative to imagine seem to suggest that without Hart-Moxon’s testimony to draw attention to these differences, we may not be aware of them at all. Thus, in both its written and visual forms, Return to Auschwitz illustrates how different the place Hart-Moxon visited in 1978 is from the Auschwitz she remembers as a prisoner from 1943 to 1944. It shows us the importance of considering survivor perspectives on sites of Holocaust memory, particularly in the context of countless non-survivors visiting and writing about these places. Return to Auschwitz also strikingly demonstrates the intrusion of survivors’ traumatic memories of places on their visits in later years. Although sites of memory may seem innocuous and even mute, for survivors, they scream with the sounds, stink of the smells and burn with images of the Holocaust. This is compounded by the meaning that visitors construct from such sites, which comes from preconceptions and projection, embellished by museum displays, memorials and other attributes of the sites, together with a mixture of the personal memory and social memory they possess. Furthermore, testimonies such as Hart-Moxon’s emphasize the disjunction of place and time: that visiting a place where a certain event occurred tends to emphasize its temporal distance, even when a goal of visiting is to prove that these events happened, and perhaps to become closer to, or even to re-experience them. This chapter analyses survivor memoirs of return, showing that such testimonies attest to a complicated relationship to sites of memory. We will see that these narratives emphasize the particular meaning sites of memory have for survivors: they are places that both attract and repel, at times seemingly innocuous, but overlaid with traumatic memories. The discussion will focus

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on three memoirs of return: Seed of Sarah (1990) by Judith Magyar Isaacson and Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) by Ruth Kluger, as well as Return to Auschwitz. In emphasizing the differences between the past and the present, these texts demonstrate strategies survivors use to communicate the meaning of these places in their memories of the Holocaust, essentially to make the landscape not mute. This chapter argues that survivor memoirs of return strive to communicate the narrative gap of contemporary Holocaust sites, yet ultimately bear witness to the difficulty and futility of doing so. Such texts demonstrate that while it is problematic to draw predominantly on place to bear witness to the Holocaust, they emphasize the importance of survivor testimony in making places meaningful as Holocaust sites. Despite, or perhaps because of, these narratives’ emphasis on the differences found in sites of Holocaust memory upon their return, these texts illustrate the perspective lacking in non-survivors’ accounts of bearing witness to the Holocaust and hence subtly warn of the dangers of non-survivors drawing on place to bear witness to the Holocaust. By beginning the investigation with primary witnesses, this book anchors its study of place at the source of Holocaust memory. The findings of this chapter have implications for the ensuing chapters, which focus on how non-survivors use place to bear witness to the Holocaust. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that as the generation of survivors dwindles, their perceptions of Holocaust sites are in danger of being forgotten. This is partially because these sites are increasingly visited by non-survivors, who are less focused on the inherent limitations of linking these places with the Holocaust, and for whom these places have different meanings. That the second generation has its own memories and experiences of Holocaust sites – often coloured by the difficulties they faced as a result of being a child of Holocaust survivors – suggests that the tenuous link between Holocaust sites and events may diminish even further as fewer survivors remain to explain their perspective. The chapter begins by introducing memoirs of return as a distinct subgenre of Holocaust testimony. It then considers the role of language in English Holocaust testimony before moving on to the specifics of return in each of the primary texts. The following sections analyse the choice of places visited in each text, investigate techniques these memoirs use to differentiate sites in the present and the past and finally, consider return in terms of transmission of memory. We will see that sites of Holocaust memory have diverse and complicated meanings for survivors, and that place affects survivor memory in inconclusive and dissatisfying ways.

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Memoirs of return It is one thing for a survivor to return to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and quite another to write about it. Committing such memories to paper requires at least some processing and evaluation of them. It involves choices of what to include and exclude and, at some level, assigns such visits retrospective meaning. Andrea Reiter argues about Holocaust testimony that ‘Temporal structuring and selection read a certain meaning into experience’.8 Thus, the choice of what to write about and the way in which the narrative is structured gives these experiences certain meaning. The inclusion of a return visit in a Holocaust testimony, therefore, merits classification as a sub-genre, that of memoirs of return. The genre of Holocaust testimony – a type of text resulting from the urge to bear witness to extreme experience – is not only a post–Second World War phenomenon, but one sparked by the Nazi persecution of the Jews beginning after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Testimony from this period includes wellknown diaries which were later published, such as those of Victor Klemperer and Anne Frank, both of whom recorded their experience of daily life in Nazi occupied Europe.9 Indeed, it is Shimon Dubnow, a renowned Jewish historian, whose last words (in Yiddish) before he was shot in the Riga Ghetto are believed to have been ‘shrayb und farshrayb’ (write and record), whereby he urged his fellow Jews to bear witness.10 Contemporaneous eyewitness accounts such as Klemperer’s and Frank’s capture their day-to-day perspective as the Holocaust unfolded, with no foresight of what was to happen. Both diaries focus on describing events in the immediate past: Klemperer was not to know that he would survive the war; Frank, perhaps the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, did not know that she would not. The perspective of survivors writing testimony post-war is different. Survivors bearing witness know of course that they have survived and recall earlier events in the context of later ones. They also know that the war ended, and that their extreme experiences of persecution did as well. As James E. Young explains, ‘unlike the diarist, the survivor-memoirist begins his testimony with full knowledge of the end, which inevitably contextualizes early experiences in terms of later ones’.11 Post-Holocaust survivor testimony is premised on the fact of survival: both the writer and reader know that the ending will ultimately be one of triumph over adversity, even if not exactly happy. This post-Holocaust perspective shapes the entire testimony, however, and consequently, as Young argues, ‘early actions become much more ominous in retrospect, and the perceived innocence of early deportations at the time is

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lost’.12 This retrospective narrative shaping of layers in testimony is even more relevant in testimony by survivors who have revisited Holocaust sites, because their post-war visits must mould the descriptions of their earlier experiences of these places. While Holocaust testimonies detailing survivors’ experiences have been published since the late 1940s, there are not many where the survivor describes returning to their former home in a later decade.13 Often testimonies conclude with the survivor travelling back to their hometown after liberation, only to find that they are amongst the few – or even the only – Jewish survivors. For example, teenage survivor Janina Fischler-Martinho describes walking back to her hometown of Krakow after she was liberated in a Polish village, only to find that ‘Not a single member of my family had returned. Nobody’.14 While she is later reunited with her older brother, she discovers that her parents and younger brother are dead. These kinds of negative experiences are no doubt heightened by occurring directly after other traumatic experiences during the Holocaust, and thus, it is entirely understandable that many survivors never returned to these places again. Yet, there are some examples of survivors revisiting the places where they experienced the Holocaust decades later, and even some who have written about it in their testimonies, such as the three memoirs of return that will be the focus of this chapter.15 It is not only the return visits that these texts have in common. Each author immigrated to an English-speaking country and hence wrote her memoir in English. Each survived the Holocaust as a child or young teenager with her mother. They all endured the loss of most other members of their family, including each author’s father, who were killed in the Holocaust. As we saw in the Introduction, as part of the 1.5 generation, the experience of life-changing trauma in childhood and adolescence is another binding feature.16 Yet, of course, there are diverse differences, such as nationality – as mentioned previously, Hart-Moxon is Polish, Isaacson is Hungarian and Kluger Austrian – and each text relates a very different life story before, during and after the Holocaust. Despite the differences, these three texts exhibit a range of features that attest to the complicated and at times contradictory role of places in the process of bearing witness to the Holocaust. As we have already seen from the opening example, the experience of return is pivotal to Return to Auschwitz. However, the emotional trip is only recounted in the final chapter. The rest of the text depicts Hart-Moxon’s pre-war life in Bielsko, Poland, before her family went into hiding, and she and her mother

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were eventually caught and incarcerated in Auschwitz.17 Born in 1926, she spent her later teenage years in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, arriving in 1943, and was liberated approximately two years later.18 As mentioned earlier, she emigrated to England with her mother in 1946, and her first memoir, I Am Alive, was first published in 1961.19 Yet, it was Morley’s 1979 film Kitty – Return to Auschwitz which made Hart-Moxon publicly known as a Holocaust survivor.20 The visit to Auschwitz for Morley’s film in 1978 prompted her to write a more detailed memoir: ‘I always felt that the story ought to be told at greater length and set in the proper context … . The return trip to Auschwitz set the seal on it.’21 Writing several years after that pivotal trip to Auschwitz, Morley observed that: She now faced these unspeakable experiences in a new light … . Gone is the mantelpiece display of her and her mother’s preserved camp numbers, gone is the ritual of baking the Auschwitz loaf, gone is the memorabilia that cast such a negetive [sic] spell on her past. Instead, there emerged a new positive attitude to life in general, and to her experiences and survival in particular.22

Although this transformative aspect does not come across strongly in the film or book, Morley’s paratextual remarks suggest that the journey allowed HartMoxon to work through aspects of her traumatic past. She is well known in the United Kingdom – deemed a ‘prominent Holocaust survivor’ – and heavily involved in British Holocaust memorialization.23 This includes accompanying school trips to Auschwitz, talking to school children before such trips and speaking at schools.24 She writes that ‘My greatest desire is to see future generations learn about, and learn from, our experiences’, showing that her motivation for assuming such an active role in transmitting the story of her experiences stems from a wish to educate young people about the Holocaust.25 The experience of returning to sites of memory also features prominently in Seed of Sarah. A similar age to Hart-Moxon, Isaacson was born in 1925 in Kaposvár, Hungary. Seed of Sarah describes her life as a carefree teenager in Kaposvár before deportation to the ghetto in 1944.26 Later that year, she was deported to Auschwitz where she was incarcerated for three weeks along with her mother and aunt, before the three were transferred to the prison camp Hessisch Lichtenau, where they were liberated in early 1945. A striking feature of this text is the strong focus on particular women’s experiences, such as loss of femininity in the camps and the fear of rape. For example, after initiation at Auschwitz, she writes of her fellow female inmates: ‘I gasped at the shorn prisoners. All men, I thought’.27 The war-time narrative concludes with Isaacson’s engagement

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to an American soldier, and this together with the emphasis on the specificity of women’s experiences makes it clear why Seed of Sarah is referenced in so many debates about the role of gender in Holocaust testimony.28 Indeed, the structure of the text resembles a fairy tale in some ways: the story of Isaacson’s Holocaust experiences precedes meeting her husband Irving and moving to the United States where she has a successful career and fulfilling family life. While the first thirteen chapters describe Isaacson’s life from childhood and throughout the Second World War, the final two chapters recount return visits to sites of memory. ‘Return to Kaposvár’ is about her trip there with her daughter Ilona in 1977 and is followed by ‘A Time to Forgive?’, a chapter about the various trips she made to Germany in the 1980s, which addresses issues of German guilt and forgiveness forty years after the Holocaust. The book’s appendix contains two letters she wrote to her future parents-in-law just after her engagement, reproduced with original spelling and grammar, for example, ‘Forgive Ike that he makes such a foolishness and marries me.’29 The second letter describes her war-time experiences and thus shows how Isaacson recalled events then in comparison to later dates, which presents an intriguing coda to the rest of the book. It is only in the section entitled ‘Sources and Acknowledgments’ that we learn that Isaacson also revisited Auschwitz. The very title of Landscapes of Memory suggests its focus on the entwinement of memory and place. Born in 1931 in Vienna, Kluger, in contrast to Hart-Moxon and Isaacson, experienced the Holocaust as a child rather than a teenager. Aged just seven when the Nazis invaded Austria, Kluger describes her childhood in the shadow of Nazi anti-Jewish laws, writing that: ‘Anyone who was just a few years older experienced a different Vienna than I, who at age seven wasn’t permitted to sit on a park bench and instead could take comfort, if I so chose, in the thought that I belonged to the Chosen People.’30 Landscapes of Memory depicts Kluger’s deportation to Theresienstadt at the age of eleven, followed by incarceration in Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen. After liberation, she and her mother remained in Bavaria before emigrating to America in the late 1940s: ‘Since my sixteenth birthday I have lived in America. In April 1945 I couldn’t know that I would have to spend another two and a half years in Bavaria.’31 While Landscapes of Memory appeared in 2001 (published as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered in 2003), it was actually an English version of Kluger’s German-language memoir weiter leben: eine Jugend (Living On: A Youth), first published in 1992.32 This book was a landmark Holocaust memoir and provoked much debate in Germany, because it entails a Jewish Holocaust survivor writing in German for a specifically German audience. As Caroline

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Schaumann observes, ‘Never before had a Holocaust testimony been so successful in Germany.’33 Landscapes of Memory is Kluger’s reworking of her German text and she explains that she chose for it to be published in English only after her mother died.34 A striking difference between weiter leben and Landscapes of Memory is the anglicization of her name from Klüger to Kluger, symbolizing the shift from her German-speaking to English-speaking identity.35 Accordingly, much existing research on this work focuses on its translation from German to English.36 This chapter will take a different route to readings such as those by Pascale Bos, who analyses it as a return to German through text, and will instead consider Kluger’s accounts of revisiting Germany and Austria, in order to elucidate the relationship between memory, place and bearing witness to the Holocaust.37 As argued in the Introduction, Holocaust survivors form a generation due to their shared experience at similar ages. For Hart-Moxon and Isaacson, this occurred during their mid to late teenage years. For child survivor Kluger, who falls under the rubric of Susan Rubin Suleiman’s 1.5 generation, this happened at an even younger age.38 Thus, these three texts offer an intriguing comparison because they all describe what it was like to experience the Holocaust as a way of growing up – all lost years of education because of it. For instance, HartMoxon writes of Auschwitz as the location of her formative education: ‘This is my old school … . Whatever curriculum and discipline other people may cling to or rebel against from their schooldays, here is where my standards were established: to obey or try not to obey, to revolt against or slyly circumvent, and always, either way, to fear.’39 In a similar manner, Kluger reflects on the timing of the Holocaust in her life: ‘People say pityingly, “You didn’t have a childhood. You lost your childhood.” But I say, this, too, was childhood. I grew up, and I learned something, as every child does who grows up, who grows older.’40 Thus, Kluger, who experienced her childhood during the Holocaust, as well as Hart-Moxon and Isaacson, for whom it happened during late adolescence, share commonalities in experience as well as age and hence form part of the generation of Holocaust survivors. It is important to note a further shared feature of Return to Auschwitz, Seed of Sarah and Landscapes of Memory. As explained earlier, each narrator survived the Holocaust with her mother (and lost other members of her family). Yet, each undertook the trip back to sites of Holocaust memory without her mother. Hart-Moxon and Kluger explicitly note how their mothers’ wishes affected their memory projects. For Hart-Moxon, returning to Auschwitz was against her mother’s wishes, but ‘Four years after my mother’s death I did what she

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wished me never to do: I went back to Auschwitz’.41 Similarly, Kluger’s mother ‘was badly hurt’ after inadvertently receiving a copy of weiter leben – Kluger admits that ‘I thought if I wrote in German, my mother wouldn’t see it, as she had no contact with things German and even considered my career an embarrassment.’42 Consequently, she waited until after her mother’s death for the book to appear in English: ‘I just let it go and promised myself not to publish it in English until after her death. Let it appear in French, in Czech, even in Japanese, but not in English.’43 While Hart-Moxon and Kluger put their memory projects on hold in order to avoid conflict with their mothers, Isaacson does not mention her mother in any of the sections which deal with returning, perhaps suggesting an adult independence from her mother, differing from dependence as a teenager during the Holocaust. For each of these survivors, the fact that their mothers shared the Holocaust experience with them perhaps necessitates an independent mode of dealing with this past. These generational differences between mother and daughter recall Rudolf Heberle’s distinction between active and passive generations: the older Holocaust survivor mother who does not return to the places of the past, in contrast with her daughter, a younger Holocaust survivor, who chooses to engage with and return to the past.44 This is perhaps a further consequence of surviving the Holocaust at relatively young ages, which separates them from their mothers: Hart-Moxon, Isaacson and Kluger lived into the age of mass and relatively cheap travel – and had the opportunity to work for long enough to be able to afford it. Hence they had more opportunity than older survivors to return to their hometowns and other places where they experienced the Holocaust. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, these three primary texts draw on place in diverse ways to bear witness to the Holocaust. Moreover, the texts strive to present what the author saw at the places they revisited. In doing so, they attempt to communicate the reactions that these seemingly innocuous places evoke and thus to overcome the vast differences between their perspective and that of their audience. Through close analysis of features such as language, representation, the choice of places visited and the potential for sites of memory in the transmission of memory, we will see that visiting sites of Holocaust memory has different meanings for different survivors and the various places they choose to visit. On the one hand, the lack of the past at a site reinforces that the trauma is indeed in the past, which can be a welcome development. But, on the other hand, survivors find that some sites do closely resemble those of their traumatic memory, which is distressing and can reawaken trauma.

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Writing in English: Creating a barrier from the past In order to analyse the tropes and features prevalent in these memoirs of return, let us first consider the perspective from which these survivors are writing. As mentioned earlier, it is significant that Return to Auschwitz, Seed of Sarah and Landscapes of Memory were all written in English because writing about the Holocaust in English requires survivors to reappraise experiences which occurred in another language. Writing about revisiting Holocaust sites in English therefore further emphasizes the distance of survivors’ post-Holocaust perspectives from the memories they are recording. Even though each author settled in an English-speaking country – Hart-Moxon in the United Kingdom; Isaacson and Kluger in the United States – their choice to write in English is part of a broader trend in Holocaust studies which, as Alan Rosen explains, means that ‘in most types of literary production, the majority of material on the Holocaust has come to appear in English’.45 Returning to sites of memory physically as well as reliving experiences in order to record them confirms that the survivor’s previous life is indeed in the past but can also awaken traumatic memories. The act of writing about the experience in English further substantiates its place in the past and also demonstrates a partially common world view to the reader. A Holocaust testimony written in English faces an enormous task: to bridge multiple areas of potential cultural misunderstanding, as well as to communicate to the reader a story foreign in almost every way. Suleiman notes that ‘for the emigrant survivor writing in a foreign tongue: the abyss that separates his or her experience from the reader’s is doubled by the difference in language, which is of course also a difference in worlds’.46 The necessary reframing of memory, intensified by the traumatic nature of the experience, means that when writing in English ‘the places and events she/he writes about, including those that preceded the radical break of persecution or deportation, are cut off from the “adopted” reader by multiple separations: of language, geography, traditions, material culture – in short, of collective memory’.47 So, it is not only the content but the frames of reference which must be communicated through this language foreign to the writer. As a language removed from the experience of the Holocaust, English – ‘a primary language of neither victim nor persecutor’ – provides a measure of distance for survivors to process and represent their experiences.48 Young explains that: ‘Many survivors have chosen after the war to speak and to tell their stories only in English, which they regard as a neutral, uncorrupted, and

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ironically amnesiac language. Having experienced events in Yiddish, or Polish, or German, survivors often find that English serves as much as mediation between themselves and experiences as it does as medium for their expression.’49 While this obviously only applies to survivors who have settled in Englishspeaking countries (the same would go for Swedish or French or Afrikaans if they lived in areas of these languages), it is important to note that the choice of language shapes what is expressed. The fact that the Holocaust took place in a European setting, enveloping German, Polish, Yiddish and countless other languages spoken across continental Europe, means that for survivors, English entails a separateness not available in other European languages. Reiter takes this argument a step further than Young, declaring that: ‘When the former victims try through their testimony to free themselves from their traumatic past, the adopted foreign language demonstrates that a new life has really begun in the author’s consciousness … The option for a foreign language was thus often bound up with the wish for a new identity.’50 This implies that the choice of a non-native language such as English offers writers of Holocaust testimony an opportunity to embrace a new identity and a new beginning that leaves the past behind. So, as Young and Reiter both suggest, writing Holocaust testimony in English not only creates distance between the survivor and their memories of their experiences, but entails writing about these experiences from the perspective of a new, postHolocaust identity. Yet, there are instances in both Landscapes of Memory and Seed of Sarah when English is not sufficient for communicating what the author wants to express. This verifies Suleiman’s claim of linguistic difference and confirms the gulf between survivors’ Holocaust experiences and their post-Holocaust audience. Writing about the Holocaust in English necessitates the translation of terms which would not be necessary in German, for example. In Landscapes of Memory, Kluger alerts the English-speaking reader to the incongruity of concentration camp names, explaining that ‘Buchenwald and Birkenau mean beech grove and birch forest respectively’.51 Here, she is bridging cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives – to the English reader, these terms only signify the Nazi concentration camps. By informing the reader of the literal and original German meaning of the terms, Kluger gives them the key to a tiny patch of her world, allowing them to catch glimpses of it from her perspective. Similarly, Isaacson provides a translation of the Hungarian folk songs she quotes in the description of her trip to Hungary, both occurring in significant and emotive contexts, which implies that preserving the original words is as important as letting the reader understand what they mean.52

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Throughout the narrative of Seed of Sarah, however, there are many instances of direct speech in English, which are presumably translations of remembered conversations. Only at certain points – often crucial moments in the narrative – is the original language used, such as the following description of facing selection at Auschwitz: ‘ “Wie alt bist du? – How old are you?” … Mother lied without a moment’s hesitation. “Acht-und-dreissig – thirty-eight.” It worked. The SS flung us to the right.’53 This instance of German speech indicates a life-or-death moment that could have had dire consequences for Isaacson and her mother. By retaining the original words immediately followed by an English translation, the narrative shows that preserving this exchange’s authenticity is equally as important as communicating it to an English-speaking audience. So, while the use of English in Holocaust testimony can provide distance from experience, these examples demonstrate the power of the original language and its uniqueness in communicating important events.

The representation of return It is not only the use of English which characterizes the relationship between the present and the past in survivor memoirs of return. The analysis of return encounters in these texts reveals a disparate mismatch between survivors’ memories of Holocaust sites and their post-Holocaust impressions of these places. Survivors’ testimonies of return decry the absence of physical evidence yet attempt to map traumatic memories on to the places where they happened. Although on the whole they attest to the muteness of landscape, these testimonies also show that landscape is at times far from mute for the survivors: as explained earlier, the encounters echo with the sounds, smells and images of the Holocaust. Lawrence Langer’s theory of ‘durational time’ as opposed to ‘chronological time’ provides a framework for distinguishing between these dual representations of place (of ‘now’ and ‘then’) and how these texts bear witness to the incompatible versions of Holocaust sites.54 While durational time refers to the timelessness and persistence of traumatic memory, chronological time forms the strategy to overcome it. Whether the survivors wrote their testimony before travelling to the sites of memory or began writing after this life-changing journey, they deploy a range of narrative techniques to navigate the relationship between durational time and chronological time and hence express the differences between the places then and the places now.55

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Differentiation between past times of trauma and how these relate to other times is essential to analysing survivor memoirs of return. Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew who was part of the French resistance, coined the terms mémoire ordinaire and mémoire profonde, which Langer translates as ‘common memory’ and ‘deep memory’, respectively, to describe her experience of Auschwitz and her life afterwards.56 He explains that ‘Deep memory tries to recall the Auschwitz self as it was then; common memory has a dual function: it restores the self to its normal pre- and postcamp routines but also offers detached portraits, from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like then.’57 In other words, deep memory refers to the deep imprint of trauma upon the soul, while common memory describes the own traumatized self, or the self that has learnt to live with trauma, and even to look back on it in a detached manner. Langer’s terminology of durational and chronological time builds on these forms of memory. Durational time, that of deep memory, describes the bridge to the past that sites of memory represent: ‘In the realm of durational time, no one recovers because nothing is recovered, only uncovered and then re-covered, buried again beneath the fruitless struggle to expose “the way it was.” ’58 Simply being back at the locations of traumatic events can challenge chronological time, that of common memory, which ‘is needed to intrude on this memory by those who insist on rescuing belief, closure, and certainty from testimonies about the disaster. Durational time resists and undermines this effort’.59 In the analysis of survivor memoirs of return, we will see that the interaction of durational time with chronological time creates the strategies that survivors draw on in order to express how different their memories of the sites during the Holocaust are in comparison to their later visits. In Return to Auschwitz and Landscapes of Memory, respectively, both HartMoxon and Kluger explain that writing their memoir followed the crucial journey to sites of memory. As Hart-Moxon writes in Return to Auschwitz, her return trip to Auschwitz prompted her to write a longer, more detailed version, specifically because ‘Now I believe I can see it all in a truer perspective than I could have hoped to do then.’60 Hart-Moxon’s claim that she now has ‘a truer perspective’ demonstrates the dual role of temporal distance and spatial proximity in accessing memory: the experience of the trip instigated rewriting her memoir. Similarly, in Landscapes of Memory, Kluger explains that visiting Germany was instrumental in her decision to write her memoir: ‘I had been in Germany for only a few months when a teenage bicyclist ran me down one evening as I was crossing the street in a pedestrian zone.’61 She began to write after this accident, and thus the German version, weiter leben, resulted from a chain of events that

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began with living in Germany. As with Hart-Moxon, committing memories to paper occurs as a direct result of engaging with an aspect of that past through visiting a particular place. In both cases, it was the journey to sites of memory that sparked the break of chronological time with durational time. In contrast, Seed of Sarah suggests the reverse order of travelling and writing: that Isaacson’s multiple return trips to Hungary and Germany take place after she has written the memoir. The Preface stipulates that she began to write after giving a talk about her experiences in 1976, which forced her to consider her past experiences: ‘That night I dreamt of Lichtenau, woke at five in the morning, sleepwalked to the typewriter and started to write.’62 Chapter 1 begins in 1938, while the war-time narrative finishes with liberation in 1945, described in Chapter 13. Chapter 14, called ‘Return to Kaposvár’, takes place in 1977. This timeline suggests that Isaacson wrote her testimony before her various travels back to Hungary and Germany, and the text offers many clues that this was in fact the case. For example, when Isaacson describes being deported from the Kaposvár ghetto along with her family, she remarks: ‘I felt angry and rejected: my home let me go without a farewell. “Mama,” I murmured, shocked at my own words, “I never want to see Kaposvár again.” ’63 Although by the time the book was published, she had indeed visited Kaposvár again, this is not referred to at this point of the text, but only in Chapter 14, which occurs after the wartime narrative has concluded. Here, chronological time does not intrude on durational time: Isaacson’s impression of leaving Kaposvár forever is preserved. So, while the process of bearing witness was entwined with visiting the places for both Hart-Moxon and Kluger, for Isaacson it occurred as a postscript. Yet, for all three examples, the experience of revisiting sites of memory is a crucial component of the narrative, emphasizing the distance of the past together with contradictory experiences of how certain places do or do not resemble the past of their memories. These differences in order of writing versus travelling do not affect the interplay of chronological and durational time: each text records differing impressions that result from a return visit. The vast differences described by survivors only emphasize the lack of traces of the past, limiting what nonsurvivors can expect to find there. Bearing witness simultaneously to war-time and post-war memories of a place emphasizes the unreachable nature of the past, including the Holocaust and the time before it. These encounters illustrate that survivors may expect to find traces of the past, and the texts record their reactions to how the places have changed. Landscapes of Memory suggests that Kluger is all too aware of this. She recalls learning to swim in the Danube during

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the immediate post-war period: ‘Years later I returned for a visit and expected the river bank to be crowded with swimmers and sunbathers, but of course the Danube was polluted, and the river banks looked drab and forlorn.’64 Here we see that even though Kluger expected the Danube to look similar to her memories of it, she appears not at all surprised that it is different. The sarcasm implied by the term ‘of course’ scorns the nostalgic ideal that a place could retain or even simply confirm the memories that she holds – yet she still acknowledges her expectations that the place should coincide with her memories of it. In Seed of Sarah, we also see that the discrepancies between Isaacson’s memories and her revisit are poignantly described. She sketches the significant differences between her memories of Kaposvár and what she discovers in 1977 with daughter Ilona: ‘We entered the gate of the Pogány house, a slum tenement now, the garden choking with weeds. The spacious porch, where I had enjoyed so many gracious meals, held a rusty icebox, a broken baby carriage, and three overflowing garbage pails.’65 Even though Isaacson’s memories of happier times may have embellished her impression of her best friend’s house, and the present appearance of the house is also a result of natural decay, this quotation contrasts her pre-Holocaust memory of it and her experience of it decades later. In this case, the significance of the post-Holocaust description is evident only in its comparison with Isaacson’s pre-Holocaust memories. From this episode, we see the importance of place for memory: the disappointment that Isaacson’s childhood memories do not accord with the present reality. In Return to Auschwitz, we see the differences in Hart-Moxon’s revisit portrayed even more strikingly, as discussed in the opening of this chapter. When recording her arrival at Auschwitz in 1978 for the filming of Kitty – Return to Auschwitz, she notes feeling a sense of surprise that it was still there: ‘The situation grew more incredible as we approached the gates. I had left the camp in November 1944, yet here it still was, waiting for me.’66 Here, in order to emphasize the distance she feels from Auschwitz, Hart-Moxon describes the site of Auschwitz, the place, as belonging to another time. And yet, through its spatial proximity and its presence in the here and now, the gulf of time is bridged in uncanny ways. Yet, it seems that this attempt to contain it in chronological time does not work, that being at Auschwitz reawakens the traumatic memory and causes it to persist in durational time. We can see this in Hart-Moxon’s expression of confusion upon arriving at Auschwitz: ‘Past and present got hopelessly jumbled up … I was not visiting a deserted museum, years and years after some historic reality. No: I was seeing the camp as crowded as it had always

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been, hearing the crack of whips, the screams, the dogs, smelling the burning flesh.’67 It seems that being back at the site of memory allows durational time to intrude on chronological time and the traumatic past to reassert itself in a series of involuntary, visceral memories. The sensory descriptions of ‘hearing the crack of whips’ and ‘smelling the burning flesh’ powerfully evoke aspects of the death and concentration camp not evident in the site and therefore not visible to other visitors. Hart-Moxon’s admission of conflating the past with the present is not only indicative of strongly recalling memories but contrasts with the perspective of non-survivors seeking meaning in Holocaust sites. Langer’s explanation of chronological time suggests why this is so: ‘Surviving victims bear witness to the impossibilities of their lives then; we tend to translate them into possibilities by easing them into chronological time as wounds to be healed, insults to be paid for, pains to be forgotten, deaths to be transcended or redeemed.’68 Hart-Moxon’s description of being back at Auschwitz shows that sites of traumatic memory reawaken trauma, that some wounds cannot be healed and that what others may regard as impossibilities are realities for survivors. Furthermore, this reminds non-survivors how different the site is today and that the events that made it Auschwitz cannot exist outside their time, not even by visiting the place and experiencing it for oneself. Here, we see that pain cannot be forgotten and that nothing can be redeemed. Another trope which survivors deploy to illustrate the striking differences between the sites then and now is that of closing their eyes. In both Return to Auschwitz and Seed of Sarah, this signifies an imagining of the past, emphasizing the magnitude of the difference between what the survivor sees and what is evident at the site. In the description of revisiting Fürstenhagen women’s camp with her husband Ike, Isaacson writes, ‘I spotted the intricate little railroad station from a distance, looking like an illustration for a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale. “This station hasn’t changed at all,” I told Ike, “it gives me the creeps”. Closing my eyes, I could see our trainload of decrepit women swarming by the half-timbered building, bent and skeletal.’69 By depicting the contrast between the not only innocuous but seemingly fairy-tale appearance of the station with her memories of it by closing her eyes, Isaacson demonstrates that the war-time vision is something that only a survivor can see, but that it has an intensely vivid albeit virtual presence for them. In differentiating between the two in this manner, Seed of Sarah emphasizes what is not visible at Fürstenhagen: what only eyewitnesses can see. To her, it looks essentially the same; moreover, it appears to give her the same feelings. It still ‘give[s] [her] the creeps’ because it has not

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changed. Writing about closing her eyes alerts the reader to the incongruousness of traumatic memories and sites of atrocities. We also see this trope in Return to Auschwitz, where Hart-Moxon employs the technique of closing her eyes, although this time it is the difference of the site, rather than the lack of difference, which is disconcerting: ‘Down here is the Kanada enclosure. Pretending to be a factory with a nice lawn outside. I close my eyes and at once the air is filled with screams; and when I open them I think that this is the dream, for the building isn’t there, and there are no longer any chimneys for the smoke to pour out of.’70 Once again, the technique of the survivor narrator closing her eyes indicates the vast gulf between the survivor’s memories and the place’s appearance. Referring to the present as a dream intensifies this sentiment and the irreality of the present – the trauma sensed and felt by the survivor is abstract and absent from the site. Return to Auschwitz further emphasizes this sentiment: ‘I open my eyes, and there’s nobody. Open my eyes and see grass. Close my eyes and see mud.’71 These descriptions suggest an unbridgeable gulf between the place and what being there evokes in the mind’s eye for survivors. The polar opposite qualities of these distinctions – silence and screams, grass and mud, a nice lawn and smoking chimneys – show how these places live on in the memories of survivors. Memoirs of return thus bear witness to the ongoing nature of traumatic memory, evoked by the sites of these memories. Moreover, in effectively drawing attention to the differences, they solidify their unreachable nature for non-survivors. As this section has shown, survivor memoirs of return deploy various strategies in order to illustrate to the reader their memories of these sites during the Holocaust. Applying Langer’s theory of chronological and durational time demonstrated the complicated interaction of earlier memories with later visits, of traumatic atrocities and seemingly innocuous sites, bridging the gap between what is evident there, and the survivors’ memories. The next section will consider how the structure of survivors’ return journeys constructs the narrative, further illustrating that such places are not always what they seem to survivors of atrocities.

Memory, place and choosing where to visit The places that are visited and written about by Holocaust survivors shape what is remembered about the Holocaust. This is because, as Young argues, ‘What is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and

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how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form.’72 Although the form and content of survivor testimonies are crucial in constructing memory of the Holocaust, the choice of places visited does not – and cannot – neatly correspond to a particular survivor’s life story. And perhaps it is not expected to. Yet, it inevitably shapes memoirs of return. For example, the title Return to Auschwitz implies a text explicitly and exclusively focused on this experience. Yet, Hart-Moxon’s evocatively titled memoir is an autobiography centred on the Holocaust: as explained earlier in this chapter, it focuses on Hart-Moxon’s pre-war, war-time and immediate post-war life – except for the final chapter, entitled ‘Return to Auschwitz’. Published shortly after the film Kitty – Return to Auschwitz was broadcast, the written text seems to capitalize on the image of Hart-Moxon portrayed on screen.73 This discrepancy between the text and the title is one aspect of how survivors’ return visits to sites of Holocaust memory are constructed through a process of selection and interpretation. The places a survivor chooses to visit on their return to Holocaust sites illustrate a range of reasons for returning to various places. Their choices are of course influenced by their own experiences and memories of these, which means that the journey may or may not revisit or include all places important to the survivor’s life before and during the Holocaust. Moreover, their choices are also influenced by collective memory of the Holocaust.74 For instance, in the first chapter of Return to Auschwitz, Hart-Moxon cites the rise of Holocaust denial as the impetus for her visit to Auschwitz: ‘As time goes on there are fewer and fewer of us left to testify that the abominations did happen; and when we are gone, there must be some evidence left so that nobody can hope to get away with denying the truth or twisting it to his own ends.’75 Yet, it appears that it was the direct influence of Yorkshire Television, who convinced HartMoxon to return – it was they who approached her.76 Accordingly, this outside influence, likely shaped by the centrality of Auschwitz to collective memory of the Holocaust, may have further contributed to the centralization of Auschwitz within Hart-Moxon’s narrative of her Holocaust experiences. The focus on Auschwitz becomes even more evident when she does not visit her hometown of Bielsko during that initial trip back to Poland – only the makers of the documentary do: ‘The researchers hoped to find some remnant of my existence there, though all the odds seemed against it.’77 The evidence found by the researchers is used to maximum effect in the film: the narrator states that HartMoxon’s school report was ‘the only remaining documentary evidence that the Felix family ever lived in Bielsko’.78 As the film does not show Hart-Moxon in

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Bielsko, or even Bielsko itself, this piece of evidence remains the only one. To Hart-Moxon, visiting Poland only means visiting Auschwitz. While the making of the television documentary was instrumental in HartMoxon’s return to Auschwitz, the timing of it was crucial, for, as mentioned earlier, Hart-Moxon’s mother was against her daughter returning to Auschwitz.79 Yet, even though Hart-Moxon’s mother refused to visit Poland, both of them were interested in visiting Germany: ‘She would never go back to Poland, to see our home town or our old home, and least of all to revisit Auschwitz; but she, too, felt this compulsion to visit Germany.’80 Here we see the categorization of HartMoxon’s mother’s memories: she equates Poland with suffering but does not have this same association with Germany, the land of the perpetrators. Although both visited Germany in the post-war years, these trips are not described in depth in Return to Auschwitz but only briefly referred to in the context of compensation: Part of her compensation was a one-month treatment every year at a spa, all expenses paid by the Germans … . Like her, I went there as soon as possible, though I was more interested in ski-ing and talking to people than in taking cures – unless you could describe all that talking and questioning as a cure in itself, which perhaps it was.81

Intriguingly, the significance of Hart-Moxon’s visits to Germany is minimized: it is only referred to in a positive context, distinguishing it clearly from her visit to Auschwitz. The representation of Hart-Moxon’s Holocaust experiences, both in her memoirs and in Morley’s film, suggests that for her, Auschwitz epitomizes the Holocaust. Such emphasis on one significant site has potentially strong implications for non-survivors choosing where to visit. Moreover, it adds significance to the site of Auschwitz as a tourist attraction. As Young’s quotation cited earlier suggests, texts such as these which focus exclusively on Auschwitz strengthen the importance of this site of memory in collective Holocaust memory. And, this also demonstrates the interplay between collective and individual memory. By linking one place exclusively with her Holocaust experience, Hart-Moxon embellishes its meaning for herself as well as for nonsurvivors. In contrast, while Isaacson and Kluger were also both incarcerated in Auschwitz, neither of them emphasizes it to the extent that Hart-Moxon does: Isaacson only refers to revisiting Auschwitz in the ‘Sources and Acknowledgments’ section of Seed of Sarah, while Kluger openly refuses to visit.82 By excluding the visit to Auschwitz from the main narrative of Seed of Sarah – burying it in the description of research undertaken for writing the book – Isaacson excludes

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it from her engagement with German forgiveness emphasized in the chapter ‘A Time to Forgive?’, which deals with her various trips to Germany. This also highlights the dangers of retraumatization, and Isaacson’s reluctance to erase any emotional distance she might have gained on the past. The brief description of revisiting Auschwitz does however share the main theme that recurs in Seed of Sarah’s narrative of return: escape. Describing visiting an exhibition at Auschwitz, Isaacson writes, ‘I made the mistake of trying to identify my family and friends on too many gruesome films and photographs. Halfway through, I gasped, suddenly faint: “I must get some fresh air!” “Sorry”, our guide said pityingly. “The entrance is locked. One must go through to the end; that’s how the museum was built.” ’83 Here she over identifies with the fates of the victims. They all represent her story, but their fate is one she escaped only by chance. Viewing these ‘gruesome films and photographs’ causes Isaacson to relive the experience, which then produces the flight response. Yet, this description of how Isaacson was forced to endure a form of incarceration in Auschwitz a second time serves as an introduction to the list of books that she purchased at the Auschwitz museum shop. Perhaps this attempt to relegate Auschwitz to a purely practical visit is because the site is too sensitive for her, and she is overwhelmed by the emotions it evokes. This contrasts starkly to Hart-Moxon’s deep emotional engagement with Auschwitz and to the emotional investment evident in Isaacson’s visits to her hometown of Kaposvár and the former prison camp of Hessisch Lichtenau. In further contrast to Return to Auschwitz and Hart-Moxon’s choice not to visit Bielsko, the first return trip depicted in Seed of Sarah is Isaacson’s visit to Kaposvár with her daughter in 1977. While this represents an engagement with a different aspect of her life, as with visiting Auschwitz a sense of wishing to escape permeates the description: As the wheels crunched to the ground, Hungarian commands reached me from the outside, reminding me of the Nazi times. ‘I’m not getting out, Ilona,’ I groaned. ‘I want to fly back. My friends will show you around.’ But Ilona coaxed me off the plane, and by the time we reached the terminal I felt better. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ I apologized. ‘Momentary insanity.’84

Isaacson’s trip back to Kaposvár is the first of several return trips to Europe; however, this is the only one to her hometown which she describes in Seed of Sarah. Although it remains an important place to visit as a means of engaging with the past, it contrasts with Isaacson’s multiple trips to Hessisch Lichtenau in the 1980s. Contained in the final chapter entitled ‘A Time to Forgive?’, these

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are presented as an opportunity for engaging with contemporary Germans and exploring issues of inherited guilt and forgiveness. She concludes, ‘The question mark is meant for those who haven’t come to terms with forgiveness, especially my former fellow victims. As for me, my recent trips to Germany have taught me to distinguish between the culprits and the innocents, the enemies and the friends.’85 Thus, the three sites revisited by Isaacson as described in Seed of Sarah each serve a different purpose and engage with a different aspect of her past: Auschwitz is a mere postscript; Kaposvár serves to confirm that the past is indeed the past; while Hessisch Lichtenau brings the past into the present. Hart-Moxon focuses on Auschwitz because the documentary makers do, in conjunction with the symbolic value of her return for the memory of the Holocaust in general. In contrast, Isaacson, left to her own devices, chooses to avoid Auschwitz because of the painful memories it evokes. This shows that survivors are often reluctant to return on a personal level, and few want to, and that the return needs to be embedded in moral and political discourses of ‘never forget’. In other words, return needs outside mediation, otherwise it risks descending into a painful re-enactment of the past. Engaging with Germans in Germany also forms a significant part of Landscapes of Memory. Kluger’s refusal to visit Auschwitz – ‘I never went back to Auschwitz as a tourist and never will. Not in this life. To me it is no place for a pilgrimage’ – presents a striking contrast with both Hart-Moxon’s and Isaacson’s memoirs.86 Furthermore, in contrast to Hart-Moxon’s indifference towards Bielsko, and Isaacson’s sentimentality for Kaposvár, Kluger is overtly negative about Vienna. Returning there shortly after liberation, she writes that ‘It was like entering the original slime, or perhaps cesspool, from which life developed.’87 While this negative viewpoint remains in Kluger’s later visits to her hometown, it is the language of her home city which she continues to identify with: Only the language was what it had always been, the speech of my childhood with its peculiar inflections and rhythms, a sense of humor that Germans often don’t get, and a wealth of malicious half tones that would be obscene in any other tongue; also an intense lyricism that easily degenerates into kitsch. I understand this language, but I don’t like it. I speak it, but I wouldn’t have chosen it.88

This strong identification with her mother tongue, along with the rejection of Vienna, leads to Kluger’s decision to move to Germany: ‘But in the late eighties I realized that I had unfinished business with a past that’s an ongoing story. Something pulled me back. Perhaps the language. For language is the strongest bond there is between an individual and a place.’89

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Thus, for Kluger, identification of an element for return occurs through language: it is the connection to the German language which dominates, rather than to Vienna or Auschwitz. The choice of travelling to Germany and engaging with Germans, rather than to Austria and engaging with Austrians, illustrates once again how journeys of return both reflect and shape memory, but that not all sites of memory hold the same subjective significance for survivors – some are magically still connected with the past and are ruled out, others are strangely less implicated sites that can form the basis of some reconciliation or forgiveness. In engaging with Germans, and at a safe distance from the actual scenes of the crimes, both Isaacson and Kluger suggest that herein lies a form of working through and shape their narratives accordingly. It seems that Isaacson is able to reconnect with her hometown because it is less tainted than Auschwitz by the events of the past. But for Kluger, her hometown is not only not innocent, it is still a site of Nazi power and barbarism – a comment on the brutal way Jewish citizens were treated by their home city. So, Kluger cannot in fact find a place that is not tainted – Auschwitz is too complicit, as is Vienna – which leaves Germany – a paradox given that this is where Nazism originated. The entwinement of memory and place is further emphasized by the choices made of where to visit. Kluger’s post-war visit to Theresienstadt described in Landscapes of Memory contrasts sharply with her experience of Vienna: ‘I was at peace when I left: I had not been to a museum; I had seen a reestablished normality, as comfortable and commonplace as the human habitat should be.’90 This sense of peaceful resolution shows, like in Seed of Sarah, that different places play different roles in the narrative. Landscapes of Memory reveals that for Kluger, Auschwitz is not to be visited; Vienna is to be visited only for the language; and that it is only Theresienstadt which provides an opportunity for engaging with, and perhaps even coming to terms with, the past. This further indicates that the places survivors choose to visit and to write about reflect their role in memory, both personal and collective, and how they are remembered rather than the events that happened there. The choice of place depends on how contaminated the site is for the survivor, and if it can be redeemed. And, whether it can be redeemed seems to depend on finding or excavating some redeeming features like the good German language, or, for Isaacson, the fond memories of a happy childhood, or the belief in the significance of witnessing as a public duty, as with Hart-Moxon. Of the three texts discussed in this chapter, the most compelling example of the different meanings of a site of memory for different survivors is Auschwitz. To Hart-Moxon, it is the basis of Holocaust remembrance. To Isaacson, it

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is a painful postscript. And, to Kluger, it is to be avoided. These differing interpretations for return echo Young’s claim that Holocaust memory evolves from current representations and also alludes to the limitations of regarding place as a witness to the past.91 Ultimately, it suggests that there are competing memory claims – those of survivors who do not necessarily want to revisit the scene of trauma versus how a collective decides it has to remember an event, and the symbols it chooses in cultural rather than personal communicative memory. If we consider this in regard to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s distinction between these two types of memory, Auschwitz has a different role in communicative memory than it does in cultural memory.92 As this section has shown, the two are in conflict in Landscapes of Memory but not in Return to Auschwitz. As transforming experience into written testimony entails choice of what to include, emphasize, dismiss and exclude, constructed as a combination of personal and collective memory, so does a decision to return to sites of pre-war and Holocaust experiences.

The illusion of timescapes One of the most intriguing aspects of return memoirs is that while returning to places of the past is emotionally difficult for survivors, for others their return is laden with meaning about the Holocaust. To know survivors have returned to Auschwitz seems to authenticate the place for future generations. Owing to the muteness of landscape, primary witnesses such as survivors are pivotal in explaining what happened at a site. Their testimony confirms a site of Holocaust memory, which Jackie Feldman notes as a crucial aspect of trips to Poland for Israeli high school students.93 Survivor memoirs of return provide documentation of this process: they testify to how survivors use return visits to places they experienced in the Holocaust to explain the past. The notion of timescape introduced in Landscapes of Memory – ‘Evocations of places at a time that has passed’ – captures what is sought through this process, though Kluger simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility of doing so.94 Timescape is Kluger’s terminology for encapsulating a place at a particular point in time. When describing a visit to Dachau, she indicates what is lacking: ‘The missing ingredients are the odor of fear emanating from human bodies, the concentrated aggression, the reduced minds.’95 Struggling with the idea of non-survivors visiting Holocaust sites to somehow access the Holocaust, Kluger relegates it to the realm of impossibility, declaring: ‘But the concentration camp

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as a memorial site? Landscape, seascape – there should be a word like timescape [sic] to indicate the nature of a place in time, that is, at a certain time, neither before nor after.’96 In allocating the nature and function of Holocaust sites to their time; in other words retaining Holocaust sites as such only at the time of the Holocaust, Kluger privileges the perspective of survivors and other primary witnesses over those who visit later. She emphasizes that only survivors can know the place as it was during the Holocaust. In doing so, she voices disapproval of Holocaust sites as tourist attractions – reminiscent in her refusal to visit Auschwitz.97 For Kluger, timescape is a way of expressing what is not possible to visit, or to imagine: what does not exist outside of its time. Landscapes of Memory further develops this argument about the tenuous relationship between place and event by asserting that Holocaust sites are only needed by non-survivors. Referencing Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary landscape film Shoah, Kluger clearly differentiates her perspective as a survivor from his as a non-survivor: ‘You need the places, I tell his image; I need only the names of the places. Yet what is the difference? We are entangled in the same web, only in different meshes.’98 Yet, in the same passage, she asserts that actually this makes little difference. Perhaps she is referring to the fact that they are both involved in recording memory of the Holocaust, even though hers is sourced from personal experience while his is not. So, while Kluger presents the concept of timescape to encapsulate the unreachability of the Holocaust through place by those who were not there, the text indicates that this may be a losing battle, that non-survivors insist on accessing the Holocaust through the places where it happened, disregarding the delicate concept of timescape. Yet, by asserting that this is what non-survivors try to do, she differentiates herself from nonsurvivors by stating that she does not need to visit, even denying that a visit can be of any benefit to survivors. While Kluger’s text indicates that non-survivors are intent on finding timescapes of the Holocaust by visiting Holocaust sites, the visits documented by Hart-Moxon and Isaacson portray a different purpose. In Seed of Sarah, visiting Hungary provides an opportunity for Isaacson’s grief to surface. During the visit to Budapest with her daughter, dining at a traditional restaurant provokes a seemingly unexpected outpouring of emotion: I played the American tourist quite successfully, until the primás started to play ‘A Vén Cigárny – Ancient Gypsy’, one of my father’s favorite songs. My father had been buried at Mühldorf Lager in a mass grave, and I felt as if at long last I were attending his funeral. I hid my head in my arms to muffle the sobs.99

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Clearly, being in Budapest increases the chance of Isaacson hearing her father’s favourite music, yet being there is also a reminder that she only became an American after the war. Her birthplace, her history and her roots all lie in Hungary. In this case, the music perhaps intensifies the effect of the place by providing an explicitly emotional connection. A further example occurs when Isaacson and her daughter travel on to Kaposvár. Once again, Isaacson links a Hungarian song to the event: The hotel clerk was shocked as he pointed at the clock: ‘It’s four in the morning, Madam! And it’s pouring out. At least take an umbrella along.’ But I welcomed the rain; it diluted the tears as I walked the ill-lit streets of my hometown. A song came to me, a song we used to sing in Auschwitz: ‘Fölöttem sír az ég,/Sírnak a fellegek./Álmaimban mindig haza járok,/Várnak reám akik szeretnek. – Above me weeps the sky/Sadly the dark clouds roam/Dreaming, I wing, I fly/My loved ones are waiting at home.’ But no one was waiting. By eight o’clock I had visited all the homes I remembered. Eyes smarting, hair dripping, clothes wet, I dragged myself back to our hotel.100

As with the previous quotation, this episode documents an emotional reaction followed by a sense of resolution. This time, it is even more explicitly linked with the place: it occurs whilst Isaacson walks the streets of Kaposvár, visiting houses significant to her. Rather than evoking a timescape, these visits allow Isaacson to perform a working through of unresolved grief, manifested in a pseudo-funeral for her father, and confirming that none of her close friends and family remained in Kaposvár. Crucially, Isaacson’s engagement with these places is contemporary. Rather than seeking the place in the past, confirming the loss of people close to her occurs in the present. This indicates that this survivor is not only visiting in order to access the Holocaust as a timescape, but also to engage with the places in the present. Both Return to Auschwitz and Kitty – Return to Auschwitz suggest that for Hart-Moxon, the site of Auschwitz provides some proof of her experiences. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Hart-Moxon cites her reasons for visiting Auschwitz as an attempt to counter Holocaust denial.101 The final chapter of the text, called ‘Return to Auschwitz’ in both editions and written as direct speech, is a version of the documentary film. It explicitly challenges such deniers: ‘Let those who deny the existence of such places come with me and walk around.’102 Thus, for Hart-Moxon, visiting Auschwitz presents an opportunity to prove that what happened to her actually happened: ‘All a myth? Come and see for

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yourself.’103 Inviting the reader (or viewer) to come to Auschwitz in order to ‘see’ what happened shows that Hart-Moxon regards place as holding some kind of proof. Yet, paradoxically, her narrative both in the film and the written text emphasizes the gulf between what she witnessed at Auschwitz and what is evident there now: ‘The past I see is more real than the tidy pretence they have put in its place. The noises are as loud as they ever were: the screams, the shouts, the curses, the lash of whips and thud of truncheons, the ravening dogs.’104 By contrasting Hart-Moxon’s memories of Auschwitz with her impressions of revisiting, this passage shows the incommunicability of memory. She hears the shouts louder than ever, but an experience of place is hard to convey to others. Her place is unreal for others and cannot be conveyed by visiting the site. She can experience it, but she cannot impose these memories onto the site for others to see and hear. The memories remain locked inside the survivors. The narrative emphasizes the lack of evidence at contemporary Auschwitz, despite the various attempts to memorialize the site with exhibitions, thereby contrasting what is visible to any visitor with Hart-Moxon’s memories of being an incarcerated Jew during the Holocaust. Just as Kluger stresses the absence of ‘the odor of fear emanating from human bodies’ in order to communicate her experience of Dachau, Hart-Moxon must fill in the gaps that the site itself does not provide.105 In both the film and the text, grass is a crucial element in differentiating the present from the past. In Kitty – Return to Auschwitz, while the viewer is presented with a landscape of brick barracks and barbed-wire fences surrounded by green grass, Hart-Moxon says: ‘Now, you see grass, but I don’t see grass. I see mud. Do you know what would have happened if there had been one blade of grass? You would have eaten it.’106 By drawing attention to the differences between what is there now and what she remembers, Hart-Moxon shows that revisiting the site cannot bring the past into the present or erase the traumatic past from the site altogether. Similarly, in Return to Auschwitz, she writes, ‘Outside, the “meadow” is green with grass. That’s something I simply can’t get used to. It was never like that when we stood for hours waiting for roll-call numbers to match up. Never like that when women collapsed and died in the mud or froze to death on the hard winter ground.’107 Once again, by stressing how the present site of Auschwitz crucially differs from her memories of it, Hart-Moxon highlights the limited capabilities of the site to portray what happened there. The presence of grass at post-war Auschwitz but not during the Holocaust is confirmed by Andrew Charlesworth and Michael Addis, who

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describe the outdoor areas of the camp as ‘a landscape of mud’ in 1943 and 1944.108 Therefore, Hart-Moxon’s explanations are a crucial component of communicating what the Auschwitz landscape itself cannot convey, proving the problems of ascribing witness status to place. Return to Auschwitz testifies to a paradox: that Auschwitz remains as proof, yet requires a primary witness’s explanation to explain what it is proof of. These three texts therefore show the diverse ways in which survivor testimony conceptualizes timescapes. While Hart-Moxon visits Auschwitz as a way of proving what happened during the Holocaust, the site of Auschwitz itself offers very limited clues. The narrative of both the film and the written text is reliant on Hart-Moxon’s explanations about what occurred on a landscape which does not emit a narrative of what she experienced. Yet, the notion of a Holocaust site somehow embodying the Holocaust is an idea warned against by Kluger in Landscapes of Memory, who uses the term ‘timescape’ to differentiate between a site at different times. On the other hand, Seed of Sarah describes how Isaacson engages with places in the present, allowing her to connect with them and using them as a means of expressing grief. Each of these examples demonstrates the specific ways in which survivors connect or disconnect their Holocaust experiences to sites, which are as varied as the places they choose to visit.

Return as transmission of memory When Holocaust survivors visit sites of memory accompanied by nonsurvivors, it is often an opportunity for the survivor to tell their story, relate their memories and explain what happened; in short, to bear witness. In the process, transmission of memory occurs as an act of bearing witness instigated by being at a relevant site of memory. Observing this exercise with a group of Israeli high school students at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Feldman notes that ‘The students’ mass presence at the original site enables this breakthrough to take place. It empowers the survivor to become a witness.’109 This concurs with Dori Laub’s theory that witnessing requires a listener: ‘For the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other [sic] – in the position of one who hears.’110 Yet, the survivor is of course already a primary witness – one who has seen an event take place. So, the witnessing that occurs at a site of Holocaust memory is secondary witnessing: when nonsurvivors visit Holocaust sites with survivors, they are in the position of other. Chapter 2 addresses this from the perspective of the second generation and the

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journeys they take with their parents. This section considers this process from the survivors’ perspective, illustrating the inherent limitations of transmitting memory at sites of memory. In Landscapes of Memory, transmission of memory occurs purely through text: Kluger does not mention anyone, including her children, accompanying her on her various visits, but explains the audience for her book, linking the original German version to the circumstances of her accident in Göttingen: ‘Now in the late eighties I sat down and wrote German prose for the good people of Göttingen who had become my friends, who hadn’t let me lie in their clinic alone, but cheered me back into movement and activity.’111 Thus, the German version – weiter leben – emerged as a form of engaging with and explaining to contemporary Germans, which is why this book is regarded as so significant.112 In explaining the origins of her memoir Landscapes of Memory in the text itself, Kluger explains this English version as ‘What you have been reading is neither a translation nor a new book: it’s another version, a parallel book, if you will, for my children and my American students.’113 So, Kluger stipulates the audience and reason for writing each version of her memoir – a further reason why her work has been analysed as a return to text, rather than a literal return.114 Furthermore, as Landscapes of Memory does not depict Kluger’s children or others accompanying her as she revisits Vienna or Germany, it remains a passive transmission of memory strictly through the text itself. In contrast, both Seed of Sarah and Return to Auschwitz describe the narrator’s children accompanying their survivor parent on the journey to sites of Holocaust memory. In both cases, the adult child acts as Laub’s other – their presence precipitates an act of witnessing and communication of memory. For instance, the narrative of Isaacson’s visit to Kaposvár with daughter Ilona in 1977 records several exchanges between the two: ‘Over the Atlantic, Ilona shifted our conversation to the war. “Mom, you named John for your father, you named him for a Holocaust victim. Why not me?” “But I did, Ilona,” I smiled involuntarily. “I named you for my best friend, Ilona Pogány.” ’115 It appears to be the action of travelling to Hungary that provides an opportunity for Ilona to question her mother. That she does not recall being previously told that she was named for her mother’s murdered best friend illustrates the power of context: for Isaacson’s daughter Ilona, hearing about her namesake becomes imbued with meaning whilst on the way to visiting the places where the original Ilona lived and died. This process of secondary witnessing also occurs when Isaacson and her daughter visit the Jewish cemetery in Kaposvár: ‘ “I never realized that your family had lived in Kaposvár for so long,” … “Five generations!” ’116 Once again,

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being at the site allows for the transfer of memory from a survivor to the second generation, illustrating the power of place in enabling secondary witnessing. While Isaacson’s son John accompanies her to Auschwitz, this is recounted in scant detail in Seed of Sarah – and, as noted previously, only mentioned in the ‘Sources and Acknowledgments’ section. It is John who points out to the Polish tour guide that Isaacson was a former prisoner: ‘John said softly, as he glanced at me: “This is my mother. In the summer of 1944, she spent three weeks in Lager B III.” ’117 This short exchange offers few clues about Isaacson’s motivation for visiting Auschwitz with her son or his reasons for accompanying her. The fact that John rather than Isaacson herself told the tour guide that she was a former prisoner suggests that a transfer of memory had already occurred. Coupled with the fact that this episode is only recounted in a supplementary section of the book, its impact and importance are minimized. This is in sharp contrast to the interaction between Hart-Moxon and her son David as portrayed in Kitty – Return to Auschwitz and depicted in Return to Auschwitz. In this case, all the explaining is done by the survivor, emphasizing the role of the second generation as listener. The film shows David trailing his mother as she walks around Auschwitz, explaining to him what she remembers about events at particular locations. Her motivations for showing him are explicitly recounted: In another thirty or forty years there will no longer be people like me alive, no one who can actually say, ‘I’ve watched with my own eyes one, two, three million people go to their death.’ I would like you, David, to be able to testify that your mother was here and you’ve been here with me, and tell your children what I’ve told you and shown you, so that it will never be completely erased from history.118

Essentially, Hart-Moxon implores her son to remember on her behalf: to testify as a secondary witness. In doing so, she emphasizes the necessity of survivor testimony to make a site of memory meaningful. At the same time, this shows the inability of sites to transmit memory on their own, just as Young and Jochen Spielmann have claimed.119 Place therefore plays a central role in secondary witnessing but cannot fulfil this role without a primary witness there to give testimony. Place thus provides a catalyst for the transfer of memory from survivors to the second generation. As a form of witnessing, it provides a setting for secondary witnessing, with the primary witness and survivor as the essential part. It is the survivor’s giving of testimony at the site of memory which allows

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witnessing to take place and the non-survivor to become a secondary witness. Clearly, the experience of survivors and the second generation visiting Holocaust sites together does allow for the transmission of information which might not otherwise occur. This emphasizes the pivotal role of survivors in the process of witnessing. Thus, while place is important in bearing witness, it is only successful combined with survivor testimony.

The ambiguity of place in survivor memoirs of return The study of survivor memoirs of return has highlighted the complex relationship between memory, witnessing and place. We have seen that for Holocaust survivors, revisiting sites of memory emphasizes the vast differences between their memories of these places during the Holocaust and the appearance of such sites today. The variety of techniques these memoirs draw on to emphasize these differences illustrates that the return has value for a range of personal, emotional reasons, often not articulated and contradictory, but related to healing, forgetting and verification of identity. While survivors’ accounts of testifying to others while at sites of memory suggest that visiting Holocaust sites can be a powerful tool in the transmission of memory, in these accounts of secondary witnessing, we see survivors at times struggling to explain that the place does not resemble their memories, does not live up to them and even confuses their memories, because it is so different to what they remember. This is important when considering non-survivors’ interaction with Holocaust sites. As this chapter has demonstrated, the link that survivors have to Holocaust sites results from memories and personal experience. For non-survivors, who lack this personal experience, their connection with these places is of course rather different. Chapters 2 and 3 will discuss how the personal connection that many members of the second and third generations feel to the Holocaust becomes transferred to sites of Holocaust memory. It seems that non-survivors’ link to place as a witness therefore stems from interpretation and creation in place of experience. The choice of places visited and not visited by survivors returning has implications for where non-survivors choose to visit, because it validates some places as Holocaust sites and omits others. Survivor memoirs of return also highlight the potential for erroneous information at sites of Holocaust memory. By illustrating the gap between their memories and the physical evidence at the site, these texts draw attention to the limitations of place as a witness potentially overlooked by non-survivors.

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While this is not to suggest that recreating the horrors of the Holocaust is a desirable aim of visiting sites of memory, survivors want to be able to restage for others, in some manner, their incommensurable experience of the nightmare. These testimonies demonstrate that the link between Holocaust sites and events is tenuous and therefore suggest that visiting Holocaust sites as a means of access to the Holocaust itself remains highly problematic. Yet, as Holocaust survivors number fewer and fewer, their perspective may be lost and in fact overrun by that of non-survivors, who use Holocaust sites to create a link to the Holocaust. This chapter therefore illustrates why reading survivor memoirs of return is an important component of engaging with sites of Holocaust memory.

2

The Second Generation: Searching for the Past at Sites of Memory In Lily Brett’s 1999 autobiographical novel Too Many Men, protagonist and Brett’s alter ego Ruth visits Poland with her elderly father Edek, a survivor of Auschwitz. Together they visit the former Nazi death and concentration camp, which the novel depicts from Ruth’s perspective: ‘She felt annoyed to have been bitten by a fly, in Auschwitz. Still, to come out of Auschwitz with only a bite was something other inmates would have prayed for. She stopped herself. It was not other inmates. It was just inmates. She was not an inmate. Others, clearly distinct from her, were there. She was not there.’1 For this fictional character, being at Auschwitz also means being in Auschwitz. She refers to herself in relation to ‘other inmates’ – an impossible situation for someone born after the Holocaust, who cannot be a primary witness. The narrative shows how being in Poland brings Ruth closer to the Holocaust and blurs the distinction between primary and secondary witnessing. The experience at sites of memory transforms the Holocaust from something abstract into something more tangible. Although becoming a primary witness is only possible by being present at the original event, this example demonstrates the significance and potential that the second generation invests in Holocaust sites. Visiting sites of memory has become an important force in shaping the second generation’s memory of the Holocaust. Born after the Holocaust – in many cases only just after – the second generation grew up firmly within its shadows.2 As a result, in many cases, their lives were and continue to be dominated by the aftereffects of their parents’ traumatic experiences. It is this generation’s position in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust that renders a journey to Holocaust sites such a significant part of their memoirs and life stories. It is also the power of place to signify the Holocaust, and thereby to offer the second generation a spatial incarnation of their parents’ past, that makes sites of memory a pivotal component of second-generation texts. While for Holocaust survivors the central experience and thus focus of their testimony was of course the Holocaust itself, for the second generation a journey to Holocaust sites acts as a potential substitute.

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Visiting sites of Holocaust memory not only gives the second generation a focus for their writing and a context for exploring their heritage, but ultimately creates an opportunity to cement their relationship to the Holocaust. This chapter analyses six works written by children of Holocaust survivors which describe a journey to sites of memory relevant to their family’s history. It discusses memoirs The Fiftieth Gate (1997) by Australian academic Mark Raphael Baker and Lektionen des Verborgenen (Lessons of Darkness) (1999) by German-born Helena Janeczek, as well as Too Many Men.3 What these three texts have in common is the presence of the protagonist’s Holocaust survivor parents on the journeys to Eastern Europe. The chapter also analyses three memoirs where the narrator embarks on the trip without their parents: Canadian writer Lisa Appignanesi’s 1999 book Losing the Dead; English journalist Anne Karpf ’s 1996 volume The War After: Living with the Holocaust; and Jewels and Ashes, Australian storyteller Arnold Zable’s 1991 memoir.4 Each of these narratives describes the secondary witness’s search for their parents’ past and the journey of discovering their family’s pre-Holocaust history, as well as the fate of those murdered in the Holocaust, thereby bearing witness to the Holocaust. We will see that although the above example from Too Many Men is extreme, similar elements can be found in all these texts. The role of the second generation’s survivor parents at sites of memory is also important: these primary witnesses not only shed light on these places in their memories, but their very presence both guides and obstructs the second generation’s engagement with them. Without their parents present, the second generation is freer to construct their own engagement with these places. Theories of primary and secondary witnessing – the differentiation of eyewitness testimony from witnessing by those who were not present – provide a fitting theoretical framework for this chapter. Second-generation memoirs are examples of secondary witnessing, a way that the second generation conceptualizes their relationship to this momentous event that occurred before their birth. Second-generation journeys to sites of Holocaust memory aim to overcome, literally, the distance from this past. In this chapter I argue that the second generation tries to enhance their secondary witness perspective by visiting Holocaust sites, perhaps even in order to become primary witnesses. The simultaneous presence and absence of the Holocaust in their lives creates tension and even outright conflict, and visiting the places where it happened is a way that this generation seeks resolution. The study of second-generation memoirs is a pivotal point in the investigation of how our relationship to sites of Holocaust memory continues

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to evolve. From Chapter 1 we have seen that although sites of memory are mute, to Holocaust survivors they scream with remnants of the past, evoking traumatic memories that discord with the seemingly peaceful appearance to other visitors. In this chapter, we will see that for the second generation who did not experience the Holocaust, visiting sites of memory is highly significant and perhaps at some level substitutes for not having experienced the Holocaust itself. In Chapter 3, we will see the next point of evolution in this process: the greater distance from the Holocaust means that third-generation Holocaust texts are less about actual visits to sites and more about the emergence of imaginary places. Engaging with both survivors and sites to bear witness, second-generation texts exhibit the desire to assimilate what the protagonists know from their survivor parents, and what they themselves see at sites of Holocaust memory. They attest to a conflict between what can be known and what remains unknown: what the second generation can discover about the Holocaust and what it is never possible for them to know. Visiting Holocaust sites enables the second generation to claim that ‘I was there’, whereas testimony from their parents makes it clear that they were not there. Second-generation texts integrate information from sites with survivors in their attempt to resolve the unsettled nature of second-generation identity. The first part of the chapter discusses the concept of inherited memory in second-generation memoirs, contextualizing these primary texts and the journeys portrayed therein. It then analyses the traces of trauma in each text, illustrating the background for the trip, before moving onto the journey specifically. The two different types of journeys – one with the eyewitnesses and the other one without – are then discussed in turn. We will see that deploying the concepts of primary and secondary witnessing enables us to both differentiate between the nuances evident in each text and draw parallels between them.

Memoirs as journeys and journeys as memoirs These six examples of second-generation texts, published in the same decade between 1991 and 2000, emerged against the backdrop of increasing interest in genealogy and family history more generally as well as specific memorial activities related to the Holocaust, such as the many events to mark fifty years since the end of the Second World War in 1995. This timing is no coincidence.

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Most members of the second generation were born in the late 1940s and 1950s. By the 1990s, they were not only reaching middle age, but their parents, born in the first decades of the twentieth century, were reaching the end of their lives. In many cases, this led to or strengthened an urge for the second generation to record their parents’ memories before it was too late. They began to realize that the opportunity of interviewing their parents and other eyewitnesses would not always be available to them. Moreover, this presented a way of addressing the burden of inherited memory that had, in many cases, haunted them for years. It is for these reasons that second-generation Holocaust texts are not just autobiographies anchored in events which preceded the author’s birth, but play an important role in transmitting Holocaust memory. The texts which record the second generation’s journeys to sites of Holocaust memory form part of a larger genre of writing by children of Holocaust survivors. While the first second-generation work is generally considered to be Helen Epstein’s 1979 study Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, a collection of interviews striking in its portrayal of a distinct second-generation identity, the number of publications in this genre increased considerably in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.5 Perhaps the most famous second-generation Holocaust text is Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic Maus, volumes I (A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History) and II (And Here My Troubles Began), a meticulously drawn odyssey where the Jews are depicted as mice, and his father imprisoned in Mauschwitz.6 As Marianne Hirsch explains, ‘Art Spiegelman’s memory is delayed, indirect, secondary – it is a postmemory of the Holocaust, mediated by the father-survivor but determinative for the son.’7 Like other second-generation Holocaust texts, Maus forms a tangible record of this generation’s quest to negotiate identity in the shadow of the Holocaust.8 While this chapter – and indeed this book – is concerned with written texts, of course not all members of the second generation write their memoirs. Different members of this generation deal with their heritage in different ways and indeed many may never deal with it at all. Choosing to write about it is but one way of addressing it. It seems that the majority who do write about it are already writers by profession – just as Spiegelman is a graphic artist who chose to explore his heritage in pictorial form. Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms confirm that the second generation is ‘less likely to write about their family’s Holocaust experience unless they are already writers’.9 The authors featured in this chapter certainly illustrate this: Karpf, like Epstein, is a journalist; Baker is an academic; Appignanesi and Zable have both worked as academics but left

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to pursue writing full-time; Brett is a writer, and Janeczek is an editor. Thus, as Egan and Helms claim, ‘For these children of survivors, it cannot be their own experience of the Holocaust that led them to writing; they are writers who use their writing skills to explore how their parents’ wartime lives shaped their own life trajectories and sense of self.’10 It is the intangible nature of this experience which means that the journey is an important motif in many second-generation Holocaust memoirs. Unlike survivors, whose memoirs of return testify to the evolution of Holocaust sites over the decades since, the second-generation pilgrimage is a first visit, and it is this experience that is most often the focus of their writing. Second-generation texts also tend to recount the life stories of others, such as the narrator’s parents and grandparents, before and during the Holocaust, as well as their own life stories. The focus on journeys to sites of memory in many secondgeneration Holocaust texts suggests that such journeys form a crucial part of the second generation’s engagement with their parents’ and ancestors’ past. As Nina Fischer explains, ‘Journeys to European places of family and cultural memory from which the Second Generation is doubly displaced – both in time and in space – are a vital and recurrent subject in their literary works.’11 This double displacement – of temporal and spatial distance – is partially overcome through the journey’s aim of spatial proximity to places relevant to their family’s history. The journey thus forms a pathway for the second generation to create their own memories, not of the Holocaust per se, but of key places where it happened. The journey thus functions as an opportunity for the second generation to transform themselves from secondary witness to potential primary witness of the Holocaust. The fact that second-generation memoirs are often evoked by the author’s parents reaching old age and death suggests that the impetus for children of Holocaust survivors to explore their heritage becomes more pressing when their link to it is threatened.12 In the opening pages of Losing the Dead, Appignanesi writes that ‘It can hardly be coincidental that I want to remember, to uncover, to know, at the moment when my last gateway to family memory – my mother – is losing hers.’13 This timing of her memoir with her parents’ incapacity to remember – in this case not death in the first instance but dementia – illustrates the underlying reason implicit in most second-generation memoirs, even if it is not always explicitly acknowledged. Similarly, Kathy Grinblat notes that ‘As our parents age, that need [to uncover and understand] becomes more urgent, and as we surpass in age our parents’ parents, we strive to come to terms with our feelings and to find some peace.’14

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Second-generation Holocaust literature stems from an urge to preserve this unknown yet dominant past and is situated in the context of the second generation’s relationship to their parents’ mortality. For this reason, second-generation texts often emphasize their unique connection to the Holocaust. Appignanesi devotes the first few pages of her book to explaining why it was necessary for her to write it, explaining that it came about ‘Partly because I am confronted by the sense that mine is the last generation for whom the war is still a living tissue of memory rather than a dusty and barbaric history of facts and statistics.’15 In other words, she seeks to explain her personal perspective on the Holocaust through the window of personal experience only available to the second generation, a view concurred with by Alan Berger, who claims that ‘Members of this generation are both the first and the last. They are the last to have direct contact with survivors and the ways of a destroyed culture.’16 While both these quotations ignore the fact that the third generation also has ‘direct contact with survivors’, they illustrate the emphasis that the second generation places on their particular position as the primary recipients of Holocaust memory.

Second-generation Holocaust memory As the second generation is defined by something it has not experienced, the Holocaust, when members of this generation write about the Holocaust, they tend to articulate their connection to it. As a result, much of the vast literature by and about children of Holocaust survivors centres on what is often described as having a memory of something they did not experience. Memory, in the form of concepts such as Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ and Ellen S. Fine’s ‘absent memory’, has become a common way to describe how second-generation Holocaust survivors encapsulate their relationship to the Holocaust.17 Such terms concretize an abstract sensation: giving a name to the intangible legitimizes it into something tangible. Crucially, applying such terms to the connection felt by the second generation to the Holocaust transforms it into a type of memory, even though recalling these events from personal memory is impossible.18 The concepts of second-generation memory propagated by Hirsch and Fine may seem contradictory but are actually complementary: while postmemory focuses on a full memory, absent memory describes an empty memory. Hirsch defines postmemory as ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’.19 Hence, postmemory entwines

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inherited memory with an individual perspective on the past. As a memory once removed, ‘Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.’20 As a result, the second generation may find their lives dominated by the narrative of their parents’ Holocaust past, even if they are not familiar with, or even aware of, their parents’ stories. This notion of concurrent exclusion and connection forms Fine’s concept of absent memory; in this theory, children of Holocaust survivors ‘continue to “remember” an event not lived through’.21 Placing the verb in inverted commas emphasizes that ‘the sensation experienced as a memory is not in actual fact a memory’.22 As an empty memory, Fine explains, ‘The “absent memory” is filled with blanks, silence, a sense of void, and a sense of regret for not having been there [sic].’23 Thus, absent memory focuses on the loss, the emptiness and the distance which children of Holocaust survivors may feel towards the Holocaust. Both these concepts encapsulate how the second generation conceptualizes their connection to the Holocaust – articulating both closeness and distance. This book deploys the term postmemory to describe the memory journey undertaken by the second generation protagonists, because its focus is the shape and content of this inherited memory, which metamorphoses through the journey to sites of Holocaust memory. The six texts under discussion demonstrate the diversity of second-generation postmemory. In considering how each text presents the protagonists’ parents’ memories – for this purpose, this shall be referred to as the Holocaust – it will show that as diverse as second-generation postmemory is, the unifying feature is a sense of niggling unsettledness; that something remains unresolved. Close as the second generation is to the Holocaust, it is not their own experience, and their attempts to discover more about their family history and visit the places where it happened can never emulate the horrors and the loss endured by their parents, nor in fact is that the aim. The passing of memory from survivors to their children therefore provides a backdrop to and a reason for undertaking the journey to sites of Holocaust memory. The transmission of Holocaust memory in Too Many Men occurs unconsciously to Ruth, the main character whose life story strongly resembles that of Brett.24 Both are Australian daughters of Holocaust survivors, were born in Displaced Persons camps in Germany and became writers living in New York. Too Many Men is a form of fiction heavily yet selectively based on fact, what Richard Freadman calls ‘faction’. Freadman observes that ‘passages … from her

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fiction closely resemble passages in her autobiographical writing’.25 As he points out, this does not only concern Brett’s protagonists in her many novels, but extends to biographical information, including names, of other characters, such as Ruth’s mother Rooshka: ‘Rooshka was Rose Brett’s Polish name.’26 Categorizing Too Many Men as faction recognizes that the thoughts, feelings and descriptions expressed in the third person and belonging to Ruth are to a large extent those of Brett herself, and therefore, this book provides an intriguing comparison to the memoirs analysed in this chapter. The excerpt cited at the beginning of this chapter which places Ruth so palpably in Auschwitz suggests that this character at times literally forgets that it is not she who went through the Holocaust. It demonstrates that Ruth has, perhaps unconsciously, incorporated her parents’ experience in Auschwitz into her own personal narrative to the extent that she momentarily fails to realize it did not happen to her. This train of thought that inadvertently slips between being a visitor to Auschwitz and a victim of Auschwitz recalls the observation of second-generation psychologist Aaron Hass, who explains that ‘the children [of survivors] may assume the identity of survivors as though they themselves had been persecuted by the Nazis’.27 Arising from the child’s growing awareness of the family’s Holocaust past, this reaction causes them to directly identify with those who experienced it. A further example occurs when Ruth describes why she does not eat meat: ‘ “Meat being grilled or fried or seared reminds me of burning flesh,” Ruth said. How could she be reminded of something she’d never seen, never witnessed, never smelled? she thought.’28 This excerpt creates postmemory by connecting two similar phenomena, one which Ruth has personally encountered – cooking meat; and one she has not – burning flesh. Brett has cleverly blended the character’s personal instincts with explicit Holocaust imagery, thus creating a second-generation response to the Holocaust. In both cases, rather than remembering her own experience, the character fabricates a Holocaust-related response to something she has actually witnessed.29 In presenting such incidents, Brett portrays Ruth as one who has, disturbingly and effortlessly, absorbed her parents’ experiences to the extent that she forgets that she did not live through them. The transfer of memory from survivor to the second generation is a much more conscious process in The Fiftieth Gate. Baker’s occupation as a historian dominates his engagement with the past, in combat with his parents’ memories: ‘This memory thing is no light matter for my father. He holds it over his family like a university degree.’30 This quotation suggests that Baker’s father elevates memory to the status of a degree – perhaps giving it the worth of his son’s

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doctorate. The transfer of memory from father to son is therefore a significant transmittal, sacredly entrusted to the son whose occupation is to discover and preserve history. After his father undergoes heart surgery, Baker acknowledges the significance of this transmission: ‘He remembers, therefore I am’.31 A few pages later, describing a memorial service in Israel for a man from his father’s hometown of Wierzbnik, Poland, this sentiment is reversed: ‘And I was his memory. “Tell them,” he’d nudge me. “Tell them about Wierzbnik. Tell them what happened.” Instead, I ask them to tell me their stories, while privately I mourned the things I had stolen from my father – first, two years of his life, and now his memory.’32 Here, the transfer of memory from father to son results in irrevocable changes (‘two years of his life’ refers to a false birth date that Baker’s father had always believed was correct, and that Baker had rectified). Baker’s historical research not only trumps memory, it also replaces his father’s memory. The university degree wins after all. Yet, despite this being the goal of Baker’s quest, it causes him to mourn the loss of ‘the things I had stolen from my father’. In other words, this text shows what is lost in the transfer of memory, despite the second generation’s expertise and willingness to record it accurately. This willingness is also present in Losing the Dead, although this text emphasizes missed opportunities: the transfer of memory when it is all but too late. Appignanesi’s desire to record her parents’ past results from observing her mother’s dementia: ‘It is to anchor myself against the rudderless ship of her mind, that I finally decide to write all this down.’33 She concedes that ‘During the brief span of time when their memories were still relatively fresh and I was capable of grasping some of their resonance – my teenage years – I wanted nothing to do with them.’34 While Baker’s mission to record his parents’ memories clashes with his historical findings, Appignanesi’s takes place in a void. Yet, the result is the same: During the time that I write about her war, something she has encouraged me to do for years, she all but refuses to speak about it. Certainly it ceases to be one of her preoccupations. I don’t know whether this is because she feels I have stolen it from her or that she has given it to me. In any case, the onus has been transferred. As she approaches her own end, I have taken over her dead.35

Like Baker, Appignanesi refers to it as ‘stealing’ her parents’ memories. In recording them for posterity, she has somehow taken them from her mother. But Appignanesi’s mother is barely cognizant that this has occurred: ‘on my return from Poland, she doesn’t really want to hear … Even the photographs of the towns of her pre-war youth receive only a cursory glance … It is too

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late.’36 Appignanesi’s quest to assume the mantle of memory has taken place without the direct input of her parents: it resembles absent memory – ‘blanks, silence, a sense of void’.37 As Appignanesi’s text records her version of these stories – quintessential postmemory – it demonstrates that what is lost cannot necessarily be known. Once lost, it is lost forever – only the postmemory version remains. In contrast to Losing the Dead, Jewels and Ashes depicts Zable’s explicit takeover of his parents’ memories while they are still cognizant of it. For instance, he writes that ‘Mother tells stories in fragments’ and that ‘From such lean and Spartan clues I have reinvented her journey.’38 So, the text is explicit about the second generation’s role in creating postmemory: that it is Zable who is creating it, rather than simply relating his parents’ stories. A further example occurs as ‘The Beijing-Moscow Express hurtles northwards across the plains of Manchuria.’39 Aboard this train, heading towards his parents’ birthplace, Bialystok in Poland, Zable describes a key event in the transfer of memory: ‘As we move I read a photocopy of my father’s life story. It is handwritten in Yiddish, a lifetime telescoped into twenty pages of foolscap, eighty years at a glimpse, lived out in two halves, within two continents on opposite sides of the globe. Father had written it at my request, just days before my departure.’40 The narrative continues, ‘I read father’s manuscript carefully – not only because I am on the way to the landscapes of his youth, but also because tomorrow at dawn we are scheduled to arrive at the Soviet border. Travellers I met in Beijing had warned me of the thorough searches that take place at this border.’41 And concludes, ‘Several hours later, while the passengers are asleep, I tear father’s manuscript to shreds and fling it into the darkness.’42 By literally destroying his father’s memories, Zable heads to Bialystok with a clean slate, unequivocally the holder of his family’s memories. The blatant transfer of memory means that Zable is free to fashion his own postmemory of Bialystok: he is now both creator and receiver of his family’s story. The journey to Bialystok therefore replaces rather than complements his parents’ memories. Such confidence in the transmission of memory from survivors to the second generation is missing from The War After. Its publication in 1996 was instrumental in bringing the second-generation experience to mainstream attention in the United Kingdom, which as Karpf noted in an article in The Guardian that same year, challenged the perception that ‘Britain’s wartime role – the plucky loner who stood up to bully-boy Hitler – has been so consistently idealised and mythologised down the years that the actual, much less balmy, experiences of refugees and survivors in Britain has been

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obscured.’43 In 2008, Karpf noted the resulting change in public perception: ‘The subsequent, belated public debate has meant that families such as mine no longer feel the burden of historical memory as ours alone.’44 In The War After, Karpf promotes a meticulous method of preserving memory by reproducing transcripts of her interviews with her parents, recorded on cassette tape in 1983 and 1984. These passages are marked by a change in paragraph format: they are left-aligned rather than justified. It is as if this change in formatting hints to the reader that their veracity may be trusted, in contrast to the main narrative which questions the moulding of stories as they are passed on: ‘How does a child cope with information about the past brutalisation of its parents? … How does she process it, render it halfway tolerable? Perhaps it becomes another story … I turned my mother’s war into a story I could tell.’45 By acknowledging her role in adapting her mother’s story to her own means, Karpf distances the main part of the text from the taped, sacred interviews. She explains that ‘Through constant recounting, my mother’s story also acquired a kind of mystical quality. It was as if the narrative had taken on a life of its own, detached from the original events to which it referred.’46 Karpf thereby suggests that she cannot be trusted to transmit her parents’ story in her own words, only in their words. The inclusion of the transcripts in the book is a rebuttal against this transformation away from the ‘original events’. In this text, postmemory is inferior to the real thing. Lektionen des Verborgenen not only takes a different track to these five texts in the transfer of memory, but emerges from a non-English linguistic canon. Born in Munich, Janeczek has lived in Italy most of her adult life and consequently wrote Lektionen des Verborgenen in her adopted language of Italian, rather than German. The original Italian version was published in 1997; the German edition examined for this book in 1999.47 Just like survivors writing in English, Janeczek’s choice to write in Italian supports Young’s observation that for survivors, writing in English creates a barrier between their experiences and dealing with them in the present.48 Indeed, as Maria Cristina Mauceri notes, for Janeczek, ‘Speaking and writing in Italian is a kind of liberation, and a way to come to terms with the burden of descending from a Holocaust survivor.’49 Writing in Italian provides a buffer which evokes both linguistic and physical distance from Janeczek’s upbringing in Munich. Perhaps not coincidentally, a measured reluctance to identify as a member of the second generation comes to the fore in Lektionen des Verborgenen. Rather than assimilating her parents’ memories into her psyche, like Ruth in Too Many Men, Janeczek detaches from them completely: ‘Ich bin meinen Eltern

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dankbar, daß sie mich mit ihren Erinnerungen verschont haben, ich glaube, sie haben es richtig gemacht.’ (I am thankful to my parents for sparing me from their memories. I believe they did the right thing.)50 Assuming this perspective of distance means that Janeczek attempts to minimize the impact her parents’ memories can have on her life. During the visit to her parents’ hometown of Zawiercie, she remarks ‘Ich habe nie an Zawiercie … als Schtetl gedacht, fast nie.’ (I never thought of Zawiercie as a shtetl, almost never.)51 In contrast to Hirsch, who admits that ‘My parents’ Czernowitz, my cultural home, is the space of my postmemory’ and bases an entire theory around this concept, Janeczek actively chooses not to assume her parents’ past.52 Such indifference does not evoke the same sense of working through evident in the other five texts, yet the fact that the narrative remains so steadfastly passive when it comes to playing a role in Holocaust memory seems strange in comparison. Yet, the fact that Janeczek has written a book about it points to a working through at some level, even if its traces in the text are asymptomatic. Janeczek’s detachment from her parents’ past is just as valid a second-generation response as those like Ruth or Hirsch, who actively assume it.53 The second generation therefore articulates their link to the Holocaust through a tortured, ambiguous notion of memory that resembles the loss of something they never had. As detailed in this section, second-generation texts oscillate between closeness to and distance from the Holocaust. This is described by French child of survivors Nadine Fresco as akin to pain felt by amputees: ‘The amputated are left only with phantom pains, but who can say that the pain felt in a hand that one no longer has is not pain. These latter-day Jews are like people who have had a hand amputated that they never had. It is a phantom pain, in which amnesia takes the place of memory.’54 The range of responses to the ‘phantom pain’ demonstrates that it is something that the second generation struggles with, and that rather than amnesia replacing memory, postmemory does. This powerful concept is encapsulated by American second-generation author Melvin Jules Bukiet, who writes that ‘It’s our job to tell the story, to cry “Never Forget!” despite the fact that we can’t remember a thing.’55 This is the crux of it: because the second generation is unable to remember something that they did not experience, they fashion their own version of events, based on what they do know about it. As postmemory, it is one step removed from the source, but nevertheless inextricably linked with it. This lies behind second-generation journeys to Eastern Europe: by visiting sites of Holocaust memory, they seek to reconcile their perspective as secondary witnesses, perhaps even to become primary witnesses.

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A place of trauma: Traces of the Holocaust in second-generation texts It is not just the journeys to sites of Holocaust memory that these secondgeneration texts have in common, they also share traces of the impact of the Holocaust on the authors’ lives. Ranging from disturbing accounts of transgenerational trauma to more subtle identity conflicts, these accounts illustrate how deeply the Holocaust has affected members of the second generation. Trans-generational trauma, which describes the effect of a previous generation’s traumatic experiences on the next, is commonly regarded as a central facet of the experience of children of Holocaust survivors.56 Placed within an autobiographical quest narrative, such traces of trauma illustrate the reasons behind the second generation’s search for the past. Trans-generational trauma plays a prominent role in The War After.57 Karpf explains that ‘I would have gladly taken over some of my parents’ bodily functions – eaten for them, breathed for them. Or, failing this, suffered for them. (But, even here, it wasn’t enough: I would never be able to match them in suffering.)’58 In this passage, Karpf ’s sense of guilt at not having been through the traumatic events of her parents’ lives is starkly evident. Torn between guilt at not having experienced the Holocaust first-hand and trying to rectify this by creating traumatic experiences for herself, Karpf writes of the compulsive scratching that took over her body and her life. She explains that ‘It seemed vaguely fitting that my outside was now beginning to look as scabrous as my inside must have felt for so long, though I was far more aware of the need to prevent any of the inside badness seeping out.’59 The narrative’s description of the scratching is followed by the long process of eventually healing it. As Erin McGlothlin explains, this means that ‘Her book, which attempts to integrate her parents’ experience in the Holocaust with her own legacy of that experience, thus also represents an act of marking, one in which the text, much like her body, takes on the trace of her struggle with the past.’60 In other words, Karpf ’s scratching is perhaps an attempt to mark her body in the way that her psyche has been scarred by the after-effects of the Holocaust. Efraim Sicher argues that Karpf ’s psychological and emotional breakdown enables her to explore coming to terms with the Holocaust as an inherited past: ‘Only by recognizing her place in the generational chain of transmission of traumatic memory can she do mourning work and come to terms with the past.’61 Thus, the act of incorporating her parents’ memories into her own work enables Karpf to achieve distance and a form of emotional closure.

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Trauma in second-generation Holocaust texts is also evident in the motif of language. The very mode of communication in these texts, the language of writing, either unites or separates the author from their survivor parents, murdered ancestors and surrounding society. In contrast to survivors who write in English, which is not their first or native language, members of the second generation who do so are usually native speakers. In contrast to languages such as German, Polish and Yiddish – spoken by Holocaust victims, survivors and perpetrators – using a ‘Holocaust-neutral’ language such as English signals the second generation’s distance from these events. For the second generation who grew up in Englishspeaking countries, English is the natural language with which to write about the Holocaust. The languages used and referred to in second-generation Holocaust texts represent this generation’s struggle between their parents’ past and the postHolocaust present. As Alan Berger and Naomi Berger explain, ‘Yiddish is the language that links the second generation to their survivor parents, to relatives whom they never knew.’62 The role of Yiddish, or Polish, or other European languages represents a struggle between the new world and the old, often giving the second generation the sense of not quite fitting in to either. It is not just the use of Italian which illustrates Janeczek’s relationship to her parents’ past in Lektionen des Verborgenen, Polish also plays an important yet conflicting role. Although German is Janeczek’s primary language, and the one her parents use to communicate with her, she has the sense that Polish is in actual fact her mother tongue, ‘the one that vibrates in her like a known lullaby that she intuits without knowing it’.63 Janeczek writes that: ‘Ich kann kein Polnisch, doch wenn es einfach ist, kann ich es verstehen, und wenn es noch einfacher, auf einzelne Wörter oder feststehende Sätze beschränkt ist, spreche ich es auch, ich spreche es fast täglich. Ich bin überzeugt, ich habe eine Muttersprache, die ich nicht kenne, aber mach das mal einem begreiflich.’ (I can’t speak Polish, although when it’s simple I can understand it, and when it’s even simpler, constrained to single words or fixed sentences, I do speak it, I speak it almost daily. I’m convinced that I have a mother-tongue that I don’t know, but try making someone understand that.)64 Here we see the contradictions which encapsulate the second generation’s relationship to their parents’ past. Janeczek claims not to speak Polish, yet at the same time, ‘speak[s] it almost daily’. This categorization of Polish as a language that is hers but not hers, close but not close, can be extrapolated to the Holocaust itself. She can understand bits of it, but she is not able to understand enough of it to claim it as her own. Language also emerges as a motif during the journey. Simply hearing languages such as German or Polish can provoke a reaction in the second

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generation, whether they understand the language or not. Early in Too Many Men, we learn about Ruth’s limited knowledge of Polish, and over the course of the narrative, we observe as her ability to understand it increases: ‘She’d heard Polish spoken, by her parents, all of her life, and she understood so little of it.’65 We thus learn that Ruth’s interactions with her parents take place predominantly in English, which limits the type of communication possible: ‘Things were said to her in short ambiguous sentences and semi-indecipherable phrases. Brief bursts of almost-comprehensible advice and guidance, warning and orders. Nothing was explained at length. Everything was in quick, oblique English.’66 Yet, during the time Ruth spends in Poland with her father, her ability to understand Polish gradually improves, until suddenly: ‘Years of not understanding Polish had vanished. Years of incomprehensible Polish phrases and sentences seemed to be over. She could understand every word. Polish verbs and adjectives and nouns and adverbs coalesced into meanings, instead of melting into gibberish as they used to do.’67 Ruth’s sudden realization that she can understand Polish is indicative of changes that have taken place over the course of the journey. Not only does the time spent in Poland give Ruth the opportunity to hear Polish regularly, but being in Poland enables her to become closer to her parents and their past. A further example of this conflict between languages and identities is evident in The Fiftieth Gate. Upon arrival in Australia, Baker’s father adopted an anglicized version of his Polish Yiddish name: ‘For my father, his new life was accompanied by a new name. Yossl Bekiermaszyn was reborn as Joe Baker.’68 Consequently, Baker’s parents chose Anglo-Saxon names for their sons, with clear Christian associations: ‘We both fancied ourselves as Jesus’ apostles, my mother’s two little gospel boys, the Bakers of Galilee – John and Mark.’69 This attempt for the family to blend in innocuously is to Baker ‘an attempt to obliterate not only my parents’ foreignness but the memories attached to it’.70 This illustrates the generations’ different perspectives: for Baker’s parents, obliterating difference to fit in is paramount, while for Baker, this unwanted assimilation represents a repression of his true identity as transmitted through his name. The survivors’ desire to fit in with wider Australian society results in their child resenting this attempt at erasing their foreign identities. Consequently, Baker decides to rectify this: ‘So I decided to put the past back into my name. I have chosen Raphael, the earliest ancestor I can find on our family tree.’71 By changing his common Australian name, Mark Baker, to something unusual that reflects his heritage, Mark Raphael Baker, Baker reclaims what has been denied to him. The effects of survivors’ decisions about the family’s position in and relationship to surrounding society are also evident in Lektionen des Verborgenen.

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As Janeczek and her parents lived in Germany, it is a different situation to those who lived in other countries. Living in the country that perpetrated the persecution and annihilation of the Jews during the Nazi period provides complex identity challenges for Jews residing in post-war Germany.72 In her much lauded study, Lynn Rapaport notes that Jews in Germany ‘are Jewish because of the boundaries they draw between themselves and Germans’.73 That is, she observed that German Jews cope with their situation by defining their identity in terms of differentiation from surrounding society. Moreover, she finds that: ‘The difficulties of feeling sentimentally attached to Germany as a homeland are even more pronounced for the second generation of Jews in the postwar population. The Jews who live in contemporary Germany have difficulty in feeling sentiments of patriotism or German national identity, and particularly in viewing Germany as their Heimat.’74 Thus, the concept of Germany as a Heimat or homeland can be especially problematic for members of the second generation such as Janeczek. In Lektionen des Verborgenen, it becomes apparent that it is not just her relationship to Polish which is problematic in light of the Holocaust but the fundamental question of feeling a sense of belonging in the country she was born and raised in. This is no doubt exacerbated by Janeczek’s parents’ contradictory notions of what it means to be German. Even though Janeczek and her parents all have German passports, this does not mean that they consider themselves German: ‘Wir sind Deutsche, so steht es in unseren Pässen.’ (We are German, so it states in our passports.)75 This aligns with the results of Rapaport’s study, in which she found that ‘Jews in Germany have a different frame of reference for understanding what a German Jew is … [They] downplayed the importance of objective cultural criteria – the fact that they were born in Germany, held German citizenship, spoke the language, and were educated in German schools – in their own and others’ identity.’76 This indicates selectivity in identity formation as a way of coping with the inherent contradiction, which is further illustrated in Lektionen des Verborgenen by Janeczek’s parents’ frequently repeated phrase ‘weil “wir keine Deutschen sind” ’ (because ‘we are not Germans’)77. Employed as a form of discipline, this claim was used to enforce what was considered suitable behaviour by the family and what was not, for example: ‘Wir geben kein monatliches Taschengeld, weil wir das Geld nicht in die Tasche zählen, und noch immer das “meine” von “deinem” unterscheiden, weil wir keine Deutschen sind.’ (We don’t give monthly pocket money, because we don’t count money into the pocket, or differentiate between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, because we are not Germans.)78 These opposing and even contradictory accounts of when it is suitable to identify as German and when it is not illustrate that, as Mauceri argues, Janeczek ‘moved to Italy in order to escape the constant parental pressure

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to be different from the Germans’.79 By choosing to live in another country and speak another language, Janeczek is not forced to solve the conflict between her parents’ and wider society’s ideas of what it means to be German.80 By portraying their experiences as children of Holocaust survivors while at the same time relating their parents’ story, the second generation situates themselves as secondary witnesses by descent. Sicher observes that ‘The story of the second generation usually includes the story of transmission, which is also the story of their link in the genealogical chain as they in turn pass on the narrative to their children.’81 By describing their parents’ stories – discovering the unknown – second-generation memoirs become a link in the chain of witnessing. Zable explicitly acknowledges this in the ‘Author’s Note’ of Jewels and Ashes, where he writes that his book ‘is concerned with the way in which family stories become, in time, ancestral legends. And as the author, recreating such stories, I am, of course, a part of this process.’82 By acknowledging his own role in this evolution of stories, Zable attaches himself to his family history, explicitly including himself as the recipient and transmitter of this family heritage. Similarly, Karpf paints the Holocaust as part of the family mythology: ‘The Holocaust was our fairytale. Other children were presumably told stories about goblins, monsters, and wicked witches; we learnt about the Nazis.’83 This emphasizes the difference she felt between her family and others: rather than stories of make-believe monsters, her childhood contained stories of real monsters. Thus, it is the traces of trauma which give the second generation something to search for. Appignanesi describes this as ‘transgenerational haunting’,84 indicating the subtle but continuous presence of her parents’ legacy in her life. She explains that ‘this is a journey into my parents’ past – into that foreign country they carried within themselves, which was also the country of war.’85 By referring to the war as ‘that foreign country they carried within themselves’, she emphasizes the difference in what her parents experienced compared to her own life, setting the scene for her journey. It is the urge to discover the unknown which prompts second-generation journeys to Eastern Europe.

Journeys to the past: Sites of memory and the second generation While for survivors, the journey is a postscript to their Holocaust experience, for the second generation, the journey is about discovering and even perhaps (re)creating the past in the present. The second generation grew up with parents who survived unimaginable atrocities, who suffered losses of inconceivable

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magnitude and who were understandably traumatized as a consequence. The journey to Holocaust sites is an opportunity to find out more about the Holocaust, the event that indelibly shaped their lives, but that they have limited knowledge of. The places the second generation visits stand in binary opposition to the author’s experience of trauma: they are locations of the past, yet accessible in the present. In other words, they provide tangible manifestations of the source of intangible trauma. As a blank canvas of landscape, they allow the second generation to see, experience and ultimately bear witness to their version of the Holocaust. The journey also provides an opportunity to work through this inherited past. For non-survivors, visiting sites of Holocaust memory is an opportunity to link this knowledge with the places where it happened. Moreover, if we consider these journeys in terms of the working through of loss that Freud describes in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, the idea that such working through is dependent on knowing what was lost provides a productive way of understanding the second generation’s implicit aims.86 Eva Hoffman explains that: ‘Freud makes the suggestive observation that in order to accomplish the natural process of mourning – to grieve and then move on – you have to know what you have lost. If you do not know what the lost object is, then mourning can turn into a permanent melancholia, or depression, as we would call it today.’87 Thus, perhaps the goal of the second generation’s journeys is simply to find that lost object which precipitated their mourning.88 But rather than discovering the lost object, these journeys provide an opportunity to create one. By personally experiencing these places, individuals who embark on such trips add a practical dimension to their knowledge of the Holocaust; for the second generation, this means that ‘Their imagined, imaginary Poland represents the Holocaust because of its association with it, so that the memoirists implicitly believe that visiting a particular space on a map can provide direct and unmediated access to an entire unknown, unexperienced past.’89 The link between place and event is assumed, and a trip to sites of memory functions as an opportunity to confirm this assumption. This shows how place plays a central role in the second generation’s bearing witness to the Holocaust. Second-generation memoirs which depict a trip to sites of Holocaust memory tend to follow a fairly uniform pattern. They begin as a journey of discovery: the protagonist decides to explore their family’s Holocaust past, often through archival research and interviews with family members or others familiar with what happened. At some point of this process, they realize that visiting the places they are discovering so much about is essential. The journey is not only central to

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embellishing their relationship to the Holocaust, but creates something concrete to write about. The structure of a book around a physical journey anchors the narrative with a literal beginning, middle and end, while also allowing a framework for the corresponding psychological journey of discovery. As F. K. Clementi writes about Lektionen des Verborgenen, ‘The trip to Poland inhabits and sustains the entire text at a narrative, thematic, and structural level. It is both a literal and metaphorical conduit.’90 Documenting such a trip is a way of both preserving it and communicating it to a wide audience. Moreover, as Arlene Stein observes, ‘Through their genealogical practices – which include exchanging family stories, photographs and letters, and traveling to their parents’ places of origin – [the second generation] tr[ies] to order the disparate fragments of memory. Their search for beginnings and endings is an indicator of their desire for a continuous narrative of their parents’ and grandparents’ lives.’91 While the journey may be the explicit motivation for creating a book, it also provides a convenient structure for telling the author’s story as a secondgeneration Holocaust survivor. By choosing to represent this journey in written form, the authors create a tangible record of their second-generation experience, which is part of the genre of Holocaust testimony. If second-generation memoirs indeed bear witness to the Holocaust, it raises the question: is it possible to bear witness to something not personally experienced? This is the role of the journey: experiencing the places is equated as a form of Holocaust experience, building on Alan Berger’s statement that ‘while not having personally experienced the Shoah, these “second generation survivors” constitute the group of non-witnessing American Jews most intimately familiar with its continuing effects’.92 Thus, the journey not only gives the second-generation memoirists something to write about but something to tangibly work through. The texts bear witness to the parallel experiences of the physical and psychological journeys, thereby suggesting a Holocaust experience one step removed from personally experiencing the Holocaust itself.

The second generation with survivors at sites of memory The visits of the second generation together with their parents at Holocaust sites reveal complex interactions of parents and children, memory and postmemory, and witnessing and secondary witnessing with place and the construction of truth. These encounters at the locations of the parents’ past – whether places with originally positive associations such as their hometowns,

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or places of suffering such as former ghettos, concentration camps and death camps – represent the second generation’s attempt to overcome temporal and spatial distance with spatial proximity and the presence of the primary witness. The implicit aim is to give the second generation unmitigated knowledge and understanding of the past and to allow them to gain access to their heritage in a way that is not possible away from the sites. As Hirsch explains about a trip she was planning with her parents to Czernowitz: ‘Together, we would try to make the place come alive, investing it with memories of old, and memories created in the present, memories transmitted across generations.’93 While the experience of visiting sites of memory with their parents does indeed increase their knowledge of the past, as we will see, it does not necessarily give the second generation what they seek. Instead, in many cases, we see a clash of primary and secondary witnessing, exemplifying the different roles of sites of memory for different generations. The three journeys under discussion in this section emerge from different circumstances and, like the survivors’ journeys discussed in Chapter 1, encompass a range of places visited for different reasons. They also allow the transfer of memory from survivors to the next generation, a process aided by the spatial proximity to relevant places such as parents’ hometowns, former concentration and death camps and Jewish cemeteries. In The Fiftieth Gate, we see how the presence of Baker’s parents alters his perceptions of their experiences. Lektionen des Verborgenen similarly presents an intricate bi-generational portrait, where Janeczek’s mother’s needs often take precedence over her own. In contrast, Too Many Men plays with the fact that Ruth did not witness the Holocaust by creating ways for her to become a witness, such as the episode cited at the beginning of this chapter. The descriptions of the second generation visiting Holocaust sites together with their parents encompass the different perspectives of these generations towards these sites and show how spatial proximity moulds witnessing in second-generation Holocaust texts. These texts demonstrate how much value the second generation invests in sites of memory. While the experience of the journey potentially changes the second generation’s perspective and even preconceptions, this is not the case in Too Many Men. In the opening pages, the narrative explains Ruth’s motivation for visiting Poland, where she is to meet her father Edek, who still lives in Ruth’s birthplace of Melbourne, Australia: Her first trip to Poland was just to see that her mother and father came from somewhere. To see their past as more than an abstract stretch of horror. To see the bricks and the mortar. The second time was an attempt to be less overwhelmed

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than she was the first time. To try and not cry all day and night. And she had cried less on that second visit. Now, she was here to stand on this piece of earth with her father.94

Having already visited Poland twice, Ruth’s desire to be there with her father is an attempt to reconcile her experience of the place with her connection to it. Yet, the narrative conforms to Jack Kugelmass’ finding that negative assumptions are likely to be confirmed rather than challenged.95 This is evident in that Edek’s ease with his former compatriots contrasts sharply with Ruth’s prejudiced attitude towards Poles: ‘It was hard to like Poles, really, Ruth thought.’96 He converses freely in Polish with locals, such as taxi drivers: ‘Edek was never as garrulous as this in Australia. And then it dawned on her. Of course, in Australia he was forced to speak English. A halting, faulty English. Here he could speak Polish. Perfect Polish. Polish, the language of his childhood, the language of his mother and father.’97 Thus, being in Poland shows Ruth another side of her father, lost in his heavily accented English. It frames her negativity towards both the country and its people in a different light, making it clear that this is her perception, not her father’s. The descriptions of Edek indulging in the local food further emphasize that he feels at home in Poland, while Ruth’s lack of appetite demonstrates her determination to maintain her prejudiced view of the country by focusing only on remnants of the past. The sparse yet evocative descriptions of the Polish delicacies pierogi and pontshkes – ‘The steam was still rising on the pierogi. They smelt good’98; ‘A puff of icing sugar powder blew out over the table as Edek bit into his pontshke’99 – are embellished by the repetition of the italicized Polish terms, which stresses their foreign and exotic nature. Edek’s enjoyment of Polish food diverges sharply with Ruth’s preoccupation of visiting the ‘small remnant of the wall that surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto’ and other Holocaust sites.100 These opposite interpretations of Warsaw can be attributed to generational differences: to Edek, it is his native country; whereas for Ruth, it is the root of all evil and the source of unhappiness in her life. Although Ruth’s reluctance to enjoy or even try the food demonstrates her determination to cling to her negative perception of Poland rather than challenge it, these examples nevertheless demonstrate the consequences of the two generations being together in Poland: Edek’s perspective would not have been evident to Ruth had she visited without him. Yet, while the narrative presents this dichotomy, it does not affect Ruth’s preconceptions of Poland, which persist throughout the book. Like in Too Many Men, the contrast between survivor and second-generation perspectives is evident in The Fiftieth Gate, but the latter shows how survivors’

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perspectives can challenge the second generation’s view of the past. In this text, the portrayal of Baker’s 1995 journey to Poland, the Ukraine and Germany with his parents and brother is interwoven with accounts of Baker’s research journey. In Wierzbnik, the birthplace of Baker’s father, his sons beg him to open a gate on the marketplace: ‘ “Push,” we scream, “lift the latch and push.” “No. They’ll think we’re coming back to take our house. I remember too much now. No.” ’101 As in Too Many Men, the contrast between survivor and second-generation perspectives is evident: his father’s reluctance contrasts sharply with Baker’s and his brother’s enthusiasm. To Baker, Wierzbnik represents a concrete connection to the past, to be explored and discovered; while for his father, it is the location of painful memories. During the family’s visit to Baker’s mother’s hometown of Bołsowce, the consequences of the bi-generational visit come to the fore. Baker writes that ‘My mother is dancing in the fields’ once owned by her family, declaring ‘Mine. They’re all mine.’102 His reaction to this is to admit that ‘We had never believed her when she told us that she was once rich, very rich, tremendously rich.’103 This illustrates the powerful role of a primary witness combined with place: as a secondary witness, Baker’s experience of seeing and listening to his mother at this place forces him to reconsider his perception. In contrast to Too Many Men, in this text, the presence of the primary witness causes a significant change: Baker could not believe that his mother came from a wealthy background until he witnessed her at the family’s former property. The presence of a survivor, a primary witness, enables a place to become more meaningful. Both these episodes illustrate the gaining of knowledge not possible had Baker undertaken the journey without his parents. Just as visits to survivors’ hometowns evoke a range of reactions, encounters at Jewish cemeteries are experienced differently by different members of the second generation. Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe contrast sharply with the anonymity accorded to concentration camp victims: these graves are memorials for individuals whose death was incorporated into established societal rituals. The cemeteries are proof of the normalization of death, concrete evidence that before the destruction of the Holocaust, Jews lived ordinary lives in these places. For the second generation, visiting cemeteries where family members were buried is an important connection to the pre-Holocaust past. The Baker family’s visit to the Jewish cemetery in Wierzbnik described in The Fiftieth Gate emphasizes loss; whereas in Lektionen des Verborgenen, Janeczek’s trip to the cemetery in Zawiercie with her mother focuses on positivity because something from the past still exists. In both episodes, the

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survivor parents play a crucial role in constructing and communicating the meaning of the site. Baker describes the Jewish cemetery in Wierzbnik as ‘an empty and chaotic landscape of death’ on the one hand, and as a ‘field of memories’ on the other.104 His father echoes this negative sentiment, remarking that it is ‘The only sign of Jewish life left in my home’ – yet this impression stems from his prior experience of the place and emphasizes an experience not available to his sons.105 The presence of a cemetery when no other traces of a community remain is tangible and irrefutable proof that a Jewish community once existed. It epitomizes the scale of destruction of this community and confirms that the past is irretrievable. Although Baker and his brother search the cemetery for relatives, they do not find any. Nevertheless, Baker frames this place as connected with the past: ‘The air is still; I listen for voices from my father’s childhood.’106 These voices however can only spring from Baker’s imagination: ‘Dad, can you hear? … Buba Laya serving ice cream to your friends on the corner of the rynek on their way up the hilly path to school?’107 Clearly imagined, these remarks correspond to Baker’s impression of Wierzbnik in the time that his father lived there. Yet, as much as Baker wills contemporary Wierzbnik to portray his father’s time there, it does not. His response demonstrates the importance of visiting Wierzbnik in the process of bearing witness: finding any trace of his family’s life is crucial, even when it must be imagined. In contrast, a trace of the past is indeed evident in the visit to the cemetery in Zawiercie recounted in Lektionen des Verborgenen. In contrast to the independent journeys described in Too Many Men and The Fiftieth Gate, Janeczek and her mother partake in an organized tour for Holocaust survivors and their children to Poland. Once again, the resulting encounter at the cemetery is produced by the interaction of the two generations at the site, for it is at the cemetery that Janeczek realizes her mother’s underlying reason for embarking upon the trip: ‘[jetzt] begreife ich, daß meine Mutter in erster Linie nicht nach Polen gekommen ist, um ihr altes Haus und das meines Vaters wiederzusehen, auch nicht um sie mir zu zeigen, und noch viel weniger, um sich den Orten zu stellen, wo die Vernichtung stattgefunden hat, sondern wegen dieses Grabes [des Grabs von Janeczeks Mutters Großvater]. Es ist das einzige, das sie besuchen kann.’ (Now I understand that my mother has not come to Poland primarily to see her old house and that of my father again, nor to show them to me, and even less to confront the places where the annihilation happened, but because of this grave [Janeczek’s mother’s grandfather’s grave]. It is the only one that she can visit.)108 While Janeczek remains focused on her mother’s needs – perhaps a corollary

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of attempting to maintain distance from the Holocaust – it is she who finds the actual grave. This time, being at the site allows the enactment of remembrance rituals: ‘Wir legen einen Stein auf das Grab, einen Strauß Blumen auf die Grabplatte, zünden ein Licht an.’ (We place a stone on the grave, a bouquet of flowers on the plaque, light a candle.)109 The existence of a family grave enables Janeczek and her mother to concentrate on what remains rather than what is missing. In contrast to similar episodes in Too Many Men and The Fiftieth Gate, here a feeling of loss is not so prominent. Instead of sadness, there is a sense of joy at the existence of something from the past. It appears that Janeczek does not wish to disturb the joyous mood by searching for the graves of other relatives: ‘Ich vermeide zu fragen, ob auf diesem Friedhof auch die Großeltern meines Vaters begraben seien, denn es ist klar, daß wir sie niemals gefunden hätten.’ (I avoid asking whether the grandparents of my father are also buried in this cemetery, because it is clear that we would never have found them.)110 So for Janeczek, bearing witness means focusing on the satisfaction of finding a concrete trace of the past, rather than on what cannot be found. That she also avoids asking her mother further questions demonstrates that although the presence of a survivor can change how the second generation views a Holocaust site, it does not necessarily provide an opportunity to garner more information. Rather than challenge the joy experienced at the Jewish cemetery in Zawiercie by extending the search, Janeczek prefers to retain the satisfaction of finding something from the past. A similar sense of equilibrium becomes apparent in Janeczek’s description of visiting her late father’s former house, which further emphasizes both her connection to this past through place and thus its importance in bearing witness, and her willingness to accept what she finds without questioning her mother further. While Janeczek’s impression of her mother’s former house evokes a sense of disappointment similar to Judith Magyar Isaacson’s reaction to her friend Ilona Pogány’s house in Kaposvár described in her memoir Seed of Sarah – she describes it as ‘sehr niedrig, dunkel und schmucklos and liegt an einer viel zu engen, düsteren und geradlinigen Straße’ (very low, dark and bare and lies on a much too narrow, gloomy and straight street) – her father’s house gives another impression altogether.111 Standing in front of this building, Janeczek writes, ‘Ich bitte meine Mutter nicht, mir das richtige Fenster zu zeigen, vielleicht erinnert sie sich nicht mehr daran.’ (I don’t ask my mother to point out the exact window, maybe she no longer remembers.)112 In doing so, Janeczek avoids challenging her preconceptions, as with the episode in the cemetery described above. And this time, the experience of the place does unequivocally enable bearing witness:

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Ich weiß, daß ich die Hand auf die Fassade gelegt habe, sie wie streichelnd über den rauhen Verputz habe gleiten lassen, daß ich meine Hand an der Wand des Hauses meines Vaters habe liegen lassen, nur so lang, daß es nicht weiter auffällt … Ich weine ein bißchen … [Ich] schaue noch einmal zu den beiden Fenstern hinauf, die ich meinem Vater zugesprochen habe.113 (I know that I laid my hand on the façade, let it glide over the rough plaster as though stroking it, that I laid my hand on the wall of my father’s house, only so long as it does not attract attention. I cry a little. I glance once more up to the two windows that I have attributed to my father.)

This quotation demonstrates the powerful potential of place as a link to the past: Janeczek senses a connection with her father by being at his former house. The fact that he once lived in this place she had never been to before evokes a strong connection, showing that place does indeed facilitate the second generation’s connection to the Holocaust. While Janeczek’s mother is present during this episode, she remains in the background. In spite of Janeczek’s reluctance to partake in the journey, this episode demonstrates that she has also become involved and gained something from it.

Visiting Auschwitz: Encounters with the aftermath of horror A visit to Auschwitz can be a harrowing experience for anyone, but visiting together with one’s survivor parents evokes a complicated, emotional and potentially volatile situation. An in-depth discussion of the site of Auschwitz will be presented in Chapter 4. The visits to Auschwitz described in The Fiftieth Gate, Too Many Men and Lektionen des Verborgenen all involve the second generation together with their survivor parent/s who were interred there during the Holocaust. In all three texts, it is the personal connection to Auschwitz which makes these visits meaningful, combined with the collective and symbolic notion of Auschwitz. What makes these visits noteworthy is that the second generation is forced to incorporate the first generation’s perspective into their experience of Auschwitz. The bi-generational visit strengthens the second generation’s quest for a Holocaust identity by inheritance, but at the same time, the parents’ presence reminds the second generation that they were not actually there. The visit to Auschwitz depicted in Too Many Men once again substantiates Kugelmass’ claim that visitors’ experiences of Poland are likely to enforce their current negative views:114 ‘Ruth was glad it was a dull, grey, wet day. She

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wouldn’t have wanted to see Auschwitz in sunshine.’115 This reaction indicates Ruth’s perception of what Auschwitz represents, rather than the reality of weather patterns. Because this place symbolizes her parents’ suffering, which has also significantly influenced her own life, she finds it fitting that the weather was grey and gloomy. Yet, the weather does not provide sufficient evidence of negativity for Ruth, as she is disappointed that there is ‘no sense of a world gone awry’ – everything is too clean and orderly for that.116 For this fictional member of the second generation, finding Auschwitz’s negative past in the contemporary site is paramount. Yet, the muteness of landscape means that this is not apparent and is perhaps what prompts Ruth to hire a guide, although the text suggests that it is for reasons of protection: ‘Somehow a guide had made Auschwitz seem traversable.’117 This urge to protect her father is a role reversal of the parent–child relationship found in some members of the second generation.118 But, her father is offended, ‘As though Ruth has invited someone who would intrude on what was his terrain.’119 These differences between the generations in the way that they approach Auschwitz become further apparent once they arrive at Auschwitz, when it is Ruth who needs comforting: ‘She stood and looked at the sign. Arbeit Macht Frei … She started to cry. She couldn’t bear the proximity to these gates. She wanted to run away. “There is nothing to cry about today, Ruthie,” Edek said. “It did already happen. It is too late to cry.” ’120 Just like the episode with the fly mentioned earlier, this passage describes inventing a reaction so that Ruth can become a witness of sorts. In other words, for Edek, who survived Auschwitz as a prisoner, there is nothing more to cry about because it has already happened. But for Ruth, who has not already experienced Auschwitz, her reaction is perhaps an attempt to experience it on some level. During the Baker family’s visit to Auschwitz, Baker and his brother concentrate on factual knowledge rather than their father’s memory in order to reconstruct his experiences. For example, they attempt to convince their father of the exact spot of his arrival, despite his protestations to the contrary: ‘ “But Dad”, we both insist. “There was no other place they could have taken you to. All the trains stopped here for the selection.” ’121 Even though Baker’s father knows it is not the right spot, he has very nearly given up his search when his sons find a place fitting his description on a map. Consequently, they drive to another gate and find the correct place, where their father leads them on a triumphant tour through the places of his life in Auschwitz. This episode demonstrates the entwinement of primary and secondary witnessing: that the joint experience by survivors and the second generation together in Auschwitz is crucial. If the sons had not come together with their father, they would not have found the exact

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point of his arrival, or even known that he had arrived elsewhere. This illustrates what is lost as witnessing shifts from survivors to the second generation. The second generation’s reliance on transmitted memory combined with historical facts cannot necessarily recreate something as seemingly simple as a primary witness’s arrival point at Auschwitz. Yet, in Baker’s case, the focus is on visiting Auschwitz as a means to furthering his understanding of his father’s experience there. Consequently, details like the precise location of his arrival are minor. The presence of a survivor ensures that inaccuracies can be rectified, but for those who visit without a primary witness, there is no one to correct any such errors. The survivor’s presence ensures that their perspective is recognized by the second generation. The presence of both generations at Auschwitz has a different effect in the episode described in Lektionen des Verborgenen. In this text, the tour itinerary includes a visit to Auschwitz; as a result, the entire group visits, irrespective of any personal or familial connections to the site. Clearly, it is the status of Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust which is important, instead of individual or family memories.122 That Janeczek and her mother separate from the tour group to travel to her parents’ hometown Zawiercie, discussed in the previous section, confirms this. In contrast to the protagonists of Too Many Men and The Fiftieth Gate, and just as in the cemetery visit in Zawiercie, Janeczek, prioritizing her mother’s needs, seems always conscious that she is accompanying her mother. Viewing the display of suitcases belonging to murdered Auschwitz victims, Janeczek writes, ‘Ich wäre gerne noch geblieben, aber meine Mutter folgt dem Reiseführer, und ich bin dort, um meine Mutter zu begleiten, und nicht um Aufschriften auf Koffern zu lesen.’ (I would have liked to have stayed longer, but my mother follows the tour-guide and I am there to accompany my mother, not to read inscriptions on suitcases.)123 At this stage of the visit, Janeczek places her mother’s needs above her own and remains a passive follower of her mother. This pattern continues when her mother reacts to the exhibit of Zyklon B canisters at Auschwitz: ‘schreit sie “meine Mama, meine Mama” … [und] begleitet ihre Schreie mit einer Vor- und Rückwärtsbewegung des Kopfes und des Körpers’. (She screams ‘my mother, my mother’, and accompanies her screams with a forwards and backwards movement of the head and body.)124 Though she was herself in Auschwitz, it seems unlikely that this reaction stems from her personal experience there. Rather, it is Auschwitz’s functionality as a symbol of the Holocaust which provokes this reaction. It is not known knowledge, but assumed knowledge: Janeczek’s mother’s assumption that her mother was murdered in the gas chambers is the reason behind her hysteria.125

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This episode also proves a turning point for Janeczek herself, who describes her own emotional reaction, though she initially hides her feelings: ‘weil auch mich das Klagen überkommt, bei geschlossenem Mund’ (because a lament overcomes me too, with a closed mouth).126 Once again, she has prioritized her mother but becomes enraged when ‘die Frau mit dem Valium … , die mich verärgert fragt, warum ich es ihr nicht gegeben hätte’ (the woman with the Valium … who asks me angrily why I would not have given it to her).127 To this, Janeczek reacts strongly: ‘Da nun überkommt mich die Wut, und ich antworte ihr, daß meine Mutter ruhig schreien soll, wenn sie schreien will, daß sie sogar so laut schreien soll, wenn sie schreien will, daß sie sogar so laut schreien soll, daß auch noch der letzte Besucher sie hören kann, denn sie sei nicht gekommen, um ein Museum zu besuchen.’ (Then rage overcomes me and I answer her that my mother should scream quietly, when she wants to, and that she should actually scream loudly when she wants to, that she should scream so loudly that the last visitor can hear her, because she hadn’t come to visit a museum.)128 This strong reaction contrasts sharply with Janeczek’s behaviour in the earlier parts of the trip, which demonstrates the progress she has made during this journey. This emotional episode comes across as cathartic and crucially, its occurrence resulted from and was dependent on being at Auschwitz. It is clear that the encounters from each text described here are significant in shaping the second generation’s relationship to the past. In Too Many Men, Ruth’s negativity contrasts sharply with her father’s attitude that it is ‘too late to cry’. In contrast, The Fiftieth Gate highlights the conflict between history and memory of the Holocaust: more specifically, the learned history of the second generation clashes with the memory of the primary witness. And, in Lektionen des Verborgenen, it is the primary witness, Janeczek’s mother, who reacts emotionally, and her daughter, Janeczek herself, who reacts and defends her. These examples illustrate that sites of memory combined with survivor/s create certain meaning for the second generation. Although, of course, the second generation makes their own meaning from these places, the presence of a survivor challenges them and forces them to see the sites differently.

The second generation alone at sites of memory For those members of the second generation who visit sites of Holocaust memory without their parents, these places hold a very different potential: with neither parent there to remind, correct or enlighten them, they are free to relate to the

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sites as they wish. The freedom to imagine combined with the inconclusive and mystifying potential of these places becomes evident in the varying descriptions of encounters at sites of memory portrayed in Jewels and Ashes, The War After and Losing the Dead. Even when survivor parents did not accompany the second generation on this journey, it does not mean that the parents are excluded completely. On the contrary, the parents feature strikingly in the second generation’s reason and justification for taking the trip to Holocaust sites important to their family. Thus, rather than the bi-generational interaction of encounters at Holocaust sites discussed above, the interaction between parents and children about the site takes place away from the site. In Jewels and Ashes, Zable writes of his parents’ role in the preparations for his trip to Poland, writing that ‘Father draws maps of a city for me. Streets flow into a central square, and he recalls their names as if he still lived in them. It is almost half a century since he last walked them.’129 This indicates that his father’s connection to this faraway place is what makes it important for him to visit. In both The War After and Losing the Dead, this interaction concerns the parents’ reluctance to support or outright disapproval of Karpf and Appignanesi, respectively, going to Poland. Karpf notes that she did not tell her mother of her pregnancy until after the trip: ‘I felt certain that the idea of my going, fourteen weeks pregnant, to Birkenau would have horrified her. (She later said that I was right).’130 Moreover, hiding this fact from her mother enables Karpf to go to Poland, which is confirmed by her statement afterwards that ‘I think I had some ridiculous fantasy that in Auschwitz I might die’, and therefore not a place to take a budding new life.131 This association of Poland with death also emerges in Losing the Dead, for example when Appignanesi’s father exclaims: ‘ “Poland is a cemetery!” My father would say, his eyes narrowing into fierce hatred. “A desecrated cemetery. Mud and shit and bones and ash and scavenged graves. You don’t play tourist in shit. You don’t grow sentimental over shit.” ’132 To this Holocaust survivor, visiting Poland is an abomination, according with Kugelmass’ observation that to Jews with Polish roots, ‘Poland is nothing more than a vast and shamefully neglected mass graveyard.’133 His attitude cannot help but influence his daughter. Appignanesi first visited Poland in 1988 when her father was still alive, for a business trip, but writes that: ‘I left Poland with no plans to return. It was as if my father’s dicta had proved right. This was no country to visit. I wrote a glowing report about Poland’s artistic efflorescence and put it all behind me. For good, I thought.’134 However, a few years later, after her father’s death, things are different. Her mother’s gradual slippage into dementia, which occurs as Appignanesi realizes she wants to know

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more about her parents’ past, prompts the trip described in detail in Losing the Dead.135 She explains, ‘I finally realise that if I am going to make any sense of my parents’ war and my sudden interest in it, I am going to have to visit the sites of memory. I will have to travel to Poland.’136 Emphasizing the link between place and event, this statement stresses ‘visit[ing] sites of memory’ as a reaction to postmemory. The obligation implicit in the phrase ‘I will have to travel to Poland’ (italics added) indicates Appignanesi’s reluctance, perhaps a result of her father’s negative sentiments. When it comes to the encounters in Eastern Europe – in this case, they are all in Poland – these three examples show that the process of investigating and concretizing postmemory, perhaps even transforming it into real memory, occurs differently for each narrator. Jewels and Ashes provides clear examples of how being there, in Poland, allows Zable to say, ‘I was there’, referring to the mythologized past of his parents, and even makes him a potential primary witness to events which occurred before his birth. As his parents’ presence would render this contradictory witnessing impossible, without them there to remind him that his interpretation does not accord with their own past or memories, Zable is free to imagine that he was there. This occurs firstly in the way he writes about his parents’ hometown: ‘Although it is barely a month since I entered Poland, Bialystok has become a home of sorts, a focal point around which the journey revolves.’137 By basing himself in his parents’ hometown during his stay in Poland, Zable literally experiences Bialystok as his home. At points, Zable writes as if he really had been there in his parents’ time: What shall we do? Stay in Poland or leave? And when the doors are sealed, the New World cut off: which way shall we go? To the trains or the forests? And at the end of the journey, at the gates of Auschwitz, Doctor Mengele waits, white gloves on his hands, as he points left or right, the ovens or slave labour … Children of the Annihilation, we know it well: life is so fragile.138

In this quotation, Zable puts himself in the shoes of the victims. By writing about the choices facing his parents and their Eastern European Jewish contemporaries in the 1930s as if he was facing the same dilemma, he positions himself as a primary witness. Yet, in this same passage, there is an oblique reference to his generation – ‘Children of the Annihilation’ – which reminds the reader that Zable was not in actual fact a primary witness but born after these events. His post-Holocaust perspective is further evident in the description of Auschwitz; a term that in the 1930s simply referred to the German name for the Polish town of Oświęcim. By including this explicit reference to his perspective as part of the

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generation born after, Zable includes a caveat indicating that although he has immersed himself in his parents’ story to the extent that he writes about it as if it happened to him, this is not in fact the case. Jewels and Ashes also attests to how being in Poland confirms Zable’s prior knowledge of the Holocaust, suggesting that seeing and experiencing the landscape itself allows him to imagine it: ‘From the moment I first entered Poland, across the Soviet border, I was struck by one overriding thought: this landscape is Judenrein. [italics in original] I had never before been so confronted with the enormity of this fact.’139 Being in Poland causes Zable to realize what he had known, but not fully understood. The text continues: ‘I became remote from the other passengers, my eyes riveted on the countryside. Here my ancestors had lived in a vast network of settlements which teemed with a way of life that had evolved for a millennium; they had created a kingdom within kingdoms, a universe pulsating to its own inner rhythms. Then it had vanished.’140 By projecting his knowledge onto the landscape, through dreaming as a means of escaping the present, Zable imagines what is no longer there. To him, the Polish countryside embodies the absence of Jews. By projecting this absence onto the physical landscape, Zable ascribes meaning to the mute landscape. Thus, he enforces his knowledge and understanding of events through bearing witness to the place itself. Towards the end of this passage, which describes the entwinement of his physical journey with the one of discovery, he includes the phrase ‘as I near the final days of liquidation’.141 The sense of ambiguity surrounding the referent of this phrase – whether it simply refers to Zable’s retelling of the story or to his journey through Poland – confirms that his memoir attempts primary witnessing of the Holocaust. While it seems likely that the phrase does in fact refer to both interpretations, it demonstrates that the second-generation witnessing of Jewels and Ashes emanates from Zable’s attempt to become a primary witness. In contrast, the process of turning postmemory into real memory in The War After assumes a rather different form. In this text, the narrator makes clear the ultimate futility of trying to become a primary witness, yet appears to do it anyway. Sitting in a café in the main square of Krakow, Karpf writes, ‘I kept thinking that, had it not been for the war, this would have been one of my cafés and this my life.’142 She continues, ‘Yet just when I felt myself on the brink of being overwhelmed by sentiment … it rudely dawned on me that had the war not occurred, I probably wouldn’t have existed at all: my mother would have remained married to Julius Hubler and given birth to a different set of children.’143 In contrast to Zable’s dreamings, which seem to wander off unheeded, Karpf ’s imaginative wanderings into the past are tempered by a reality check. This

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passage also emphasizes contradictory feelings of the second generation: despite the Holocaust being the cause of detrimental after-effects, most of them would not exist if it had not occurred. In the words of Bukiet: ‘The Second Generation’s very existence is dependent on the whirlwind their parents barely escaped.’144 Karpf appears to be all too aware of this. The War After also describes emotional encounters when Karpf finds places related to her family history. One significant example occurs when she describes finding her mother’s house, on the outskirts of Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow. She explains that: ‘The contrast between my charged fantasy and the pedestrian reality (I’d somehow imagined something of at least nineteenthcentury antiquity, not this relatively modern-looking block) was enormous, and yet to me the building was extraordinarily totemic, as if its pores had soaked up parts of my family’s past which were now preserved in its very fabric.’145 Despite her disappointment that the building’s appearance does not live up to her expectations, Karpf ’s reaction changes her perception of her mother’s past, thus illustrating the strong connection found at the site of memory. The powerful effect of this connection is evident in a following passage, one of the most striking in the text: ‘Other people hurry by but they’re in a different time zone and occupy an adjacent, unconnected reality – a present without a past, while she’s unable to relinquish a past without a present. The woman sobs as if the sheer unexpected extent of the tears of a stylish young woman for the dead might somehow revive them.’146 Written entirely in the third person, this paragraph appears to describe Karpf walking around Kazimierz whilst crying. Being there, in the area where her mother lived before the Holocaust, allows Karpf to not only imagine the people who once lived there, but to grieve for them, just as Isaacson grieved for her family in Kaposvár.147 The use of the third person draws the reader away from the more inward focus of the rest of the narrative, allowing them to see Karpf from the outside rather than inside perspective. Simultaneously, this carves a space between the narrator and Karpf, drawing attention to what appears to be an out of body experience. Like in Jewels and Ashes, it seems to be an attempt at primary witnessing: being at the place enables her to experience the past. Yet, unlike Zable in Jewels and Ashes, Karpf realizes the incongruity of such a sentiment. A few pages later, she concedes that: ‘I also see that (like many others before me) I’ve confused time and place, history and geography, as if coming in person to the site of terrible events which occurred fifty years ago could somehow yield them up for us to transform them – they might actually extrude through the stones and earth and be mitigated by modern sorrow.’148

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Thus, although Karpf is aware of what she is doing – confusing the past with the present – this does not prevent her from doing it. In contrast to Zable, who writes of Bialystok as if he was there in the 1930s without acknowledging the incongruity of doing so, Karpf does so while also admitting the impossibility. Karpf ’s experience echoes Ruth Kluger’s concept of timescape, explained in her 2001 memoir Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, which although referring to concentration camps, also applies here. Just as Kluger concedes that ‘It won’t do to pretend that we can evoke the physical reality of the camps as they were when they functioned’, Karpf admits that she has ‘confused time and place, history and geography’.149 Even though Karpf is not with her survivor parents in Krakow, The War After suggests that she does realize that visiting the place does not equate to visiting the past. In contrast to the narratives of finding places from the past in Jewels and Ashes and The War After, Appignanesi’s journey to Poland in Losing the Dead elicits disappointment after disappointment as places important to her family history have disappeared with little trace. Her descriptions of Poland, which poignantly blend the modern with the old, do not let the past dominate, thus reflecting the mixed results of the substantial archival searching and locating of historical documents detailed in the book. In Warsaw, for example, she writes: The mirrored facade of the Sony Tower encloses and replicates the Jewish Historical Institute and has framed me in postmodern parody. I am both inside the old and inside the new looking back at myself. I have an eerie sense that in the search to make my mother’s memories real, to return her past to both of us, I may be entering the ultimate hall of mirrors.150

By referring to ‘The mirrored facade of the Sony Tower’, Appignanesi firmly anchors her description of Poland in the present. Moreover, she is explicitly aware of the limitations of this journey: that it may not make things clearer to her, or that what she is looking for may not be found. Similarly, the visit to her mother’s shtetl, Grodzisk, results in a palpable anticlimax: I hide my disappointment. Had I in the nostalgic unreason really expected a Chagall-scape, an exotic site of crooked streets and higgledy-piggledy houses, their sloping thatched roofs providing a ready perch for a dream fiddler? … There are no pious black-cloaked Jews here endlessly arguing points from the Talmud … Of course, I knew that. I know that. Yet the twinge of loss is there all the same.151

Here, Appignanesi minimizes the disappointment by explaining that her expectations were unrealistic. Yet, no matter how unrealistic such expectations are, visiting the site makes the loss of this unknown emotionally real.

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However, her disappointment grows even further when she visits Pruszków to look for the house her parents lived in – she finds that ‘My parents’ house has been torn down and replaced by a public library.’152 The discovery that a building so important in Appignanesi’s family history has been destroyed also destroys the capacity for potential primary witnessing. The destruction of this building confirms that its existence was only in the past, and that it cannot be visited nor retrieved. In this journey, visiting the sites of memory does not evoke an attempt at primary witnessing as in Jewels and Ashes or even The War After, but merely confirms the unreachable nature of the past. It is at the end of her time in Pruszków that Appignanesi makes an unexpected discovery: But it is only when we are standing on the station platform that my own blindness kicks me in the groin. On the opposite side of the station from the town – the side that I hadn’t taken in because I was sitting in the wrong place – lies the huge expanse of the railway yard and carriage works … This is the railway yard which once belonged to my great-grandfather, the very yard in which my father worked as slave labour to the Nazis.153

This last-minute reprieve shows that perhaps it simply depends on where one looks. The significance of the railway yard is emphasized by disappointment at the disappearance of Appignanesi’s parents’ house and provides an opportunity for her to finally engage in imagining the past: ‘I walk the length of the platform and stare and imagine the wartime that I cannot see until the arrival of the Warsaw train obliterates my vision.’154 Here, Appignanesi bears witness by drawing on the familiar place from her family’s past, the railway yard in Pruszków, as a point of imagining what took place. Yet, by mentioning the modern train that they are waiting for in the same sentence, Appignanesi remains firmly rooted in the present. Despite using the place to hint at its past, this episode does not even begin to develop into attempted primary witnessing. Losing the Dead therefore presents a different perspective to the other texts discussed in this section: the fact that sites of memory significant to Appignanesi and her family have been destroyed means that not only do they remain in the past, but allows her to maintain the perspective of the present. These three narratives each detail strikingly different experiences of the second generation in Poland, yet each engages deeply with these places. They place huge investments in them and the implicit link to their parents’ past, yet honestly record disappointments. For Zable, the Poland of the late 1980s almost becomes the Poland his parents left in the 1930s. Similarly, Karpf yearns to find the Poland of her mother’s past, yet is yanked back to the present. For

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Appignanesi, the past seems elusive, until the last minute discovery of the railway yard which had belonged to her family. It is clear that place still plays an important role in bearing witness to the past.

The role of place in second-generation bearing witness to the Holocaust The journeys to Holocaust sites portrayed in second-generation texts play an important role not only in this generation’s working through of trans-generational trauma, but also demonstrate the complex and intertwined relationship between inherited memory, place and bearing witness. While visiting sites of Holocaust memory does not provide direct access to that past, it does nevertheless allow the second generation some kind of working through and the opportunity to come to terms with their uneasy burden of postmemory. The implications of these findings fall into three broad categories: a reinterpretation of the Holocaust through sites of memory, an aspect of working through loss and the meaning of witnessing. It is pretty clear that visiting Holocaust sites changes the fabric of the Holocaust for the second-generation protagonists. Evaluating their family’s history at sites of memory allows the second generation to reconsider their relationship to this past and to bear witness to it. Openly recognized in second-generation texts, it entails what Dora Apel describes as ‘shift[ing] the focus of witnessing from the devastating events themselves to the reconstruction of those events in the present’.155 In other words, visiting sites of Holocaust memory repositions the second generation’s relationship to the Holocaust and focuses it on the place in question rather than the event. By visiting sites of memory, the second generation strives to transform postmemory into a more authentic or traditional memory. These visits enable what was previously a combination of historical knowledge and inherited memory to become a memory. This change in fabric is a desirable outcome for the second generation because it is a form of working through – what in German is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). As explained earlier, a possible interpretation for the second generation’s journey to sites of Holocaust memory is to find that lost object which precipitated their mourning.156 Thus, even though these visits occur in the present, they still allow children of Holocaust survivors to fashion their own view of the Holocaust after personally experiencing the places where it happened. Yet, even visiting these places does

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not allow them to experience the Holocaust per se, especially in the company of their survivor parents, because it only enforces that the second generation was not there. Therefore, travelling to sites of Holocaust memory is potentially a solution for the discombobulating nature of second-generation identity: to create the lost object to allow Freudian working through. Yet, the compelling nature of second-generation identity, which on some level is perhaps an elective identity – it is to a certain extent personal choice to identify with and therefore embrace belonging to this generation – means that working through renders it invalid. It is for this reason that second-generation texts often end in uncertainty rather than suggesting resolution. As Apel observes, ‘Pilgrimages to the European birthplaces of ancestors and/or to the locations of death camps made by succeeding generations as journeys of discovery often end in perplexity.’157 The six texts analysed in this chapter confirm this observation. The last sentence of The Fiftieth Gate – ‘ … it always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory … ’ (ellipses in original) – is identical to the book’s first sentence, indicating a closed circle.158 Yet, the ellipsis before and after the quotation indicates what is unsaid and hints that pursuing memory cannot uncover all. Jewels and Ashes similarly ends with memory. In the final paragraph, Zable recounts his earliest childhood memory of finding ‘a white object’, writing that his mother ‘drops the dented ping-pong ball into a kettle of boiling water and, minutes later, it re-emerges, smooth, restored, fully rounded, a glowing white sphere’.159 This seems to be a metaphor for his parents’ memories and how their explanations illuminate the stories of the past, yet are obliquely communicated. The endings of Too Many Men and Lektionen des Verborgenen both address a tangential aspect of the narrative. Brett’s novel concludes with a theme that gradually emerges over the course of the text: Edek becomes romantically involved with Zofia, a Polish woman he met in Poland. The final few pages of Janeczek’s memoir concern her nanny, Cilly, appearing as an afterthought, especially as the text discusses her childhood in detail without mentioning Cilly until this point. Both The War After and Losing the Dead indicate a resolution of sorts, based on re-establishing a continuity of generations. Karpf ’s request for her young daughter to put on her coat is met with ‘I’m not cold. You are’.160 For Appignanesi, visiting her father’s grave in London means that ‘I think my brother and I are both happy that with all the lost dead, our father at least, is in a place where we can find him.’161 All these texts indicate that working through second-generation identity means finding a way to solve it while simultaneously retaining it – perhaps ultimately an impossible task. The nature

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of second-generation identity – constructed by exclusion, uncertainty and a sense of one’s life being shaped by something one did not experience – cannot be maintained if these terms are invalidated. Visiting sites of memory cannot result in primary witnessing of the Holocaust, because doing so rejects the foundation of second-generation identity. Second-generation witnessing is therefore a distinct form of Holocaust witnessing. Based on the dual definitions of witnessing as ‘to see’ and ‘to tell’, second-generation texts describing visits to sites of Holocaust memory are indeed a form of witnessing: they tell about what the second generation has seen. This contradicts Gary Weissman’s view of witnessing, who argues that: ‘We can read books or watch films on the Holocaust, listen to Holocaust survivors, visit Holocaust museums, take trips to Holocaust memorial sites in Europe, research and write about the Holocaust, look at photographs of the victims, and so forth, but in none of these cases are we witnessing the actual events of the Holocaust.’162 But, it is visiting Holocaust sites that allows the second generation to say ‘I was there’ – to somehow overcome the spatiotemporal distance of the Holocaust. As this chapter has shown, the combination of inherited memory and travelling to sites of Holocaust memory potentially enables the second generation to transform their secondary witnessing perspective into primary witnessing. But, as the analysis of six second-generation texts has demonstrated, overcoming the spatiotemporal distance is clearly impossible. Visiting sites of memory only emphasizes that the second generation can never be anything but secondary witnesses to the Holocaust, and it is from this perspective that they bear witness. In conclusion, Holocaust witnessing changes as the role of witness and chronicler shifts from survivors themselves to secondary witnesses. As inheritors of the Holocaust, the second generation maintains both closeness to and distance from this series of familial and historical events that collide in visits to sites of memory. By travelling to Holocaust sites, these secondgeneration authors attempt to enhance their perspective in order to bear witness to the Holocaust, even though becoming primary witnesses is impossible. Sites of Holocaust memory therefore possess dual, contradictory functions for the second generation: they are simultaneously this generation’s key to becoming closer to the Holocaust, and categorical proof that this generation can only ever be secondary witnesses to the Holocaust.

3

The Third Generation: The Role of Place in Imagining the Past The third generation forms the last living link to survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust. Members of the third generation are likely to be the last to remember Holocaust survivors as living people, rather than talking heads in video testimonies or the pensive subjects of black and white photographs. It is the third generation which will carry these memories of survivors and their contemporaries into a future where one day there will no longer be anyone alive who remembers the atrocities of Nazi Europe and the lost world of pre-Holocaust European Jewry. For these reasons, I classify the third generation as the ‘bridging generation’, a term which describes their role connecting lived memories of the past with people of the future, born after the last eyewitness has passed away. Yet, despite the third generation’s connection to Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses, this generation’s relationship to the Holocaust is very much characterized by distance. Unlike the second generation, who were raised by Holocaust survivors dealing with the after-effects of extreme trauma and loss, the third generation generally grew up in calmer circumstances. For them, the Holocaust tended to be more in the background than in the foreground of their family. Yet, it was still there, at times perhaps a wordless presence behind the inexplicable sadness of their grandparents, or the unacknowledged reason for not wasting a scrap of food. And, it shaped the third generation’s relationship and interaction with their survivor grandparents, which was also moulded by the timing: often, the third generation came of age as their grandparents grew frailer and eventually passed away. As a result, the third generation find themselves situated more distant from the Holocaust.1 For the third generation, sites of memory form an important part of engaging with their family’s past. Just like their parents, the second generation, members of the third generation often journey to Holocaust sites in order to embellish their knowledge of and connection to both the atrocities suffered by their relatives and the pre-Holocaust Jewish world which was destroyed. Thirdgeneration Holocaust texts, informed by the authors’ position as the last living

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link with survivors as well as their distance from the Holocaust, bear witness to finding new spaces where they can create new narratives of the Holocaust. The representation of these places generally has a strong imaginary component. The third generation’s distance from the Holocaust encourages and perhaps even necessitates imagination in bearing witness to the events of the past. Although the use of third generation in this chapter is chiefly genealogical, it also refers to a particular narrative form that emphasizes and embodies the author’s connection to yet distance from the Holocaust. This chapter explores third-generation representation of the Holocaust in two memoirs and two novels. The analysis of the former, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002) by Andrea Simon and the Holocaust testimony For Esther (2000) by Alex Sage, will show that in both these works, an imaginary grandparent–grandchild relationship is the main motif for bearing witness to the Holocaust and its aftermath. This chapter will then turn to perhaps the most well-known thirdgeneration work, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, and contrast it with Our Holocaust (2006) by Amir Gutfreund, in order to explore the representation of place in the fiction of third-generation Holocaust witnessing. We will see that the representation of Holocaust sites in thirdgeneration texts often resorts to fictionalization, even when inspired by the author’s own experiences.

Third-generation witnessing of the Holocaust Everything Is Illuminated famously depicts a third-generation journey to Holocaust sites. The novel’s protagonist, who is an American named Jonathan Safran Foer just like its author, visits the Ukraine in order to find a shtetl called Trachimbrod and with it traces of his grandfather’s past. This narrative shares the premise of many other heritage tourists, who attempt to make, as Jack Kugelmass phrases it, ‘past time present’.2 Rather than making past time present in this case, the result is a fictional representation of the past created as a response to finding no trace of it. This is most evident when the party arrives at Trachimbrod: ‘What do you mean we’re here?’ the hero asked. ‘Tell him it is because it is so dark’, Grandfather said to me, ‘and that we could see more if it was not dark’. ‘It is so dark’, I told him. ‘No’, she said, ‘this is all that you would see. It is always like this, always dark’. I implore myself to paint Trachimbrod, so you will know why we were so overawed. There was nothing.3

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Yet, while there is ostensibly nothing at Trachimbrod, the text contains many descriptions of this place, in various forms. Poignantly, as the novel’s Ukrainian narrator Alex observes, ‘The less we saw, the more he wrote.’4 This novel encapsulates third-generation witnessing. Foer’s distance from the Holocaust means that he resorts to fictionalization to bear witness to his family’s past. As Alan Berger explains, ‘The third generation is much less restrained than its predecessors. They search for memory even while giving free rein to artistic imagination that informs a variety of innovative narrative techniques.’5 Thirdgeneration witnessing therefore accounts for this generation’s position as the last living link to the Holocaust combined with their distance from it. A form of secondary witnessing, it is nevertheless a separate category to second-generation witnessing, because it encompasses the third generation’s distinctive perspective. This chapter draws on James Berger’s generational witnessing typology as a basis for theorizing third-generation witnessing of the Holocaust, combining it with the biographical definition to create a framework for interpreting this generation’s writing about the Holocaust. The crucial component of distinguishing between different witnessing generations is assessing their contact and relationship with eyewitnesses of the Holocaust. It is for this reason that Berger defines Holocaust generations in terms of steps removed from survivors.6 In his graded typology of distance from survivors, he states that ‘The first generation of Holocaust representation was that produced by survivors and victims’, which is consistent with the definition of first generation, the survivors of the Holocaust, in this book.7 The limitations of Berger’s theory, however, lie in its categorization of the degree of interpretation and re-representation in terms of generations, rather than genealogical relationships. When it comes to the second generation, Berger’s definition widens, because in his view ‘The second generation is the generation that directly encounters the survivors.’8 This loss of biographical specificity differentiates Berger’s theory from the definitions of second-generation scholars such as Alan Berger, Melvin Jules Bukiet and Kathy Grinblat.9 Berger’s broadened definition of second generation equates to the general understanding of secondary witnessing, which means that his interpretation of second generation is largely redundant. However, Berger’s remark that ‘The characteristic of the second generation of Holocaust representation is that it responds to the presence of survivors and their ongoing testimonies’ indicates the critical distinction between the second generation and the third generation.10 This distinction encapsulates the difference between having a living link with survivors and not.

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It is the third generation’s loss of the living link combined with its biographical distance from the Holocaust which characterizes its witnessing. Indeed, Berger argues that ‘In the third generation, the direct living contact with the survivors is lost, or begins to be lost.’11 Interpreted positively – as the last living link rather than the lost living link – this provides a theoretical framework for the position and representations of the biographical third generation. Jessica Lang argues that ‘these writers mark a second transition, or another remove from the eyewitness: the first transition from eyewitness to a recounting by the witness now becomes, as the Holocaust enters history, an indirect [sic] relation to the original eyewitness’.12 However, Berger asserts that ‘The third generation of Holocaust representation takes place after the end of the possibility of testimony and witnessing, and this impossibility gives rise to the myriad and problematic forms that these representations have taken.’13 The notion of the third generation precluding witnessing ignores those testifying to the ramifications of losing this living link, such as the examples analysed in this chapter. Actually, Berger’s designation of third-generation representations as taking ‘myriad and problematic forms’ refers to the significant imaginary element in many thirdgeneration texts – a result of distance. As Lang explains, this occurs ‘as the representation of the Holocaust becomes indirect rather than direct’ – an event that she attributes to its metamorphosis ‘from a direct experience, the experience of the eyewitness … to an indirect experience’.14 The three main elements of third-generation witnessing therefore are: loss of the living link, which results in distance from the Holocaust and which results in imaginary representations. The difference between second- and third-generation witnessing is therefore not just a matter of genealogy: third-generation Holocaust representations demand separate treatment from second-generation ones because they are composed of different elements. As the bridge between generations who do not live at the same time, the third generation transmits Holocaust memory between non-contemporary generations. Third-generation witnessing therefore plays a crucial part in both present and future Holocaust memory.

Third-generation Holocaust texts In contrast to the vast numbers of survivor and second-generation memoirs and novels, there are considerably fewer third-generation Holocaust texts. Yet, the number of texts in this genre continues to grow. This can be explained by the very nature of the third generation: their distance from the Holocaust means

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that their connection to it may be weaker, even diluted.15 The age of generational identification is also a factor – today’s third generation has only recently reached the age of the second generation at this generation’s formation. It is for these reasons that the texts analysed in this chapter do not document visits to sites of Holocaust memory in the way that the survivor memoirs and second-generation texts analysed in the previous two chapters do. However, as we will see, through the motif of place, these texts create new narratives that bear witness to the Holocaust. Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest has a similar form to many second-generation memoirs: it portrays the first-person narrator’s physical and research journeys, which focus on her grandmother Masha’s life, as well as the extended family who were murdered in the Holocaust.16 Bashert’s similarities to second generation texts do not stop here, however: born in 1945, Simon is also the age of this generation. Furthermore, her grandmother immigrated to America in 1923 – sixteen years before the Holocaust began. Yet, as the book’s subtitle emphasizes, this text can be considered third generation because it focuses on Simon’s relationship to the Holocaust through her grandmother. The first part of the text describes Simon’s trip to Poland, Belarus and St Petersburg as part of an American Jewish tour group, while the remainder revolves around Simon’s research on the Jews of Volchin – her grandmother’s hometown now located in Belarus – and the massacre at Brona Gora in 1942, where the majority of Volchin’s Jews were killed. To Simon, this ‘voyage to the ancestral Jewish homeland was not a religious pilgrimage, but a spiritual one.’17 The quest described in Bashert is inspired by a wish to discover family history, similar to the journeys portrayed in many second-generation memoirs. Simon’s relationship with her grandmother dominates the narrative of Bashert. Although Masha died fifteen years before the book was written, her voice is a strong presence, praising Simon’s efforts to record this family story.18 Masha’s voice occurs in two contrasting ways throughout the text: in transcripts of interviews conducted by Simon in the late 1970s and as a voice in the narrator’s subconscious, which encourages her to persevere with the quest.19 This voice of Masha recurs frequently from the beginning of the text. In the Prologue, Simon writes that: My grandmother’s spirit haunts me still: ‘Mamaleh, it’s not over’, she calls from her grave. Her croaky voice, heavily layered by cigarettes, bitterness, and the fractured intermingling of Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and English, reaches through my skin, pinching my heart. ‘Bless your pupik [navel] [sic]’, she bellows in an imitation of herself, ‘there’s more work to do’.20

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Here is where this text moves away from the second-generation narratives it resembles and into the realm of third-generation texts. Simon’s familial link to the Holocaust is mainly expressed through her grandmother’s fictitious voice, which idealizes Masha’s support and trust in her to pass on the family’s Holocaust story. As this imaginary voice only features in the first part of Bashert, which describes Simon’s journey in Eastern Europe, it is as if Masha posthumously accompanies her on this trip. While the remainder of the book sporadically quotes Simon’s interviews with Masha amongst the unfolding of her historical research, it is the semi-fictionalized grandparent–grandchild relationship which embodies the third-generation experience. For Esther, the second text to be analysed in this chapter, is clearly not a third-generation text.21 Written by Czech-born, Australian-resident Holocaust survivor Alex Sage, this semi-fictionalized memoir is rather a survivor testimony structured around a fictional granddaughter. It is included here because it shows how a Holocaust survivor sees their grandchild as the recipient of Holocaust memory. This work demonstrates just how important grandchildren are to Holocaust survivors: Sage wrote this book for his fictitious granddaughter, a persona he created in order to pass his story on to someone. Its portrayal of an idealized granddaughter makes it a rather unusual survivor testimony. The work describes Sage’s childhood in extreme poverty in pre-war Czechoslovakia, where he left home at the age of just eight. The narrative continues by depicting his tumultuous youth, spent alternately living in orphanages and on the streets, culminating in the Second World War, which he mainly spent in Hungary, before being captured and sent to Mauthausen. Concluding with a visit to his hometown of Chust shortly after liberation in 1945, the book does not mention any descendants. The story is interspersed with correspondence between the narrator and his imaginary granddaughter Esther, serving in the Israel Defense Forces, which function as commentary on the main narrative. For example, in a letter to Esther, he writes, ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to believe the terrible misery I was brought up in. Today, when I sit down to a meal your savta serves up, I can scarcely believe that this isn’t the normal thing and that it wasn’t like this at my parents’ place.’22 The presentation of the letters in italics accentuates their separation from the main narrative, and marking them as fictitious emphasizes the veracity of the remainder of the narrative. Everything Is Illuminated, published when Foer was twenty-five, is often viewed as a representative third-generation text.23 The winner of prizes including the National Jewish Book Award and The Guardian First Book Award,

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it garnered superlatively positive reviews, called ‘a jawdroppingly brilliant book’ in The Guardian and ‘brilliant’ in The New York Times.24 The novel tells of young American protagonist Jonathan who travels to the Ukraine in search of the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis. It is these elements which lead to its consistent categorization as a third-generation text, along with the many interviews Foer has given explaining that it is based on a real trip.25 Foer explains that ‘I did not intend to write Everything Is Illuminated … But as I began to fill pages, I imagined that the result would take the form of a nonfictional chronicle of a trip that I made to Ukraine as a 20-year-old.’26 The result is far from non-fictional – Foer admits that this is partly because ‘I didn’t know what questions to ask, or who to ask, or the necessary names of people, places and things.’27 The novel unfolds in three separate but interweaving strands: Alex, the Ukrainian tour guide tells the story of Jonathan’s visit to the Ukraine in his distinctive and comical English; the story of Trachimbrod, Jonathan’s grandfather’s shtetl, is told through passages which comprise the book that Jonathan is writing about his trip to the Ukraine; and letters from Alex to Jonathan which reflect both on Jonathan’s writing and the trip they took together, written in the same distinctive voice as Alex’s narrative. The purpose of the trip, as narrated by Alex, is the search for Trachimbrod, ostensibly to find Augustine, the woman Jonathan believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis. However, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes concerned with deeper themes, such as questions of truth, responsibility and guilt, particularly in relation to Alex’s grandfather, whose role as driver posits him both as a necessary background character and, ultimately, the very reason that Alex has undertaken this trip. The novel’s climax, where it is revealed that Alex’s grandfather betrayed his Jewish best friend who was then murdered, intertwines the narratives of the past and present. In doing so, it also entwines third-generation Holocaust descendants of both survivors and perpetrators. As Caroline Schaumann notes, ‘grandchildren’s texts … move beyond the dual victim-perpetrator typology, embracing the fact that their fates (like Jonathan’s and Alex’s) have become intertwined and multifaceted’.28 While the motivation for the journey stems from Jonathan’s deceased grandfather, it is Alex’s grandfather who becomes the focus of the narrative. The magical realist style of Everything Is Illuminated invites contemplation of how much stems from Foer’s real-life experience.29 He notes that ‘there really was a photograph of Augustine’ and that a ‘young man named Alex did take me around, although we had absolutely no relationship whatsoever during the

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trip and did not correspond after’.30 His relationship with his grandparents also appears to be consistent with real life: his grandfather passed away in 1954; Jonathan’s grandfather in the novel ‘died only five weeks after coming to the States, just half a year after my mother was born’.31 Foer admits that ‘I didn’t tell my grandmother about the trip [because] she would never have let me go’; in the novel, Jonathan says that ‘ “I couldn’t even tell her I was coming to the Ukraine. She thinks I’m still in Prague.” ’32 These facts, coupled with the fact that the protagonist of Everything Is Illuminated shares its author’s name, means that it can indeed be classified as a third-generation Holocaust text. The reason for the novel’s fantastical narrative means that, notes Robert Eaglestone, ‘it is precisely the distance from the events that leads to its choice of novelistic style’.33 It emerges from a real-life third-generation situation, but the form of its narrative arises from the distance inherent in this very relationship. Like Everything Is Illuminated, Our Holocaust (originally written in Hebrew and first published in 2001) features a protagonist who shares the same name as the author, and won high praise for its innovative treatment of the Holocaust as experienced by later generations.34 The novel depicts a young boy growing up in Israel in the 1980s who is obsessed with the Holocaust. Amir, along with his friend Effi, spends large amounts of time with the Holocaust survivors living on Katznelson Street in Haifa, Israel, whom they designate surrogate grandparents. Like Trachimbrod in Everything Is Illuminated, Katznelson Street is largely fictitious, a place of the author’s imagination that encapsulates his relationship to the Holocaust. To the child characters in this novel, the Holocaust is fascinating, mythical and therefore desirable; it is the unknown aspects which render it alluring, in the absence of factual knowledge. As Amir matures, so does his perspective on the Holocaust, shifting to an obsession with collecting documentation. Just as in Everything Is Illuminated, a grandson of Nazi perpetrators plays a crucial role in the story: the novel’s climax similarly intertwines the fates of third-generation Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. The arrival of a young German in Katznelson Street awakens the narrator’s interest in the fate of the Nazis and their children, a point at which Amir begins to realize that the lines between victims and perpetrators blend in shades of grey. As Amir comes of age, the power shifts from the now elderly and frail survivors to him, which leads him to systematic recording of survivors’ stories. The book’s final section focuses on Amir’s young son and passing this legacy on to him and his generation. Unlike Everything Is Illuminated and Bashert, Our Holocaust is not, strictly speaking, a third-generation Holocaust text. Gutfreund and his alter ego are

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in fact part of what he calls the ‘second-and-a-half ’ generation, meaning that his parents survived the Holocaust as children: ‘Mom was two years old when the war started and Dad was nine, both young enough to recover from the Holocaust and eventually start a normal family.’35 Yet, the most prominent Holocaust survivors portrayed in the novel are the child characters’ surrogate grandparents. The narrative suggests that dealing with the parents’ pasts is in fact too difficult: ‘But beneath the surface was an enchanted tapestry of musts and mustnots. Questions you didn’t ask Mom, questions you didn’t ask Dad. And questions you did ask, but which had no answers.’36 In fact their stories are almost inaccessible: ‘Mom’s story was like Braille – it was the gaps that produced the content.’37 It is perhaps for these reasons that the text predominantly focuses on the more exciting and mysterious surrogate grandfathers, eccentric characters whose existence is a direct consequence of the Holocaust. The narrative explains that: We called him Grandpa – Grandpa Lolek – due to our family’s Law of Compression, a wonderful invention of our parents, the first generation of the Holocaust. Lacking brothers, uncles, fathers and mothers, they had done away with the requirement for precision. Anyone belonging to our parents’ generation was simply called ‘Uncle.’ Their offspring were our cousins.38

While there clearly are Holocaust survivors in the family – including Amir’s grandfather, Grandpa Shalom – by taking on more grandparents who are Holocaust survivors, Amir and Effi broaden their link to the Holocaust.39 It is clear that the link to the Holocaust emerges primarily through the ‘grandparents’ rather than through Amir’s parents. Gutfreund explains in the Afterword that ‘Lolek and Hainek were my father’s cousins’ and that ‘Grandpa Yosef is a purely invented character. He is probably inspired by my true grandfather, Grandpa Shalom.’40 Like Everything Is Illuminated, Our Holocaust is based on the author’s real family. The inclusion of Our Holocaust in this chapter on third-generation texts stems from its portrayal of Holocaust survivors as surrogate grandparents. Between them, these four texts show diverse ways of bearing witness to the Holocaust. For Esther and Bashert offer a complementary comparison in their presentation of an imaginary grandchild and grandparent figure, respectively, both built around existence in another place. In contrast, Everything Is Illuminated and Our Holocaust exhibit a complex, imaginary representation of Holocaust sites as experienced and conceived by the third generation.

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The bridging generation The third generation forms a bridge between Holocaust survivors and future generations, born after the last survivor has passed away. While the second generation emphasizes closeness to the Holocaust, a defining feature of the third generation is its comparative distance from the Holocaust.41 Eva Hoffman describes the second generation as the ‘hinge generation’, referring to their pivotal position ‘in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history, or into myth’.42 The third generation, on the other hand, are the bridging generation: those who will likely live into a time beyond lived memory of the Holocaust, and who will one day form the last living link to the eyewitnesses. The third generation straddles the boundary between what Jan and Aleida Assmann call ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’.43 These terms describe the difference between Holocaust memory during the lifespan of survivors, and what remains after this period. ‘Communicative memory’ denotes the memory or general perception of the Holocaust as linked to survivors’ living memories. Jan Assmann explains that ‘Its most important characteristic is its limited temporal horizon. As all oral history studies suggest, this horizon does not extend more than eighty to (at the very most) one hundred years into the past, which equals three or four generations.’44 Note that the number of generations is named as three or four – this is because the lifespan of a genealogical generation of course varies across families. The period in which the Holocaust occurred is receding from communicative, that is living, memory and into what the Assmanns call ‘cultural memory’. Jan Assmann explains that ‘Just as the communicative memory is characterized by its proximity to the everyday, cultural memory is characterized by its distance from the everyday.’45 Thus, cultural memory describes something more distant, moreover, as Assmann writes, ‘Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (text, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance).’46 Once communicative memory is no more, cultural memory draws on representations and ritualized experience to remember these events. This indicates how Holocaust memory will evolve after the death of the last eyewitnesses. The third generation forms a bridge between those who know the Holocaust as a living memory and those who can only know it as a fixed memory represented by ‘figures of memory’ such as memorials, museums and texts.47

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The literary texts of the third generation therefore do not only bear witness to this generation’s perception of the Holocaust, but link it to both the Holocaust past of survivors and the future Holocaust memory of those born after the last survivor has passed away. As Schaumann explains, ‘As final listeners to the Nazi past, the third generation is thus crucial in the transmission of history.’48 Empirical studies such as Julia Chaitin’s 2002 investigation of Israeli families and Amelia Klein’s 2007 survey of Australian members of the third generation concur. Chaitin declares that ‘The third generation, whose direct contact with victims of the Holocaust helped shape their understanding of the Holocaust, will be the last personal link in their families to victims of the Holocaust.’49 Klein observes that ‘The third generation’s temporal distance from the Holocaust and access to information, such as that encapsulated in a video testimony enables them to make novel decisions about their role in remembering.’50 Recent years have also seen the rise of third-generation groups in countries such as the United States and Australia. These largely self-defined peer groups provide an opportunity for those with a common background to come together, similar to the second-generation groups that emerged in the 1970s. Daniel Brooks, the director of 3GNY, a group based in New York, provides the following description: ‘We, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, come from diverse backgrounds and work in various fields, but we all share a unique family history. We are also the last living link to Holocaust survivors. It is only through us that future generations will know the actual stories of our grandparents’ survival and the unimaginable losses of that generation.’51 This statement poignantly encapsulates the third generation’s position in the generational chain. Australian third-generation group 3GH gives a similar definition, stating that the ‘third generation are a unique population as they carry the deep ancestral ties – close bonds with ageing survivor grandparents and with the second generation – in addition to strong, articulate minds and slightly broken hearts.’52 That both groups use the word ‘unique’ to describe the third generation emphasizes this generation’s distinctive perspective on their role in Holocaust memory.

Writing the bridge As I have argued so far, an important feature of the third generation is their symbol of continuity with the past, signifying a future. To Holocaust survivors, the existence of grandchildren tends to cement the re-establishment of the cycle of generations. Hoffman explains that ‘the restoration of an affirmative order

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and sequences of life brings reassurance to the survivors so that losses that were unbearable can now be faced.’53 Writing by and about the third generation often describes their relationships with their Holocaust survivor grandparents and their second-generation parents. Despite the fact that the second generation lies in between Holocaust survivors and the third generation, there is a direct link between survivors and their grandchildren which is central to the third generation’s identity. When second-generation texts discuss the third generation, they often indicate a desire to protect this generation from the Holocaust. This urge to protect their children by controlling how and when they find out about the Holocaust, understandable though it is, may in fact dampen the special dialogue that can exist between survivors and the third generation. In The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Raphael Baker writes, ‘I often wonder if it is fair to break my children’s hearts and tell them about their grandparents’ lives … But I know they must be told.’54 Despite writing that ‘My father tells them that the tattoo on his arm is a telephone number, but they already know’, Baker believes that his children ‘must be told’ about the Holocaust.55 Similarly, Aaron Hass voices concerns about his daughter, asking ‘How to balance my desire for my daughter to know and my hope that she develop as a fearless, undespairing individual?’56 Sharing the concerns of Baker and Hass, in The War After: Living with the Holocaust Anne Karpf describes asking her mother to refrain from discussing her experiences with Karpf ’s daughter: ‘we asked her to mention the war as little as possible in front of B: we wanted to be the ones to explain it to her, as and when we saw fit’.57 While at this point in time B is a young child, this action potentially limits communication between a survivor and her own granddaughter. This may be because, as Sylvie K. Schapira found, the ‘symptomatology for the second generation is still unresolved and is now transmitted to the third generation’.58 The second generation echoes survivors’ desire to protect their children from the Holocaust. Yet, such attempts at protecting the third generation potentially interfere with its natural position as the last living link. While many Holocaust survivors told their children little about their traumatic past, confiding in their grandchildren has proved for some to be much easier. This continuity is even noted by second-generation scholars such as Hass, who writes that the ‘third generation, one generation removed from the survivor, provides a more comfortable and, in some cases, more receptive and interested audience. Survivors can relax somewhat, therefore, as they and their stories are assured of continuity.’59 Hoffman confirms this, asserting that ‘Perhaps there is less danger, from the greater generational distance, that the fraught cargo of guilt,

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fear and sorrow will be transferred directly into the listener’s psyche.’60 The texts analysed in this chapter testify to a strong grandparent–grandchild relationship (with the exception of Everything Is Illuminated, as Jonathan’s grandfather died before he was born) and rarely mention the second generation.61 For Esther shows this clearly: in the narrator’s first letter to Esther, he writes that ‘I know your mother could not tell you much about my past, for the simple reason that I told her very little.’62 He explains that ‘There was no opportunity for talks about our pasts.’63 In this case, the third generation presents an opportunity missed with the second. The letter continues by stating that the ‘thought of you reading them strengthens my resolve to revisit these dark memories, and to struggle now with the words which must convey them’, which demonstrates the significance in the continuity embodied by direct descendants as listeners.64 Perhaps even the different timing of the third generation compared with the second generation makes a difference to how Holocaust memory is passed on. The third generation is not only a recipient of this continuity, but a promoter of it. In both Bashert and Our Holocaust, the narrative describes how transmission to the next generation is occurring, thus positing the third generation in a chain of witnessing. In the closing pages of Bashert, Simon summarizes her odyssey in three distinct phases, writing that: ‘What began as a search for missing facts, for missing relatives, ultimately became a search for myself. Yes, the branch was long and tangled, but I found my end … . It can be pulled in a smooth, even line, much farther than I can go. This is the cord of the future, the one I hand to my daughter.’65 Thus, Simon portrays herself as an intermediary, asserting that the search for her family’s Holocaust past progresses from these relatives, to herself, to her daughter. By presenting herself as a link in the chain from her grandmother’s generation to her own daughter rather than a passive recipient of Holocaust memory, Simon actively takes on the role of third-generation witness. Thus, such continuity does not only mean the existence of succeeding generations, but transmitting Holocaust memory to them. The third generation as the bridging generation is also evident in Our Holocaust, where Amir’s five-year-old son Yariv plays an important role. The final section of the book is entitled Yariv – significantly, it contains the testimonies of both the narrator’s grandparents and his father. By presenting these ancestral testimonies in a chapter dedicated to his son, the narrator explicitly links the two. Patterns of generational behaviour are cemented when the text describes Amir bringing Yariv to Attorney Perl’s hardware store – a site of Holocaust memory in this text – just as his father had brought him, noting that ‘Traces of Shoah lurked in the most surprising places, like the little shops where Dad went

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to order wallpaper or buy light bulbs. He often took me with him to Attorney Perl’s hardware store on Yonah HaNavi Street.’66 Pivotally, it is young Yariv who discovers Attorney Perl’s meticulous documentation of the Holocaust, housed in his hardware shop: The nuts bored Yariv. He started inspecting the little drawers along the back wall. He carefully pulled out one drawer, wondering if he would be rebuked, and revealed that the drawers did not contain the store inventory, as I had believed all those years, but rather notes of paper. The little drawers that filled the back room contained index cards bearing crowded notations.67

Each card describes a Nazi, what they did and if and how they were punished – a record painstakingly kept by Attorney Perl. The discovery of this archive by Yariv places him as the next link in Gutfreund’s chain of witnessing; moreover, he becomes an essential part of Amir’s attempt to record Holocaust memory. Shortly afterwards, Amir begins to interview survivors and includes Yariv in this process: ‘I set up meetings with family members and come to demand their recollections. I bring Yariv, the representative of sweetness and charm. We work as a team.’68 Once again, the third generation actively takes on the role of witness: not only preserving survivors’ stories, but involving the next generation in the process. Such continuity further cements the third generation as the bridging generation – a critical link in the chain of Holocaust memory. Yet, for other members of the third generation, it is distance rather than continuity which dictates their relationship to the Holocaust. Of the texts analysed in this chapter, Everything Is Illuminated in particular testifies to such a defining distance. As Foer’s grandfather passed away before his birth, such a direct link from survivor to the third generation is impossible. Rather than interviewing his grandfather or simply asking him about his life, Foer can only access this past indirectly. That he chooses to do this through place – by visiting the Ukraine, trying to find Trachimbrod, and writing his own version of events – emphasizes the link between place and event, and perhaps even suggests that place becomes a substitute for asking a Holocaust survivor. Alex’s strand of the novel questions what this means, asking ‘How can you do this to your grandfather, writing about his life in such a manner? Could you write in this manner if he was alive? And if not, what does that signify?’69 As Jonathan’s return communications are not included in the novel, we can only speculate on the answers. Indeed, Alex’s narrative gently criticizes the Trachimbrod thread, which creates a meta-narrative that highlights problems with fictionalizing the Holocaust and the repercussions of visiting sites of Holocaust memory as

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a substitute for talking to an eyewitness. The narrative emphasizes the third generation’s distance from the Holocaust, showing how a place can never become a comprehensive substitute for survivors’ versions of events. As the bridging generation, the third generation forms a link from the Holocaust to the future. Despite their distance from the Holocaust, they form continuity between the past and the future, occupying a position which the second generation cannot. Yet, for those who never met their survivor grandparents, such as Foer’s alter ego Jonathan, distance dominates this continuity, necessitating the use of imagination in deploying place to bear witness.

Witnessing through an idealized grandparent– grandchild relationship Both Bashert and For Esther portray an imaginary grandparent–grandchild relationship, which becomes the main motif for witnessing the Holocaust. These texts are semi-fictionalized memoirs which deploy imagination as compensation for the last living link. Analysis of For Esther reveals that the imagined granddaughter is in many ways problematic: she is the perfect listener, and a real member of the third generation may well not live up to her standards. It shows the perils of a survivor imagining what the third generation should be. As Schaumann explains, ‘For grandchildren, the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is tied to the biographies of various family members over multiple generations, with different perspectives and interventions. Thus, creative imagination becomes the necessary, appropriate, and imperative approach to the past.’70 Bashert portrays the narrator’s grandmother posthumously accompanying her on her journey to sites of Holocaust memory. This fictional component in bearing witness to the Holocaust demonstrates that for the third generation, imagination is a crucial part of bearing witness using place. These fictional characters provide strategic encouragement for the narrator protagonists, thus suggesting the importance of intergenerational support for the transmission of Holocaust memory. While Sage does not explain his choice of format, he does state in the ‘Author’s Note’ that he decided ‘to use a fictional grand-daughter who asks me to tell her my story’.71 Thus, for this survivor, being asked to give testimony, even by an imaginary granddaughter, is important. This recalls Dori Laub’s theory of testimony, and the requirement of a listener to witness the giving of testimony by a survivor.72 By creating a granddaughter as

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this essential listener, Sage’s memoir unequivocally anoints the third generation as the recipient of Holocaust memory. Like many third-generation texts, For Esther largely circumvents the second generation. The sole mention of Sage’s daughter (Esther’s mother) occurs when the narrator explains why he neglected to tell her about his past life – all other mentions of the narrator’s children are in reference to keeping secrets from them.73 For example, Esther writes, ‘Sabah, I don’t want you to write about it to my parents, but I met a very nice boy at the officer’s course, whom I like very much.’74 By allowing the fictional granddaughter to entrust her deepest secrets to him, the author reciprocates her actions by entrusting his story to her. Conversely, because he confides his story in her, she must confide something equally important in him. A couple of letters later, it is the narrator’s turn to disclose a secret – he has been ill in hospital: ‘I didn’t tell your parents about all this – I didn’t want to worry them. You don’t have to tell them either, let this be our little secret.’75 Once again, the second generation is excluded: the narrator maintains distance from his own children. The reply to this letter involves yet more secrets: ‘One secret deserves another, and here is mine: I am going out with a boy, a Yemenite boy, my own age.’76 Once more, Esther implores the narrator: ‘Please, not a word to my parents about my new friend.’77 By asking each other to keep significant secrets from the second generation, survivor and granddaughter strengthen their bond, thus laying the foundation for the trusted transfer of Holocaust memory. The fictional granddaughter as listener and recipient of Holocaust testimony validates the third generation as a crucial link in the chain of Holocaust witnessing. For Esther confirms Hass’s and Hoffman’s claims that Holocaust survivors may find it easier to confide in the third generation than the second generation.78 The fictionalized granddaughter also means that reassurance is provided when needed: Esther gives implicit and explicit encouragement, while the narrator asks for her opinion, complains about his progress and is fortified by her support to continue writing his testimony. However, the fact that both Esther and these letters are fictitious means that their content is effectively Sage’s own perspective on his work. In an early letter, Esther writes that his story ‘is very depressing. And yet, I wouldn’t want you to stop telling me about it.’79 Pivotally, because she accepts the depressing nature of his story, the narrator does not have to worry about censoring it for her; she is a perfect listener. When the narrator directly asks Esther her opinion of his writing, the reply is (predictably) reassuring: ‘I might be somewhat biased, but I think it makes good reading. I find myself impatient to know what happens next … . ’80 This encouragement still does not

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quell the narrator’s uncertainty, however, and his next letter is full of self-doubt: ‘I am finding the going very hard. I think, after all, that I cannot finish this project.’81 This crisis of confidence is followed by a strongly worded reply from Esther: Sabah, I exhort you to go on! … But it’s not just for me that I urge you to write; it’s for those who weren’t as lucky as you – those who didn’t survive. Listen to their voices: they demand that your story be told. How else will my generation know what occurred unless people like you tell it how it was?82

Yet, again, the fictional granddaughter has told her grandfather precisely what he needs to hear. By emphasizing the importance of Holocaust survivors as primary witnesses, this letter iterates that the third generation is dependent on survivors for first-hand knowledge of the Holocaust. The voice of Esther also accords with Berger’s theory of third-generation witnessing, particularly his assumption that the lost living link leads to problematic representations.83 But, the significance of this is dulled by the fact that a survivor created this character: such an obliging representation of the third generation may not exist in reality. The narrator’s response to Esther’s plea is utterly predictable: ‘I understand now what I must do. It will be enough if only you read this story.’84 The use of such a meta-text to create and resolve such a drama not only idealizes the third generation, but highlights survivors’ insecurities about passing on their testimony. This idealized granddaughter illustrates the survivor’s perspective on giving testimony, rather than providing a meaningful portrayal of the third generation. This theme of an idealized third generation is further explored in the final letter which concludes the book. The narrator claims that ‘Everything in these pages is true – the truth as I experienced it.’85 By including such a statement in the fictitious section of the book, Sage draws attention to the complicated nature of truth in his work. Writing that ‘Everything in these pages is true’ in a letter to a fictional character blurs the boundary between truth and fiction; perhaps suggesting that this text is akin to Richard Freadman’s idea of faction.86 Particularly as the narrator concludes by thanking his granddaughter for her support, writing that ‘you, my dear grand-daughter, have given me the strength to revisit the past and complete my journey’, which is quite an accolade for an imaginary granddaughter.87 According such significance to a fictional character confirms the importance of a listener, once again confirming Laub’s theory that ‘Testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody [sic]: to somebody they have been waiting for for a long time.’88

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The creation of a seemingly perfect granddaughter for this purpose echoes Sharon Kangisser Cohen’s findings that survivors fear that the next generation will not adequately continue to bear witness. In a study on Holocaust survivors in Sydney, she reports that: ‘As they grow older, they realize that they are reliant on the next generation to preserve their memories, the story, and to maintain remembrance of those souls who perished … They do not feel that the next generation is willing or able to look at the Shoah [sic] closely and squarely without recoiling from it.’89 Thus, while survivors realize that Holocaust memory will be transferred to younger generations, they do not feel confident in these generations’ ability to commemorate it sufficiently. Sage’s creation of a fictional grandchild who responds exactly as he desires therefore reflects wider survivor sentiments about the role of younger generations in future Holocaust memory. Whether a real grandchild would respond in this way is another question altogether. For Esther is an important work because it is an example of how a survivor views the third generation, and more importantly, how he sees their role in perpetuating Holocaust memory. In Bashert, it is the granddaughter who does the imagining: by engaging with Masha and researching her life, Simon creates a connection between herself and her relatives who were victims of the Holocaust. Masha’s voice provides explicit encouragement for Simon’s search, echoing the situation with Esther in For Esther. Once again, it is the person who the narrator is writing for whose voice appears at key moments in the text, providing just the encouragement the writer needs. As with For Esther, the narrator cites imaginary quotes from her grandmother which address her insecurities about what she is writing. Early in Bashert, the narrator expresses self-doubt, asking ‘Who am I to write about a life I know nothing about?’90 This is immediately countered by Masha’s reassurance: ‘At home, lying in bed, I hear my grandmother speaking. Am I dreaming? “Go back,” she says. “So many times, you wrote about things you didn’t experience. And you made it your own.” “But Gram,” I say, about to fall into familiar insecurity. “Gram?” The next sound I hear is my alarm clock going off.’91 Not only does this passage give the narrator her deceased grandmother’s approval, but it encourages her to visit sites of memory in order to bear witness to the Holocaust. Masha’s command to ‘Go back’ tells the narrator to travel to the Ukraine as part of writing her family story. The narrator clearly needs Masha’s approval, for Masha is the reason that she is writing this story. Here, the narrator expresses doubts about the authenticity of representing something not personally experienced by her. Yet, by including her grandmother’s approval in the very piece of writing that she is apprehensive about, she circumvents this doubt and

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therefore endorses her own version of events. In contrast to For Esther, where the imaginary granddaughter reassures the survivor that his story has a listener, in Bashert, the grandmother’s imaginary voice gives approval to third-generation witnessing, assuring the granddaughter that her version of the grandmother’s story counts. Thus, Bashert not only encapsulates third-generation witnessing, but validates it. While approval to bear witness on her grandmother’s behalf is explicitly given in Masha’s voice, Simon’s trip to Eastern Europe is an important part of this puzzle. The narrator makes it clear that she is testifying on behalf of her grandmother, even with her blessing: I’ve been a writer long enough to know that the more people I question, the more versions I will get. It’s up to me to pick the best ones. But can I do it? Can I? ‘Yes’, my grandmother says gently, but with the kind of tone that lets me know there’s no choice. ‘Write my story’, she repeats. ‘Without our stories, we are nothing.’92

The narrator needs her grandmother’s story to access the Holocaust, because she does not have her own Holocaust story. By accessing the Holocaust through her grandmother and the places where it happened, Simon attempts to imbue her writing about it with the privilege of a primary witness. But, just like in For Esther, the fact that the same author provides both these narratives illustrates only one perspective, along with her ability to mould her grandmother’s words accordingly. Taking on the role of others who are unable to travel or testify is also evident in Simon’s journey to Eastern Europe. She explains to her tour group that ‘I’m planning to write a book about my grandmother’s life. She was born in a small town near Brest. My mother and her brothers and sisters spent a lot of time there before the Cossacks wiped out their childhood. Unfortunately, they can’t come here themselves. I have come for them.’93 Thus, just as Simon writes her grandmother’s story, she represents her deceased ancestors on her journey to sites of Holocaust memory. The description of this trip emphasizes the third generation’s position as the last living link to the Holocaust, as well as their distance from this inherited past. The narrative suggests that Masha is in fact travelling with the narrator. A pivotal moment occurs when the group visits the Brest Fortress and Simon is introduced to someone from her grandmother’s village, Volchin: ‘My head vibrates with noise. I can make out one thin, doglike trill. I know what it must be. The sound of my grandmother sobbing.’94 Encountering someone who knew her relatives, near the place where they lived, causes Simon to wish her grandmother back into existence, if only to join in the sorrow.

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But, later on, in Volchin, visiting her family’s former house, even Masha is silent: ‘I listen for voices. I’m surprised that my grandmother doesn’t speak … . There’s nothing. Even the ghosts are dead.’95 This passage confirms how the third generation utilizes place to create a connection to the Holocaust, portraying an encounter with a site of memory in order to bear witness. Simon confirms the role that imagination plays in her work. Reflecting on her visit to Volchin, she writes, ‘Though I now have a sense of the physicality of her village … I learned little more of the background that shaped Masha’s early years. But with my enhanced visual context and by meeting people of her next generation, I can use more of my imagination to fill the gaps.’96 This amalgam of memory, facts and imagination is a direct consequence of the distance in third-generation witnessing and shows that for the grandchildren, imagination is necessary to fill such gaps. Bashert is a typical example of witnessing by the third generation: it combines stories from a survivor grandparent with the experience of visiting Holocaust sites, completing it with imagination.

Witnessing the Holocaust through imaginary places The portrayal of imaginary places in both Everything Is Illuminated and Our Holocaust is key to how each novel bears witness to the Holocaust. The fictionalized representation of the places confirms Schaumann’s observation that third-generation ‘Narrators turn to fantasy and imagination when memories are not available, deliberating the processes of mediation and distortion.’97 Place is the motif around which fictional third-generation witnessing revolves, because that is where memory is stored. It is an opportunity to rewrite the Holocaust narrative and situate it in different spaces. In Everything Is Illuminated, this place is Jonathan’s grandfather’s shtetl Trachimbrod; while in Our Holocaust, it occurs in Katznelson Street, a fictional area of Haifa. The search for Trachimbrod in Everything Is Illuminated, told in the strand of the novel narrated by Alex, begins with a sentiment found in many secondgeneration memoirs: ‘ “I want to see Trachimbrod,” the hero said. “To see what it’s like, how my grandfather grew up, where I would be now if it weren’t for the war.” ’98 Just like many other heritage tourists, this character seeks what Kugelmass describes as ‘the clarity of place that only direct experience can provide’99 – and thus places great importance on this town as a link to the past. As in Bashert, this quotation demonstrates the importance to Jonathan of finding a personal link to a place he has never visited, in order to bear witness to the Holocaust.

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Yet, in this novel, this sentiment is not directly addressed; instead, it is developed obliquely through the story of Trachimbrod’s history from 1791 until 1942 – the only section of the narrative told from the perspective of Jonathan himself. The search for Trachimbrod unfolds in a delicately constructed story that ultimately leads to the climax of the novel. In Alex’s words: There were no people anywhere, and when there was a person, the person could not help us. ‘Go away.’ ‘There is no Trachimbrod here.’ ‘I do not know what you are speaking of.’ ‘You are lost.’ It was seeming as if we were in the wrong country, or the wrong century, or as if Trachimbrod had disappeared, and so had the memory of it.100

Linking place with memory, this quotation suggests that the outright denial of Trachimbrod’s existence alludes to amnesia about the Ukraine’s Jewish population, while the tone of the locals’ comments indicates hostility, thereby suggesting anti-Semitic tendencies and bystander guilt among the local population. Moreover, this quotation introduces the questions of memory, place and time that concern the novel. Alex’s observations indicate that time and place are inextricably intertwined. The narrative suggests that while Trachimbrod is a place, it belongs in a different time and hence can only exist in memory. But, does the memory of something exist if there is no one that remembers it? Perhaps only if this memory has been transferred elsewhere – as James E. Young has argued, creating memorials releases us from the obligation of remembering, and even allows us to forget.101 This is indeed the case in Everything Is Illuminated: the narrative consistently presents evidence of memory in the form of someone remembering, thereby demonstrating the ongoing survival of memory. And, so happens in the search for Trachimbrod: eventually, Jonathan, Alex and his grandfather come across an elderly woman outside a dilapidated house, where ‘The house was white wood that was falling off of itself. There were four windows, and one of them was broken. As I walked more proximal, I could perceive that it was a woman roosting on the steps.’102 Alex gently questions her: ‘I pointed to the car. “We are searching for Trachimbrod.” “Oh,” she said, and then released a river of tears. “You are here. I am it.” ’103 Thus, there is at least one person who remembers Trachimbrod. Or more precisely, this woman who appears to be the sole survivor of Trachimbrod has become the memory of the shtetl itself; as Eaglestone writes, ‘She is a living memorial, and a survivor of an atrocity.’104 By ascribing the memory of Trachimbrod to a person, Foer assigns it the attributes of a living being, including a limited lifespan, thus suggesting its limitations and demonstrating the importance of a living link for passing on memory.

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As it happens, the memory of Trachimbrod has been archived not far away. Describing the woman’s house, Alex notes that ‘There were many boxes, which were overflowing with items. These had writing on their sides … . Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front.’105 The house is full of boxes containing the remnants of Trachimbrod. Not only do these boxes contain what is left of Trachimbrod, but in effect are Trachimbrod, in its memorial (or post-memorial) form. In this manifestation of memory, then, the woman is the memory, the house contains her memory, and Trachimbrod does not exist except in memory. By literally placing Trachimbrod in a box, Foer gives it a physical location that can be visited, picked up, sorted through, discovered and, ultimately, remembered. This also demonstrates how an archive of memory differs from what it is that it commemorates.106 In signifying Trachimbrod by a collection of lifeless boxes overseen by an elderly woman, Foer relegates the living Trachimbrod to the irrevocable past – a beguiling metaphor for the remains of this shtetl. The mythical nature of the house indicates Foer’s thirdgeneration perspective: a place created through imagination because the reality has disappeared, it is an example of what the Holocaust has become for the third generation. The existence and form of Trachimbrod are further complicated by a description of the characters’ visit to the former physical location, which concurs with Chapter 1’s findings that survivors are pivotal to making such places meaningful. Contradictory conversations enforce its mythical nature: ‘ “There is nothing,” she said. “I already told you. Nothing. It used to be four kilometers distance from here, but everything that still exists from Trachimbrod is in this house.” “You say it is four kilometers from here?” “There is no Trachimbrod anymore. It ended fifty years ago.” ’107 Again, the issue is how the memory of a place can exist if the place itself no longer does. By containing the memory of Trachimbrod in the house, yet simultaneously stating that it no longer exists, this passage plays on the notions of memory and place, and whether one can exist without the other. It also questions whether the memory of a place can be contained separate to the place itself. When the characters arrive at the site of Trachimbrod, there is literally nothing, as shown in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. After all, if all of Trachimbrod is contained in the house, then there can only be nothing at its original physical location. Once again, memory and place come under scrutiny: the text seems to be asking, if there is nothing there – no evidence of a town having existed at its physical location – can it be remembered, or did it

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even exist at all? The concept of nothing is a powerful remembrance of what was lost, which the reader is aware of through Jonathan’s novel and fictional history of Trachimbrod. There is a further twist to this meditation on memory: just as in Return to Auschwitz Kitty Hart-Moxon’s testimony transforms the site of Auschwitz, the field that was Trachimbrod becomes meaningful to those present once the elderly woman describes what she witnessed there.108 While there is only a stone memorial physically there, the witness recounting the story allows the empty field to become Trachimbrod. This witness is the link between the site and the event; only in her presence does the memory inhabit the place. The horrific nature of what she witnessed remains unimaginable: ‘It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.’109 Thus, the elderly woman makes the site Trachimbrod. Without her, it is a field. The cementing of Everything Is Illuminated as an example of third-generation Holocaust witnessing can be found in the history of Trachimbrod that the fictional Jonathan is writing. At several points, this narrative provides validation of the novel’s approach by defending the nature of memory. It describes a 1791 Shabbat service, when a Trachimbrod inhabitant addresses the congregation: ‘The what, Didl said, is not so important, but that we should remember. It is the act of remembering, the process of remembrance, the recognition of our past…’ [italics in original].110 This justifies Foer’s fictional account, by suggesting that remembering the shtetl in fictional form is akin to remembering the shtetl itself. The text therefore claims that such witnessing is valid because it is the form rather than the content that counts. However fictional Foer’s novel, it is still witnessing: it describes his version of what he has seen. This is the crux of third-generation Holocaust memory: representation of the Holocaust by this generation increasingly relies on imagination, thereby producing a text that differs from the testimonial format of survivors. It is because of this, not despite it, that such a text creates third-generation Holocaust witnessing. Third-generation witnessing through place takes on a different form in Our Holocaust. Unlike the other examples discussed in this book, not all the sites of memory in this text are located in Eastern Europe. In fact, Our Holocaust only fleetingly refers to a contemporary trip to Eastern Europe. The sentence ‘We took a trip with Dad to trace our roots in Poland, to see it all’ is followed by a sentence referring to someone else’s trip.111 In this text, the journey to Poland is less significant because memory is associated with other places. But, the brief descriptions of the narrator Amir’s visit to Poland confirm the link between place and event: ‘When we went to Poland with Dad to see his stories made real (the imaginary picture solidified, we could even take photographs), we discovered

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that we did not need the Holocaust stories as much as we wanted the stories of his childhood – the happy one, the forgotten one, in Bochnia before the war.’112 Moreover, this passage also shows that for Amir visiting these places changed his perception of the Holocaust: it loses the mystery and sense of adventure that his childhood self found in it. This leads to a turning point in the novel, when Amir begins to comprehend the horrific reality of the Holocaust as opposed to his childhood impressions: ‘There was a certain discord between our childhood stories and the reality we found … . Our memories stood gravely in attendance, prepared to defend the childhood stories in this complicated suit – after all, this conspiratorial reality was scandalous. But as we walked behind Dad through the ghetto, reality went through the stories with a fine-tooth comb, dismantling everything.’113 This passage demonstrates the impact that visiting Holocaust sites can have on inherited memories, highlighting the discrepancy between the physical reality of places and their imagination as postmemory. Just like Karpf in The War After and Lisa Appignanesi in Losing the Dead, visiting the actual places necessitates confrontation of postmemory with reality.114 Yet, in contrast to these texts, this trip to Poland is not extensively dwelled on in Our Holocaust, showing that in this novel, a place for the Holocaust lies elsewhere. Its significance lies in its occurrence within the context of the narrator’s search for documentation, thus precipitating a further search for facts and demonstrating Amir’s shift from childhood imaginings to an adult keen on recording survivors’ memories. Rather than focusing on Eastern Europe, Our Holocaust presents several other places where the Holocaust persists into the present. The novel’s action centres on Kiryat Haim, an area of Haifa inhabited by many Holocaust survivors: ‘In that neighborhood, the Holocaust – the Shoah – had never ended. People had settled there after the war with their memories, their stories, their grudges. Like a huge flock of storks, they came all at once and landed near the woods on the edge of Kiryat Haim, and there they remained. Sick people, confined by their memories.’115 This passage demonstrates the importance of memory in creating a link to the Holocaust: it claims that the Holocaust ‘had never ended’ because its memory lives on. Other passages confirm that memory defines the inhabitants of this area; for instance, further description notes that ‘Everyone in the neighborhood had two types of past: there was “what you did during the war” and “where you came from before the war.” The present and the future languished insignificantly in the distance.’116 Thus, for the young Amir and his friend Effi, the memories of these survivors are

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not only the key to what happened in the Holocaust, but provide something desirable to emulate. In this novel, categorization of the present and future as unimportant emphasizes the unmitigated significance of the Holocaust. For example, Gutfreund writes that ‘Way back at the beginning of time, in 1939, the Big Bang had occurred, and the meaning of its visible crumbs would become apparent only if we could comprehend the instant of that explosion.’117 Such imagery echoes Hoffman’s description of the Holocaust as ‘the dark root from which the world sprang;’ thus denoting the universal centrality of the Holocaust to those in the second and third generations.118 This image of the Holocaust as the source of the world underlies the children’s fascination with it: ‘We liked to listen to them, although in our presence (by Grandpa Yosef ’s orders) they did not delve too deeply into the Shoah itself. We sat at their feet, an inner ring inside the circle of tea-drinkers, enjoying a wonderful childhood in the shadow of their terrors.’119 As their childhood relationship to these survivors encapsulates a sense of wonderment, the sharp contrast between the ‘wonderful childhood’ of Amir and Effi and the unknown traumas of the Holocaust survivors highlights the gulf between them. As the narrative unfolds, these characters try to bridge this gap, with the ultimate goal of trying to reach the Holocaust itself. This theme is strongest in the text’s early section, culminating in the episode where Amir and Effi ‘visit’ Buchenwald. While Katznelson Street is constructed by Holocaust survivors’ memories, the section where the narrator describes simulating Buchenwald alludes to the narrator creating his own memory of the Holocaust. Unlike the other places depicted in the novel, Amir physically creates Buchenwald within himself by embarking on a hunger strike, explaining that ‘We had finally found a magic key to the Shoah: hunger was something we too could experience. Hunger. That, we could do ourselves.’120 Raising the question of whether it is possible to experience a place without literally visiting it, this episode evokes the Holocaust as a bodily experience. Similar in theme to Karpf ’s experience of involuntary scratching, for Amir, the hunger strike is a reverential, religious experience that he expects to bring him closer to the Holocaust: ‘It was not a game played for immediate victory, but in the service of the senses, to acquire skill, depth, and the possibility of touching the truth.’121 Just as Karpf writes that ‘I’d always envied my parents their suffering;’ and that ‘through the scratching … it was as if I’d finally managed to prise off some particle of my mother’s suffering and make it my own’, Amir’s hunger strike is an attempt at emulating Holocaust survivors.122 For Amir, who becomes physically ill and then decides to start eating again, this

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episode is highly significant: ‘at the moment when I touched the door to Dov’s room, on the border between an Israeli kibbutz and Cell Block 55 in Buchenwald, I touched a speck of Shoah. Only a hint, just for a moment, but I will never again be as close.’123 Amir’s tiny taste of what it might have been like to experience the Holocaust signifies just as much what he will never know or understand. Moreover, now he has a ‘memory’ of the Holocaust: he has ‘been’ to Buchenwald. By evoking a place through experience, the text draws on imagination to bear witness to what is known and to what can never be known. Attorney Perl’s hardware store is the other key location for the Holocaust in Our Holocaust. As mentioned above, it is where the transmission of the Holocaust from Amir’s father, to Amir, to his son Yariv occurs. But, it is also where survivor Attorney Perl gives his knowledge to the adult Amir: ‘He spread before me the treasures of the Holocaust, rolling them out like a fabric merchant. Together we tore up everything I had learned at school; the Shoah recited in ceremonies, the placards displaying numbers of casualties. It was a competition of sorts, a hope to impress, to shock, to emphasize the magnitude of the catastrophe.’124 His archive of index cards documenting Nazi deeds and punishments is, like the Trachimbrod house in Everything Is Illuminated, a site of Holocaust memory. Attorney Perl introduces a different facet of the Holocaust to Amir: the crimes committed by individual Nazis and their post-war fates. While Attorney Perl cautions Amir against placing too much significance in this archive – ‘What happened there, in the Shoah, is more complex than what you can derive from my cards’ – this is merely a warning: after his death, Attorney Perl leaves the cards to Amir.125 Taking on this knowledge gives Amir a further aspect in his increasingly multifaceted view of the Holocaust. Just as the Buchenwald experience allows him to physically feel as though he was experiencing the Holocaust, the interaction with Attorney Perl shows him that people actively perpetrated the Holocaust, thus embellishing the character’s postmemory. As a third-generation text, it illustrates the myriad ways this generation may try and access memories of the Holocaust. Both Everything Is Illuminated and Our Holocaust, therefore, embody thirdgeneration Holocaust witnessing: rather than presenting factual accounts of visiting sites of Holocaust memory, the combination of distance and losing the living link means that the places of memory can only be imagined. Expressing memory through place demonstrates the important link between place and event, showing that memory does indeed, to paraphrase Pierre Nora, cling to places.126 Moreover, the vastly different ways in which these texts create these places hint at the diversity of third-generation Holocaust memory.

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The place of third-generation Holocaust witnessing The analysis of third-generation Holocaust witnessing through the prism of place reveals a subtle shift in the source of Holocaust memory from survivors to sites of memory. Third-generation Holocaust texts show what is lost in this transition: they replace the voice of survivors with imaginary ones or imagined places. They show that distance from the Holocaust does not mean it ceases to be represented, but that it takes a form that incorporates this distance. The study of these forms results in a broadened understanding of what the Holocaust is, showing that third-generation representations are still about the Holocaust. In addition, it suggests that sites of memory play a significant role in the future of Holocaust memory. Just as visiting Holocaust sites allows the second generation to say ‘I was there’ and therefore confirms their closeness to the Holocaust, creating imaginary places lets the third generation express their more distant link to the Holocaust. This is because the third generation’s perspective on the Holocaust is naturally embedded into their representations – just as in any survivor testimony.127 Yet, they approach it from the perspective of a familial link, thus attesting to the ripples of the Holocaust felt in later generations. Third-generation Holocaust texts bear witness to the existence of Holocaust memory in the third generation. Moreover, this chapter has challenged the notion that later generations are not capable of representing the Holocaust. It has shown that the third generation has its own way of witnessing the Holocaust which is just as valid as the second generation’s. Crucially, this chapter has shown that memory is still entwined with place in the third generation, even though distance from both is much more apparent. Three generations from the Holocaust, real environments of memory are being replaced by sites of memory. Relieving the third generation from its obligation to remember releases the imagination and creates space for third-generation Holocaust witnessing. In doing so, the third generation bridges the space between survivors and sites as sources for Holocaust remembrance.

4

The Paradox of Place and Bearing Witness: Manipulated Topographies, Pilgrimage and Holocaust Tourism The Holocaust has morphed from a set of historical events into a mosaic of grassy fields, unmarked burial sites, dilapidated synagogues and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. These diverse sites are united in their link with the Holocaust, whether as places of pre-Holocaust Jewish life or sites where events of the Holocaust happened, or both. They appear to signify not only the destruction wrought by the Holocaust but also its consequences: a startling absence of Jews from Eastern Europe. Such sites appear to offer understanding of the Holocaust through visiting them. The role of place in bearing witness to the Holocaust is entwined with visitors’ experiences of visiting sites of memory. The diversity of texts by different generations – survivor memoirs which testify to the unmuteness of sites, second-generation texts which seek traces of the Holocaust at these sites and third-generation texts which create sites anew – suggests that place in fact has a paradoxical role in bearing witness to the Holocaust. While sites of memory have an indisputable link with the past, the differing interpretations show that this link is created by visitors’ encounters with the site as much as by the site itself. Visitors’ actions at Holocaust sites, discussed in the previous three chapters, are only one side of the story. These sites are not simply a blank canvas for the performance of remembrance rituals, they have an evolutionary history spanning the nearly seven decades since the Holocaust. Notwithstanding changes in natural vegetation, and of course changes in the purpose of Holocaust sites, the evolution into tourist attractions necessitates, at the very least, a reappraisal of the site. Yet, this manipulation can lead to a biased narrative, reflecting less on the site itself than its meaning in a particular context. This chapter addresses the complexity in sites of Holocaust memory and investigates how they come to signify the Holocaust in various contexts. In order to illustrate the development of Holocaust sites since the Holocaust,

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it begins by analysing the contemporary site of Auschwitz. This is followed by discussions of pilgrimage to Holocaust sites and Holocaust tourism. The chapter concludes by analysing Shimon Attie’s 1994 photographic work The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter, in order to illustrate the role of projection in creating meaning at sites of Holocaust memory.1

Place as transmitter of memory As Jochen Spielmann explains, people are crucial to the function of memorials: ‘Without visitors, believers, wreath layers, and ceremonies, these places [memorials] would themselves become mere historical sites and works of art. Only in their connection to visits, excursions, guided tours, observances, worship, recitations, and rituals can memories be passed on over time and become part of society’s understanding of itself. Monuments without visitors have lost their function.’2 Memorials alone are incapable of transmitting memory: they are dependent on visitors for becoming meaningful. It is only as part of a remembrance ritual that memorials contribute to the communication of memory. James E. Young echoes this argument, asserting that ‘memorials by themselves remain inert and amnesiac, dependent on visitors for whatever memory they finally produce’.3 Essentially, as ‘lumps of stone, their meaning is moulded by those who visit them’.4 Thus, as inanimate and fixed objects, memorials only perpetuate meaning through human interaction. While these observations apply equally to Holocaust sites, they cannot be regarded in precisely the same way. As explained in the Introduction, it is the innate connection with events which establishes a Holocaust site. Nevertheless, the visitor remains an essential component in the transmission of memory because sites are also, in Young’s words, ‘inert and amnesiac’.5 However, while it is the creator of a memorial who moulds its shape and therefore the parameters for its interpretation, Holocaust sites receive this shaping from their function as locations of Holocaust events, in conjunction with later manipulations. Hence, despite the post-war development of a site, interpretation and transmission of Holocaust memory is based on its sense of authenticity and proof in regard to the events that occurred there. Since Holocaust sites alone lack the ability to transmit meaning, they require visitors for this to occur. As Richard Crownshaw argues, the ‘meaning of an artefact is determined not only by its placement in a narrative matrix, its textuality, but also conferred by its spectators.’6 Thus, even

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though Holocaust sites are not a blank canvas, they still require visitors for the transmission of meaning. The potential of Holocaust sites to transmit memory evokes questions of representation which also arise in the process of bearing witness. A site’s inextricable link with the events that occurred there elicits an expectation of accurate and authentic representation. The tension between visitors’ expectations and what the sites offer is captured by Ulrich Baer in his essay on Holocaust photography and memory. His analysis of two landscape photographs taken at former sites of mass murder – one at death camp Sobibor in Poland and the other at concentration camp Ohrdruf in Germany – which depict clearings edged by trees and contain no explicit references to the Holocaust, and hence appear to be tending further from the Holocaust rather than closer to it, provides a useful answer to the conundrum of Holocaust representation:7 How can younger generations be taught that the Holocaust poses a problem for representation except by representing it, how can its senselessness be conveyed except by turning it into a (negative) lesson, and how can its shattering effects on all categories of thought and known modes of transmission be conveyed except by turning it into a circumscribed and thus finally graspable object of inquiry?8

This encapsulates the dilemma faced by each site and each person who visits them. Yet, Baer suggests that accessing the Holocaust in any way changes it irrevocably: even though visiting a concentration camp or massacre site provides an opportunity for further understanding of the Holocaust, it also decreases the sense of ineffability surrounding it. If the expectation is that visiting Holocaust sites transmits knowledge about the Holocaust, or at the very least gives one a greater perspective on the Holocaust, then it does so only in a reduced and manipulated form.

Holocaust sites since the Holocaust: Auschwitz-Birkenau Over the almost seven decades since the end of the Holocaust, Holocaust sites have not stayed statically still and frozen in time. Yet, the myriad complexities and possibilities for development mean that they have evolved in diverse ways. Possibilities range from the presence of museums and/or memorials, to whether the site has been left to evolve naturally – eventuating in deterioration and decay; or altered, aiming to maximize preservation or to make it more visitorfriendly. Often, the meaning of a place or building as a Holocaust site emerges from its lack of preservation, as the following quote from Lily Brett’s 1999 novel

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Too Many Men illustrates, ‘It was absurd to renovate synagogues in Poland, Ruth thought, and think that that was restoring Jewish life. The existence of the synagogues, she thought, underlined the fact that the Poles and the Germans had very successfully got rid of the Jews.’9 Thus, natural decay can provide a fitting memorial, confirming that the message lies in the medium. Holocaust sites range from pre-Holocaust Jewish sites which are now abandoned synagogues and overgrown cemeteries; to sites where the Holocaust actually took place, such as concentration camps, death camps and massacre sites; and post-Holocaust constructions, such as memorials, which are found both in neutral locations such as cities and towns, and at actual sites where people were murdered or imprisoned during the Holocaust.10 These numerous and varied places all contribute to form the stereotypical Holocaust narrative of flourishing pre-war Jewish life ending in total annihilation, with each type of site embodying and hence enforcing the absence of Jews in a different way. Auschwitz, a huge and complex memorial site where the impossibility of authentic preservation, as well as conflicts between different memorial groups, has come to light, provides an intriguing case study to illustrate these issues. The site of the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau exemplifies many of the debates surrounding the use, status and future of Holocaust sites. The interplay between the dual aspects of landscape is evident in the descriptions of the site across the literature. Referred to as ‘the most significant memorial site of the Shoah’, ‘a notorious, universal symbol of evil’, ‘the most renowned symbol of ethnic genocide and Nazi atrocities’ and ‘Auschwitz-land’, the term Auschwitz has become almost synonymous with the Holocaust itself.11 Consequently, the contemporary site visited by hordes of tourists annually is far from a straightforward representation of the concentration camp used by the Nazis, with chilling efficiency, to murder 1.3 million people.12 Appraisal of the site reveals that the link between the contemporary site of Auschwitz and the events that occurred at Auschwitz during the Holocaust is as much constructed as intrinsic, validating the work of cultural geography landscape theorists.13 Furthermore, visitors’ preconceptions of Auschwitz entwine with the site’s less than authentic layout and ecological appearance to produce a landscape: essentially an experience of the site but not of the place.14 The experience of visiting contemporary Auschwitz often involves a clash between the two aspects of landscape. As evident from Chapter 1’s analysis of survivor memoirs, the physical manifestation of a Holocaust site does not often match one’s memory of it. A similar phenomenon is evident in secondgeneration Holocaust memoirs. For example, in Too Many Men, lack of evidence

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forms a crucial part of Ruth’s impression of Auschwitz: ‘Ruth was disturbed by the absence. The absence of dirt, filth, stench, stink. The absence of cruelty. The absence of suffering. She’d expected to see the suffering in the air, on the ground, in the walls and on every fence.’15 While this reaction to some extent parallels Kitty Hart-Moxon’s reaction to returning to Auschwitz portrayed in Return to Auschwitz, in this text, the character’s perception, rather than memory, of Auschwitz clashes with the experience of the physical place.16 This is because, as Andrew Charlesworth, John Wylie and Young all argue, landscape itself is mute.17 Young writes that ‘When the killing stopped, only the sites remained, blood-soaked but otherwise mute.’18 Consequently, whatever meaning is found in a particular place is not created by the site itself, but by its representation and perception in a particular cultural narrative framework. Indeed, Kenneth E. Foote argues that ‘The sites have been inscribed with messages that speak to the way individuals, groups, and entire societies wish to interpret their past.’19 Thus, it is not the site itself that is meaningful but the twin aspects of presentation and perception. Similarly, in an essay on ‘The Topography of Genocide’, Charlesworth makes the salient observation that while the materials and places used in death camps were familiar ones, they are seen differently because they were part of the Holocaust, thus marked by experience rather than intrinsically.20 This categorization of place as not only marked because it is where events of the Holocaust took place, but somehow embodying the very events themselves, is central to the phenomenon of visiting sites of Holocaust memory. As Young explains, ‘In the rhetoric of their ruins, these memorial sites seem not merely to gesture toward past events but to suggest themselves as fragments of events, inviting us to mistake the debris of history for history itself.’21 Thus, pieces of the past come to be regarded as the past as a whole, giving some explanation as to why Auschwitz has become such a significant site to visit. In terms of Foote’s typology for sites of violence, which he portrays on a continuum ranging from sanctification to designation to rectification to obliteration, Auschwitz clearly falls into the category of sanctification.22 As a result, the site is clearly marked as different from the surrounding landscape, because ‘these sacred sites [are defined] as fields of care [sic], portions of the landscape that are set apart and tended with special attention’.23 Thus, the presentation of the Auschwitz site as distinct from the surrounding landscape confirms its status as a symbol of the Holocaust, suggesting that the place is so marked that it embodies the idea of Auschwitz. However, it is the layout of contemporary Auschwitz which complicates its role as a site of Holocaust memory. Crucially, the layout of Auschwitz, the tourist

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attraction, differs significantly from Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. First, the sites visited by tourists are Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau.24 While there are several more sites that were part of the camp, including Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and several others, they are not visited and not even labelled as part of Auschwitz.25 As a result, while Auschwitz I and II may be classified according to Foote’s typology as sanctification, the unmarked areas come under the category of rectification or obliteration. Foote notes that the status of many sites changes over time, writing that ‘Times change, and as they do, people look back on the past and reinterpret events and ideas … . Often this debate focuses on place – on the actual site of the event – and whether it deserves to be remembered or forgotten.’26 Thus, the presentation of a site indicates what has been chosen to be remembered, rather than a straightforward representation of what happened. Furthermore, Auschwitz I is fitted with amenities for visitors, as described by Charlesworth further.27 But, it is not only these modern facilities which render the current format misleading. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt point out that a ‘misconstruction of history begins right in the parking lot: visitors think they have arrived at the periphery of Auschwitz I; in fact they are already in the middle of the camp as it existed in 1945’.28 This is because, unbeknownst to most visitors, the car park is situated on ground which was part of the wartime Auschwitz. Contrary to popular belief, the iconic gate inscribed with Arbeit Macht Frei (Work sets one free) was never the entrance to Auschwitz. This ‘misconstruction of history’ informs visitors’ perception of Auschwitz and therefore their behaviour, as Charlesworth describes: The Museum authorities have, however, for years disguised the fact that the reception area with its cinema, coffee shop, restaurant, toilets, bookshop, post office and currency exchange was once the prisoner reception building … . In summer anyone passing sees a jamboree of people, behaving in many different ways. This is because the vast majority don’t know where they are until their guide starts the tour proper at the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. At that point, the guide explains the geography of the site and asks all visitors to behave appropriately; the gate becomes the moral boundary where behaviour must change.29

The perception of this marked, post-war ‘moral boundary’ is also noted by Dwork and van Pelt, who theorize that ‘For the post-Auschwitz generation, that gate symbolizes the threshold that separates the oikomene (the human community) from the planet Auschwitz.’30 Consequently, even though its role during the war was marginal, many tour groups are photographed in front of it.

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Tim Cole, who coined the term ‘Auschwitz-land’ to encapsulate the striking differences between war-time Auschwitz and the site today, writes that ‘The tourist’s experience of “Auschwitz-land” starts at the gate proclaiming Arbeit macht frei, and ends at the reconstructed Crematorium. It is a manipulated tour which makes claims to authenticity, and yet owes much more to the constructed symbol “Auschwitz”.’31 While this viewpoint confirms that contemporary Auschwitz is a less than authentic version of the Nazi concentration camp, Maoz Azaryahu and Foote offer some explanation for these decisions, noting that ‘This element of selectivity is not always clearly apparent in the contemporary landscape because we see only what has been marked, rather than what has not been [sic].’32 Thus, because the Arbeit Macht Frei gate is positioned as the entrance to Auschwitz, visitors assume that it was. The consequences of not marking are also evident in that the car park is built on an area that was part of Auschwitz but not marked as such. Thus, the layout of contemporary Auschwitz is constructed by post-war decisions but still interpreted as congruent with the idea of Auschwitz during the Holocaust. It is not only these issues of what is marked and unmarked at the Auschwitz site which cause controversy, however. The role of different collective memories, particularly Polish-Catholic and Jewish, also evoke much discussion about how the site is marked and memorialized.33 The inherent difficulty of mapping a narrative on to a landscape, eloquently described by Azaryahu and Foote as ‘when history is presented in the landscape, historical chronology needs to be reconfigured onto a set of synchronous spatial features so that the onedimensional, temporal sequence of historical narrative is, so to speak, “draped” across the spatial dimensions of an actual historical site’, means that the choice of narrative is restricted to these parameters.34 Clearly, a choice of narrative equals a choice of what is to be remembered. For instance, a misleading exhibition is described by Judith Magyar Isaacson in her description of her visit to Auschwitz in 1978 in her memoir Seed of Sarah. She writes that ‘Today, Auschwitz is treated as a memorial to the Polish underground, and hardly any mention is made of the millions of Jews killed there. Only when I told our guide that we were Jewish did she obtain the keys to the Jewish museum.’35 This collision of Polish and Jewish memory is reminiscent of Konstanty Gebert’s observation that ‘If 3 out of the 6 million of Poland’s war dead were Jewish, the other 3 million were ethnically Polish. It is hard for the Poles to see a substantial difference between these two fates.’36 Yet, this paradigm of Polish memory of Auschwitz clashes with a survivor’s memory, who was imprisoned there simply for being Jewish. Young notes that ‘the Jewish pavilion was closed after the Six-Day War in

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1967, at the height of the Polish government’s anti-Jewish purges, ostensibly for renovations, and remained closed until 1978, when it was rededicated’.37 While this explains why it was shut during Isaacson’s visit, it is an important example of the consequences of choices made in memorializing such sites – in this case marking the site in a way that privileges the narrative of Poles at Auschwitz over Jews.38 However, it is the ecological aspects of preservation at Auschwitz which emphatically demonstrate the limits of memorialization and representation, and by extension throw into question the role of sites of memory in the process of bearing witness. Unlike aspects such as buildings, memorials and museum displays, maintenance and preservation of a site’s natural attributes is predominantly uncontrollable. The central motif through which this issue emerges at Auschwitz is grass. As Chapter 1 showed, the presence of grass was a central part of Hart-Moxon’s reaction to revisiting Auschwitz, stemming from the fact that she did not remember any grass there.39 Similarly, in Helena Janeczek’s second-generation account, grass was also an unexpected facet of Auschwitz: ‘denn es konnte kein Gras da sein, in Auschwitz gab es schnee, gab es Eis.’ (Because there could not be any grass there, in Auschwitz there was snow, there was ice.)40 While Janeczek’s reaction could be attributed to what Charlesworth terms ‘out of place’, its congruence with a survivor’s reaction suggests a second-generation perception of Auschwitz gleaned from survivor parents as well as a collective knowledge of the site. Charlesworth points out that ‘People prefer to take photographs of Auschwitz when it is snowy or raining or has leaden skies. If it does not match our expectations, then we may regard the site as out of place.’41 David Lowenthal makes a similar argument, writing that: ‘Above all, memory transforms the past we have known into what we think it should have been. Selective recall eliminates undesired scenes, highlights favored ones, and makes them tidy and suitable. A city may be misremembered as uniformly icy and windswept if a blizzard was our most memorable experience there.’42 Thus, the perception of Auschwitz collides with its representation: the perception of the physical place aligns with the preconception of it. The evolution of the natural environment at Auschwitz has been traced by Charlesworth and Michael Addis, who note the startling finding that ‘The first systematic mowing of the extensive coarse grassland areas in the barrack areas appears not to have taken place until 1979, in advance of the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz.’43 Thus, while the lack of grass at Auschwitz was a crucial characteristic, if not a by-product, of its operation, it was left to grow unheeded

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in the decades following the Holocaust. This episode illustrates the entwinement of the perception and representation of Auschwitz: its status as landscape. In other words, while the occasion of the Pope’s visit for the first post-war mowing jars with the perception of Auschwitz as a site of Jewish memory, it fits with the Polish perception of Auschwitz as a site of Polish martyrdom. When it came to planning the ecological future of Auschwitz, Charlesworth and Addis note that the plan for preserving the natural environment at Birkenau aimed ‘to re-create the ecological landscape of 1943/44’.44 This choice of selecting one historical period to emulate recalls Young’s analysis of death camps: While in operation, the death camps and the destruction of people wrought in them were one and the same: sites and events were bound to each other in their contemporaneity. But with the passage of time, sites and events were gradually estranged … . Events that occurred in another time seemed increasingly to belong to another world altogether. Only a deliberate act of memory could reconnect them, reinfuse the sites with a sense of their historical past.45

Thus, attempting to shape the natural environment at Auschwitz so that it resembles the site in 1943–1944 is what Young terms ‘a deliberate act of memory’: an act that reunites the site itself with evidence of what happened there. The desire to do so stemmed from the role of Auschwitz as a tourist attraction, as Charlesworth and Addis note, ‘Heritage sites where there is apparently little or nothing to see do not thrive.’46 While the plan to replace trees was deemed feasible, ‘the landscape of mud that covered the vast majority of the outdoor landscapes of the camp in 1943/44 could not be re-created’; even though ‘the grassland and meadowland areas that had developed since 1944 were declared inauthentic’.47 Such actions can be interpreted as a desire to retain Foote’s state of sanctification, which ‘almost always involves the construction of a durable marker … that is intended to be maintained in perpetuity’.48 Notwithstanding the presence of concrete memorials at Auschwitz, ecological preservation follows the principle of transforming misleading evidence into that which more accurately portrays what the narrators wish to.49 Thus, Charlesworth and Addis’s research not only raises the question of how to preserve a site as it was, but both the requirement and consequences of selecting a certain point in its history to emulate. However, even such meticulous plans are incapable of emulating the past, as Lowenthal writes, ‘The tangible past is altered mainly to make history conform with memory. Memory not only conserves the past but adjusts recall to current needs. Instead of remembering exactly what was, we make the past

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intelligible in the light of present circumstances.’50 Thus, Charlesworth and Addis point out that ‘The more Birkenau is managed as an ordered, tidy landscape of metalled roads and paths and maintained grassland, the more its appearance is going to resemble a park.’51 In other words, no matter how Auschwitz-Birkenau is moulded to become meaningful as a site of Holocaust memory, its meaning is deemed to be created by those who visit it, those who create the landscape, and those who interpret it. In short, it is the entwinement of the actual site itself and its perception that creates the landscape of Auschwitz. The analysis of Auschwitz and the way it has changed since the Holocaust illustrates the inherent complexity in sites of memory. Places which are important to the memory of particular events, particularly traumatic events, do not straightforwardly represent the events they have become emblematic of. Instead, such sites display the various narratives projected onto them by different groups and become repositories for the narratives and expectations that visitors bring with them.

Sacred sites: The Holocaust journey as pilgrimage The structure of journeys to Holocaust sites often assumes the form of pilgrimage. Essentially, a pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred site. Whether as part of an organized tour or not, visiting Holocaust sites is often undertaken as a trip expressly for that purpose, as exemplified in the journeys discussed in previous chapters. Such trips entail visiting places where Jewish life once thrived, as well as sites where Jews were murdered, though the emphasis on each of these elements varies according to the ideological aims of the organizers. Generally, the disparate sites visited on such a trip are connected in a narrative starting with bustling Jewish communities and concluding with the destruction not only of these people, but their educational and religious establishments, businesses and cemeteries. The concept of witnessing is central to this process, because seeing the places with one’s own eyes is crucial. In enabling participants to discover more about the Holocaust by visiting the places where it happened, thus making their knowledge less abstract and more visceral, these trips aim to create secondary witnesses. Pilgrimage is a crucial aspect of visiting Holocaust sites because it not only depends on place as instrumental in a multisensory experience of the past, but on such sites as sacred.52 Like the second-generation witnessing discussed in Chapter 2, in pilgrimage, place acts as a substitute for experience. But, as the

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previous section of this chapter has shown, Holocaust sites cannot be assumed to be reliable witnesses of the Holocaust. They have not only naturally evolved in the decades since the Holocaust, but in many cases have been shaped or even manipulated towards portraying a particular narrative. While referring to Holocaust sites as sacred substantiates Peter Novick’s claim of the validity of deeming the Holocaust a religion, it removes them from ordinariness and places them in the realm of the extraordinary.53 Clearly, pilgrimage provides a neat narrative framework for Holocaust journeys, a reason for its prominence in Holocaust memoirs. Sacred sites are places which are imbued with meaning for followers of a particular religion or members of a certain ethnic identity.54 The transformation of locations of violent acts into sacred sites worthy of pilgrimage is one found in both modern and ancient times, yet is exemplified in the postmodern, secular societies of the west. This metamorphosis is a form of reclaiming the space, as Janet Jacobs notes in an article tracing the evolution of death camps into sacred sites, writing that these ‘increasingly become sacred ground where the performance of rituals and death rites mark and reclaim these surviving landscapes of violence and genocide’.55 This notion of reclaiming indicates a substantial shift in meaning, drifting away from the space’s original function and defining it through a specific interpretation of the events that occurred there. For example, despite the contested memory of Auschwitz, it has evolved into a Jewish sacred site through the remembrance rituals performed there: ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau, as a museum/camp memorial, remains one of the most important sites of Jewish loss in post-Holocaust Jewish culture, and therefore is a particularly hallowed ground where Jews from all over the world come to pray, say Kaddish, and light candles for the hundreds of thousands of Jews who died there.’56 While many Jews who visit Auschwitz use it as a platform to perform their cultural and religious rituals, this is only one interpretation of the place and does not denote a universally accepted, or indeed universal, way of behaving at the site. Such an interpretation also indicates a shift away from its original purpose, making the place of victims into a place for solemn remembrance. While this may form part of coming to terms with the horrific events, it also entails a distancing from the reality of the events. In a pilgrimage, the journey is as important as the destination, and the experience is associated with a change or transformation in the person undertaking it. Ian Reader describes the central facets of pilgrimage as ‘the idea of a journey out of the normal parameters of life, the entry into a different, other, world, the search for something new, the multiple motives of participants,

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ranging from homage and veneration to the simple impulses of curiosity’.57 Thus, a pilgrimage is about removing oneself from everyday life, visiting somewhere new spiritually and emotionally as well as physically. The place visited therefore takes on monumental importance as part of this narrative of transformation. It is therefore no wonder that Jewish trips to Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe are frequently described as pilgrimages. To take one example, in Jackie Feldman’s extensive research on trips run by the Israeli Ministry of Education for Israeli high school students, the ‘voyage is an attempt to explore the meanings of the Holocaust in the present through a multisensory pilgrimage to the ruins of the past’.58 The mention of ‘multisensory pilgrimage’, the attempt to take participants into another world, encapsulates the drive to discover the past in the present on journeys to sites of memory.

Manipulated journeys: Organized Holocaust tours Trips designed especially for groups of young Jews are a key example of Holocaust journeys as pilgrimages. Such trips entail an explicit political narrative and aim to produce a certain world view in participants as a result. March of the Living, a well-known programme initially for Jewish high school students (and now for adults as well) which involves walking from Auschwitz I to Birkenau on Yom HaShoah, carries with it an explicit message: to draw Baer’s ‘negative lesson’ from the Holocaust and never to let it happen again.59 Followed by a trip to Israel to coincide with Israeli Independence Day, the March of the Living allows participants to experience a redemptive narrative: the death of Jewish life in Poland followed by its renewal in Israel. The official website makes these intentions clear: ‘The goal of the March of the Living is for these young people to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and to lead the Jewish people into the future vowing Never Again.’60 The trips organized by the Israeli Ministry of Education for Israeli teenagers are similar in scope and structure, yet their purpose is even more explicit. Feldman’s study found that these trips were structured to enforce the view that the Diaspora is still rife with anti-Semitism, and that the only safe place for Jews is Israel. The underlying purpose was to indoctrinate the youngsters ‘that the Holocaust never really ended, and that, but for the State and its defense forces, the Jews in Israel would today be on their way to the gas chambers’.61 He concludes that the reason behind this philosophy is to enforce this view before the participants commence their compulsory military service, thus showing how place can be manipulated to serve a certain ideology.

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It is not only Israelis who visit Poland for such reasons, Diaspora Jews also journey there in great numbers. Researching American Jewish visits to Poland, Kugelmass finds that the majority engage in ‘a secular ritual, one that confirms who they are as Jews, and perhaps, even more so, as North American Jews’.62 Essentially, confirming Novick’s thesis that the Holocaust has become a critical part of American Jewish identity, these trips enforce participants’ identity as post-Holocaust Jews.63 So organized tours to Holocaust sites are structured to promote a certain ideology and create a particular narrative, essentially using Poland as a pawn. Such ventures are surely the inspiration for the family travel agency depicted in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2003 novel Everything Is Illuminated, around which the story evolves, as Alex narrates: ‘Father toils for a travel agency, denominated Heritage Touring. It is for Jewish people, like the hero, who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine. Father’s agency scores a translator, guide, and driver for the Jews, who try to unearth places where their families once existed.’64 This fictitious portrayal of organized trips for Jews from the perspective of locals nevertheless aptly describes their purpose, indicating that such ventures are a widespread practice and encapsulate a formalization of pilgrimage. Organized Jewish trips to Poland are carefully constructed in order for the participants to empathize with the victims of the Holocaust. The structure of these trips contributes to what Kugelmass terms ‘the “time out of time” quality of these visits’.65 He notes that those on the trip ‘are required to engage in activities that they often avoid in their everyday lives, for example, attending religious services three times daily [and] eating strictly kosher food prepackaged in Western Europe’.66 Thus, participants are coerced into living an observant Jewish life for the duration of their stay in Poland, marking their Polish experience as different to their regular life and more tied to their Jewish identity, perhaps with the aim of bringing their experience closer to that of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Such selective identification of course neglects the fact that unobservant Jews were just as much Holocaust victims as observant Jews. At the same time, these actions promote the differentiation of Jewish tour participants from the average tourist in Poland, and crucially, from the Poles themselves. The confirmation of locals as other only serves to enforce the perception of Polish apathy towards the Holocaust. In a similar vein, Feldman’s research found that tours for Israeli teenagers made a sharp demarcation between the ‘interior space’ of the tour bus and the ‘exterior space’ of Poland itself.67 While the formal part of the tour takes place at Holocaust sites and therefore in an exterior space, the atmosphere of the interior

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space on the bus is just as significant. As Feldman explains, ‘The bus constitutes an insular Israeli community; the symbols of death and the strangeness of being in a foreign country remain outside, beyond the foggy or grimy window pane.’68 Consequently, participants travel as an Israeli island, cut off from the country they are visiting. Furthermore, when they do leave the sanctuary of the tour bus to visit Holocaust sites, they are compelled to behave in a way appropriate to sites of mass murder while partaking in solemn ceremonies of remembrance.69 The result of this dichotomy, strengthened through limited contact with locals, is that ‘The Diaspora is portrayed as a place of hostile, strange surroundings, wandering and the inevitable end.’70 It is no coincidence that these trips take place in the years immediately preceding the participants’ compulsory military service: ‘Parents and educators often speak of the voyage as having come at just the right time – to make the students know what it is they’re fighting for.’71 This illustrates the potential power of a constructed journey and the far-reaching effects of a pilgrimage that promotes a certain ideology. Essentially, the purpose of post-Holocaust Jewish trips to Poland is to focus on the Jews murdered by the Nazi regime. In order for these trips to succeed in pushing their narrative, these Jewish victims must be the focus. Kugelmass noted that a similar exclusion of Poles and Polish culture is evident in research on American Jewish trips, though this time it is more due to lack of interest than deliberate ignorance: ‘Jewish tourists see nothing quaint about the local culture, either Jewish or non-Jewish; their interest is the dead rather than the living.’72 After all, if someone is travelling to Poland to ‘experience’ the Holocaust, it makes no sense to encounter anything which might contradict the perception that every Pole was an accomplice in the murder of the country’s Jews. While the reality is of course infinitely more complicated, this oversimplified view is easier to absorb, and hence it is also perhaps simpler to experience Jewish life in Poland as completely destroyed and irretrievable. While the rituals participated in by participants of the Israeli trips serve to unite them against the enemy of the Diaspora, extroverted displays of young Israelis at Auschwitz can alienate non-Israeli Jews who are also visiting. Dressed in identical sweatshirts, these groups with their large Israeli flags can hardly be missed. As Feldman describes, ‘Participants are issued blue and white delegation sweatshirts emblazoned with a large Star of David designed in a barbed-wire pattern, with the word “Israel” printed in Latin letters (!) [sic] on the back.’73 The use of Latin letters clearly indicates that this labelling is meant for those who cannot read Hebrew. In Lektionen des Verborgenen (Lessons of Darkness), Janeczek writes of encountering such a group in

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Auschwitz: ‘Kaum sind wir durch das Tor, da entrollt ein hünenhafter, stämmiger Mann eine israelische Flagge, so groß wie eine normale Fahne, und hebt sich auf die Schulter. Um ihn herum steht eine Gruppe, fast alle sind aus der Generation der Kinder, Israelis.’ (We are barely through the gate when a gigantically built man unfurls an Israeli flag, as big as a normal flag, and lifts it onto his shoulders. Around him stands a group, almost all are of the children’s generation, Israelis.)74 This evokes ‘wirren and unnutzen Gedanken’ (confused and useless thoughts) on the part of Janeczek, who says to her mother: ‘sieh doch, wie sich hinter ihrer Flagge verschanzen, sie sind einfach nicht in der Lage hierherzukommen, ohne der Welt und sich beweisen zu müssen, daß wir gewonnen haben.’ (Look, how they take cover behind their flag: they can’t simply come here without having to prove to themselves and the world that we won.)75 While her mother tacitly agrees, when Janeczek raises her voice a little, her mother responds by telling Janeczek to be quiet: ‘Sei still, sagt sie, sie könnten dich hören, auch wenn ich bezweifele, daß jemand hinter dieser Fahne die Sprache des Feindes kennt.’ (Be quiet, she said, they can hear you, although I doubt that anyone behind this flag knows the language of the enemy.)76 While German Jews such as Janeczek are likely to be in the minority of Jewish visitors at Auschwitz (simply because of their small numbers), the overt display of Israeli symbols has the potential to distance non-Israeli Jews, perhaps even inducing feelings of guilt for not participating in the Zionist ideal of living in Israel. Manipulating place to promote one ideology does not necessarily allow another one to share it. Two of the texts analysed in this book feature trips to Eastern Europe that are organized group tours. In Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, Andrea Simon travels with an American Jewish tour to Poland, Belarus and St Petersburg, and in Lektionen des Verborgenen, Janeczek and her mother join an international Jewish group, with participants from Israel and London.77 In both texts, it is the opportunity of an organized trip that convinces them to go. For instance, in Simon’s case, it is linked to the idea inscribed in the title of her book – bashert is a Yiddish word meaning ‘fate’ or ‘luck’. Upon learning of the trip organized by the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, she writes, ‘ “I must go” … “My mother was born in Warsaw. My grandmother and other relatives were born in Volchin, near Brest. And my grandfather used to travel to St Petersburg. This trip was made for me. It’s fate.” ’78 The fact that the independently organized trip matches Simon’s interpretation of her family history may be a strong coincidence, but it also shows how such trips can enforce preconceptions. In other words, Simon wants to visit these places because they feature in what she knows of her family

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history. In doing so, she ensures that her knowledge of her family history coincides with the places she visits. For Janeczek, an organized tour presents itself as a similar once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Ich war der Meinung, wir sollten fahren und diese einzigartige Gelegenheit der organisierten Reise nutzen, weil ich befürchtete, daß ein Aufschub einem endgültigen Verzicht gleichkäme, zumal über eine Rückkehr nach Polen fünfzig Jahre lang nie geredet worden war, und weil ich dachte, daß es schöner, sinnvoller und auch weniger hart sei, die Reise mit einer Gruppe von Menschen zu teilen, die ähnliche Erfahrungen durchgemacht hatten und größtenteils ebenfalls zum ersten Mal zurückkehrten, als allein, zwei Frauen, dort herumzugeistern.79 (I was of the opinion that we should go and use this unique opportunity for an organized trip, because I was afraid that a postponement would equal a final relinquishment, especially since a return to Poland had never been spoken of in fifty years, and because I thought that it would be nicer, more meaningful and less difficult to share the journey with a group of people who had been through similar experiences and for the most part were also going back for the first time, than two women to wander around there alone.)

The themes that emerge from this explanation are simply convenience and moral support, to travel with others who come (literally and figuratively) from the same place. Yet, in doing so, Janeczek leaves the shaping of the itinerary to the group organizers (except when she and her mother travel independently to her parents’ shtetl, Zawiercie), seemingly content to be shown around Poland. In doing so, Janeczek becomes a perfect candidate for absorbing the perspective on Poland and the Holocaust espoused by the tour leaders. This however still produces a meaningful coincidence: ‘Aber es ist ein Zufall gewesen, daß wir mit dieser Gruppe abgefahren sind, daß der Tag der Abreise der Tag war, an dem ihre Mutter, ihr Vater, ihr Bruder deportiert worden waren.’ (But it was a coincidence that we went with this trip, that the day of departure was the day on which her mother, father and brother were deported.)80 Thus, although organized trips can be shaped in a manipulative way, this does not mean they do not provide a personal, meaningful experience for the participants. On the contrary – it is clear from both Bashert and Lektionen des Verborgenen that without these organized tours, the protagonists may not have travelled to Eastern Europe at all. The itinerary of an organized tour can both facilitate and prevent the visiting of places meaningful to particular individuals. For example, Janeczek admits that her mother would have preferred not to visit Auschwitz: ‘Wäre es nach ihr gegangen, hätte sie dieses Datum vermieden, wie es auch wahrscheinlich ist, daß

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sie nicht nach Auschwitz zurückgekehrt ware, noch hätte ich sie gebeten, mich dorthin zu bringen.’ (If it was up to her, she would have avoided this date, and it’s also likely that she wouldn’t have gone back to Auschwitz, nor would I have asked her to take me there.)81 Yet, because it is on the itinerary – as an important site in collective Holocaust memory – she does visit. This interplay between collective and individual identity is particularly poignant in Israel and reflected in the Ministry of Education trips. Feldman notes that in these trips, collective identity usurps individual identity: The common Holocaust ‘experience’ of the participants in Poland is to serve to minimize ethnic and religious differences within Israeli society, by uniting all in a sense of common fate … . In line with this emphasis on Jewish unity, no special role will be given to grandchildren of survivors and no effort will be made to have the group visit sites of individual (Ashkenazi) students’ ancestors.82

Thus, in order for the agenda of the organized trip to be fulfilled, individual participants whose family experienced the Holocaust are denied the opportunity to explore their personal link to it in Poland. While this dominance of collective memory potentially obfuscates valid individual memories, Alon Lazar et al.’s 2004 study showed that the individual connection still shines through. Lazar et al. questioned Jewish Israeli teenagers undertaking compulsory Holocaust education, both those who chose to go to Poland and those who did not, analysing the results to see whether having Holocaust survivors in one’s family made a difference.83 The outcome was not clear-cut: on the one hand, they found that teenagers who chose to partake in extra Holocaust education had a strong sense of national identity, whether or not their families were involved in the Holocaust.84 Among those with family connections to the Holocaust, however, this was intensified, to the point that they were ‘less attuned to the importance of universalistic lessons’.85 In other words, it seems that for those young Israelis descended from Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust remains meaningful in a specific way, as part of their Jewish identity. Thus, even in a context where the collective Israeli perspective on the Holocaust may obscure any individual connection, the individual identity emerges. Pilgrimage depends largely on sites of memory’s intrinsic connection with the events of the Holocaust, much like second-generation witnessing. Both practices prioritize place as a substitute for experience of the Holocaust. By designating Holocaust sites as sacred, there exists a place to visit which is literally and solemnly linked to the Holocaust. The components of pilgrimage also lend well to narrative structure, leading to the multitude of Holocaust memoirs

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which depict a pilgrimage to Holocaust sites. The growth of organized tours to Holocaust sites only adds to this notion of places as a form of direct link to the Holocaust. Moreover, this indicates that, as survivors’ voices dwindle, this is potentially the way of the future. Even though sites of memory can only partially, if at all, represent the events of the Holocaust, the importance of place in discovering the past means that reliance on places to represent the Holocaust is likely to continue to increase.

Holocaust tourism: Creating a fantasy of witnessing The evolution of many Holocaust sites into bona-fide tourist attractions, with amenities, car parks and even cafés, complicates how such sites represent the Holocaust. While some Holocaust sites remain both elusive and exclusive, off the beaten tourist track and requiring effort and persistence to visit, the explosion of tourism to the masses in the late twentieth century, along with the collapse of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, has aided the development of many sites. Such sites have become more accessible due to relatively affordable travel and increased leisure time. But, the modifications resulting from the transition to tourist attraction changes the site’s focus and therefore complicates even further its relationship to the events of the Holocaust. Thus, while Holocaust tourism relies on place in the process of bearing witness, its very existence denotes a shift towards constructed, even embellished, representations of where the Holocaust happened. This shift highlights the consequences of the source of Holocaust memory shifting from survivors to sites. Holocaust sites as tourist attractions require a separate classification from places visited simply for pleasure – their difference in purpose, scope and hence reasons for being visited puts them in a category known as ‘dark tourism’.86 Dark tourism is a term which incorporates sites associated with death, which John Lennon and Malcolm Foley list as ‘murder sites, death sites, battlefields, cemeteries, mausoleums, churchyards, the former homes of now-dead celebrities’.87 While they concede that there is nothing new about visiting such sites, they note that the mass media representation of death is pivotal in providing both familiarity and notoriety of contemporary deaths.88 This undoubtedly contributes to the growth of Holocaust sites as tourist attractions – particularly visits by heads of states to Holocaust sites which garner media coverage. Perhaps the most pertinent example of a Holocaust site being transmitted to millions is when talk show host Oprah Winfrey visited Auschwitz with survivor Elie Wiesel

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in 2006.89 Having featured his memoir Night as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club that same year, an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show chronicled Wiesel showing Winfrey around Auschwitz in the bitter, winter cold, thus exemplifying the importance of a survivor in the process of bearing witness using place.90 Visiting Holocaust sites is clearly a different experience for those with a family connection. While Too Many Men is filled with examples of how other tourists are denigrating Holocaust sites or profiting from the persecution of the Jews, in her memoir The War After: Living with the Holocaust, Anne Karpf admits that seeing oneself as somehow above mere tourists is futile. For instance, Too Many Men makes much of the fact that local tourist operators refer to Auschwitz as a museum: ‘ “I’m not here to see the Auschwitz Museum,” she [Ruth] said, loudly, to the receptionist. “I am here to visit the Auschwitz death camp.” ’91 And approximately one hundred pages later: ‘ “You are going to the Auschwitz Museum?” the driver said. “No,” said Ruth. The driver turned around. “We are going to the Auschwitz death camp,” she said to him. “Could you remember that?” ’92 Here the patronizing tone masks what is perhaps behind Ruth’s indignation: the Holocaust forms so much and such a central part of her identity that allowing others to share in it, let alone denigrate it, is construed as a personal insult. In contrast, Karpf realizes that this position is unsustainable: We have a Polish guide whose father, it turns out, was killed in Auschwitz in 1941 for being a member of the resistance. I find this both comforting and disconcerting: it forces me to acknowledge that I’m trying to assert my difference to the other tourists in this place, as if I belong higher up than them in the hierarchy of sensitivity, and am entitled to borrow that old aura of martyrdom. But this woman, being the daughter of the victim rather than a survivor, necessarily comes even higher than me, and therefore collapses the endeavour.93

Karpf ’s reflective attitude indicates an open mind when it comes to visiting Holocaust sites. She realizes that while she does have a family connection, it is not exclusively hers and even allows others to be ‘above’ her in ‘the hierarchy of sensitivity’. In other words, she does not blindly accept her feelings towards Holocaust sites but questions them. Both these examples shed light on how Holocaust tourism can transform a place: referring to Auschwitz as a museum cements it as a tourist attraction, thus detracting from its reality as a location of mass murder. Thus, whether tourists expect to visit a death camp as a museum, or a museum as a death camp, the element of a museum draws the place away from the realities of the site. Karpf also comments on this shift: ‘in

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Auschwitz I, I get a sense not so much of having come to a place where over a million of the doomed were brought fifty years ago, as one where millions of tourists have visited subsequently, and it’s only in the relatively neglected and decayed Birkenau that the effects of time more aptly give off ravage and abandonment.’94 Thus, for Karpf, the sense of a tourist attraction dominates her visit to Auschwitz I. Her awareness of this touristic influence demonstrates how Holocaust tourism can perhaps detract from the essence of a site. When visitors mainly focus on the touristic elements, it shows that these are the dominant elements.

Survivors’ perspective on Holocaust tourism Criticism of Holocaust tourism begins, but certainly does not end, with survivors. The transformation of Holocaust sites into tourist attractions is definitely not welcomed by all survivors, partly due to the perceived abuse of the sanctity of such sites, and partly because the places cannot accurately depict what happened. In Lisa Appignanesi’s 1999 memoir Losing the Dead, discussed in Chapter 2, she presents her father’s opinion of Poland as ‘A desecrated cemetery’. He expresses his opinion on Holocaust tourism with the memorable line: ‘You don’t play tourist in shit’.95 To him, the notion of tourism to Holocaust sites threatens the sanctity of these places. Ruth Kluger clearly agrees – several passages in her 2001 memoir Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered are devoted to the topic. For instance, she explains, ‘In a museum I feel that I belong, though nothing belongs to me … . The various Shoah museums and reconstituted concentration camp sites do the exact opposite. That’s why I find them so hard to take: they don’t take you in, they spit you out.’96 Kluger’s objections take a slightly different slant to Appignanesi’s father: it is because the nature of Holocaust sites differs so drastically from the purpose of museums that they could never fit the museum model. On the other hand, famous Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz Primo Levi originally concurred but later changed his mind. He admitted that directly after the war, his response would have been to ‘get rid of everything, raze it to the ground, along with Nazism and everything German’, but later came to the realization that Holocaust sites are instrumental in informing future Holocaust memory.97 He wrote that: ‘These are not mistakes to efface. With the passing of years and decades, these remains do not lose any of their significance as a Warning Monument; rather, they gain in meaning. They teach better than any

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treatise or memorial how inhuman the Hitlerite regime was, even in its choice of sites and architecture.’98 This makes the crucial point that whether or not such sites accurately display their history, they will remain places to visit for the foreseeable future. But Levi’s stance overlooks the complicating factors of change over time, making it difficult to believe that Holocaust sites ‘gain in meaning’ as time goes on. While these three examples of survivors’ views of Holocaust tourism are based on different reasons, they are united in their view of Holocaust sites as sacred places to be treated with reverence and respect. Yet, their perspective is one threatened by the dwindling number of survivors, signifying that the meaning of Holocaust sites is increasingly dictated by those who visit them. Second-generation criticism of Holocaust tourism is evident in Too Many Men, drawing attention to how it detracts from the Holocaust itself. For instance, during Ruth’s visit to Auschwitz with her father, the text comments on the lack of horror: ‘Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How could you feel people’s anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted barracks?’99 This text seems to assume that other tourists do not share these feelings or this perception and hence are ignorant of the real function and significance of Holocaust sites – which plays to Kluger’s reservations on the subject. Too Many Men also portrays the ‘Jewish’ souvenirs and ‘Jewish’ restaurants in Poland as insensitive, as well as inappropriately profiting from the Holocaust. For example, in reference to carved wooden figures of Jews for sale in Krakow’s market, Brett writes, ‘Poland had got rid of its Jews, and had now turned them into knick-knacks, Ruth thought. Brica-brac. Fodder for a tourist industry … Ruth wanted to get behind the stands and knock every one of these faux Jews over. She felt furious.’100 Significantly, while this infuriates Ruth, it does not ruffle her father: ‘Ruth assumed that next to the pogroms and beatings and stone throwings of Polish life that Edek and his family had been accustomed to, these figurines seemed harmless.’101 Hence, as a survivor, Edek is excused from not feeling indignant about the manipulation of Jewish memory for tourism. This confirms a hierarchy, whereby the survivor is followed by the second generation, above anyone else visiting Holocaust sites. All these examples illustrate the gap between Holocaust sites at the time and their representation today. The problem with Holocaust tourism is that although it purports to give an accurate picture of the Holocaust, in reality, it steers perceptions away from it. Even though analysis of Holocaust sites

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demonstrates how much they have changed and evolved since the time of the Holocaust, people continue to visit such sites in an attempt to discover more about the Holocaust.

Projecting the past in the present While the chapter so far has illustrated how sites of memory and Holocaust tourism can be misleading in their representation of the Holocaust, I will now turn to an impressive attempt to bridge the incommunicable loss at sites of Holocaust memory. Attie’s 1994 book of photographs The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter uses place to simultaneously depict both the events of the Holocaust and the subsequent absence of Jews from Europe.102 Deploying photographs in order to allow sites of memory to become meaningful, this text strives not only to represent the very essence of the Holocaust, but to make it into an experience. We shall see that place is indeed entwined with the idea of authentic representation, but that the paradox of place as a witness nevertheless persists. It is the combination of place and images that Attie uses to bear witness to the Holocaust in The Writing on the Wall. The book comprises slides of old photographs depicting Jewish life projected on to contemporary buildings in the Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s pre-war Jewish area. This text lends itself to the straightforward interpretation that it depicts what used to be directly on to what is there now. Yet, it is not quite that simple. Unlike journeys to sites of Holocaust atrocities, Attie’s text addresses the absence of Jews away from the killing fields. By visually representing the Jews who once lived there, it creates a presence out of absence. While the title suggests a written narrative, the format is mainly photos, labelled with a location and address. The haunting, simple pictures demonstrate the limitations of recreation: because the photos are ghostly, they simultaneously depict presence and absence. Furthermore, East Berlin’s Scheunenviertel was filled with working-class Ostjuden in the early twentieth century and was in many ways a slice of Eastern European Jewish life.103 Today it is branded as the former Jewish area of Berlin, although it was predominantly traditional Jews rather than assimilated German Jews who lived here. By representing the Ostjuden, who are both real and stereotypical Holocaust victims, rather than the multifaceted German Jewish story, Attie seizes upon one aspect of the Holocaust. By visually combining the past with the present, Attie is, as Marianne Hirsch argues, ‘ “rebuilding” the ruined world on the very site of its ruin’.104 While this sentiment aptly describes what Attie is attempting, confirmed by the ingenuity

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of the project and its powerful method of communicating the absence of Jewish life in Berlin, the reality is more convoluted. First, Attie admits that only in 25 per cent of the photographs was he able to project the old photograph onto the original building, due to factors such as the original building no longer existing, the replacement building being aesthetically too different and external issues such as streetlights.105 Attie tempers this sentiment by asserting that ‘When it was not possible to project onto the original architecture, the projections were made onto neighboring buildings.’106 Second, not all the photographs were actually from the Scheunenviertel – Attie discloses that ‘In approximately 5 out of 70 installations, I used images from other Jewish quarters and ghettos in Eastern Europe.’107 Thus, it is clear that artistic claims prevailed over authenticity – Attie writes that ‘When it was necessary to choose between being a good historian and – hopefully – a good artist, I always chose the latter’, calling the finished product ‘a simulation of Jewish life as it once existed in the Scheunenviertel’.108 By asserting his claim to artistic integrity over historical accuracy, Attie refutes any criticism of his project’s authenticity. By combining sites in the Scheunenviertel with photographs of others which are not authentic either because of the specific site or the location altogether, it is clear that Attie has manipulated the resources available to produce the desired outcome for this project. He has chosen a certain representation to portray and consequently found images to fit this view. Just as Karpf recognizes the problem of ‘confus[ing] time and place’ after doing so herself, Attie admits his project’s shortcomings but does it anyway.109 It is clear that the places need extra information, whether accurate or not, to become meaningful as sites of Holocaust memory. An important component of The Writing on the Wall is its duality, as it actually comprises two separate representations: the installations themselves, completed in 1991; and the book of photographs, published in 1994. Hirsch describes the creation of these as ‘Then rephotographing the projections, Attie created layered images which have become moveable memorial sites, sites each of us can invest with our own nostalgic and elegiac needs.’110 This concept of turning fixed installations into ‘moveable memorial sites’ utilized by individuals in whichever manner they choose demonstrates the twin functions of Attie’s project. As either the original projections in Berlin or as the book of photographs created later, this project both recreates an aspect of the past destroyed by the Holocaust and records it for posterity. As a portable, tangible representation able to be experienced by anyone anywhere in the world, the book has a much higher remit than the original installations. Such ‘moveable memorial sites’ recall the representation of Trachimbrod in Everything Is Illuminated. Just as Trachimbrod is described as an archive comprised of boxes, which encompasses the memory

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of the place as well as turning it into something tangible to be picked up and moved at will, the presentation of Attie’s photographs as a book creates an object of memory that can be picked up and moved at will. In both cases, the intangible memory of a place has been transformed into a tangible representation of that memory, emphasizing the irrevocable changes between the two, but still evoking the sense of the original. The selection of photographs in The Writing on the Wall emphasizes the paradox of place as a witness. Easily recognizable as Jews or Jewish endeavours, the photographs depict orthodox Jews dressed in traditional Hassidic garb; businesses with Hebrew lettering clearly visible; or simply a Star of David or other Jewish symbol. The photographs clearly portray Ostjuden rather than assimilated German Jews: obviously, it is so that they are unmistakably identifiable as Jews, otherwise the meaning of the entire project is lost. Essentially, place becomes secondary to the message. Just as Feldman noted Israeli teenagers in Poland wearing jumpers emblazoned with the word ‘Israel’ in Latin rather than Hebrew letters – clearly aimed at those who do not read Hebrew; if Attie used photographs of people who were not obviously Jewish, this would mean that they would not necessarily be recognized as such and hence the entire meaning of the project would falter.111 The selection of an authentic location – the Scheunenviertel – with clearly Jewish signifiers demonstrates the paradox of place as a witness: an authentic location still needs explanation of why it is significant. Hence, The Writing on the Wall conflates the aspects of space and time to present access to the past. The analysis of this text enforces this book’s central argument: it confirms the paradox of place as a witness and provides further evidence that the source of Holocaust memory is shifting from survivors to sites. While these texts use sites to bear witness to the Holocaust, they require other devices to make the place meaningful. Though this enables place to be used to bear witness to the Holocaust, it simultaneously projects the place away from the Holocaust and towards the narrative that the text’s creator perceives. The resultant representation reflects the author’s perception of the Holocaust, rather than what is evident at the sites.

The paradox of place as a witness The examples of contemporary engagement with sites of Holocaust memory analysed in this chapter – Holocaust sites themselves, pilgrimage and Holocaust tourism – have shown that the way they have changed since the Holocaust

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suggests that visiting such sites in order to bear witness to the Holocaust is problematic. However, despite this, Holocaust sites are still visited as part of pilgrimages in order to, in some way, witness and bear witness to the Holocaust. Third, the analysis of Holocaust tourism has demonstrated that its very existence promotes a fantasy of witnessing, because the evolution of Holocaust sites into tourist attractions necessitates fictionalizing of some aspects of the sites. Sites of memory remain as evidence of the Holocaust. The role of these places in contemporary engagement with the memory of the atrocities is a multifaceted one that incorporates the sites themselves and those who visit them. The testimony of eyewitnesses endures as a record of what a site cannot communicate. Yet, the diminishing voices of Holocaust survivors mean that the narratives of non-survivors begin to take precedence. This indicates a shift from survivor memory to non-survivor memory – a significant and irrevocable change that will only intensify as the number of survivors dwindles. Moreover, the position of the third generation – as the last living link to survivors who nevertheless rely on imagination to witness the Holocaust – indicates a further shift that is occurring. This final shift is a crucial one, in which remnants of the Holocaust are still evident, but which are increasingly dominated by later generations’ perspectives on the past.

Conclusion If Place Is Not a Witness, What Is?

In her evocatively titled memoir, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), Ruth Kluger wrote that ‘It won’t do to pretend that we can evoke the physical reality of the camps as they were when they functioned. Nevertheless, I want my timescapes.’1 This book has shown that it is not just Kluger who wants Holocaust sites to be timescapes. Analysing Holocaust texts through a generational structure reveals that for non-survivors, place becomes a substitute for experience. In lieu of experiencing the Holocaust, second-generation texts bear witness to it through describing their visits to sites of Holocaust memory, while third-generation texts deploy imaginary sites of memory to do so. However, survivor memoirs of return tell a different story: describing the inability of sites to transmit memory, these texts show that visiting such places cannot even begin to replicate the experience of the Holocaust. These conflicting interpretations of place give rise to the paradox of place as a witness: despite awareness that a site of Holocaust memory cannot adequately represent the events that occurred there, it is still expected to. The investigation of Holocaust sites confirms this paradox, observing that while it is assumed that such sites represent the Holocaust, they function as a blank canvas for the projection of pre-conceived notions. There are many more examples of texts which document visits to sites of memory as a way of bearing witness to the Holocaust than those discussed in this book. As a whole, this collective demonstrates the importance of sites of memory as a way of accessing this otherwise inaccessible past. It raises further questions about the future of the Holocaust, and the way in which this momentous and tragic event will be remembered in a world without living survivors and eyewitnesses. It also shows that within a climate of collective memory of the Holocaust and Holocaust tourism, one way for direct descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims to claim their identity and closeness to both the Holocaust and the pre-war Jewish world that was destroyed is to create narratives that

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weave their ancestors’ stories with their own accounts of these places. Yet, as the analysis in this book has shown, these narratives struggle to represent the horror of what really happened. This begs the question of what we really want to find at sites of Holocaust memory. Although throughout this book I have argued that these sites are unable to represent the Holocaust, because the very essence of what made them Holocaust sites disappeared when the atrocities ended, this is not to suggest that a solution would be to recreate the horrors at these places. While the idea of making Holocaust sites more accurately resemble the horrific events they strive to represent is worth considering, such a presentation of history would be both unethical and uncomfortable. Instead, I would argue that an important aspect of visiting sites of Holocaust memory is the acknowledgement, either implicitly or explicitly, that these places do not and cannot resemble the places that visitors expect them to be. They remain in the present, not the past. The memorials and monuments at such sites represent the ideas and narratives of those who have erected them, but often without such markers, certain places would remain unmarked and hence unvisited. So, what is actually the point of visiting Holocaust sites, of seeing these places? On the one hand, it may not make the unimaginable any more imaginable. But, on the other hand, perhaps it is the closest clue. Beyond reading memoirs, interviewing eyewitnesses, watching testimony and archival footage, and studying photographs, documents, letters and newspapers, there is something about being in the actual place that links clues from all the different sources together. Visiting a Holocaust site is a three-dimensional experience, a colour experience, a tactile experience that allows walking through, touching and smelling as well as seeing and hearing. Yet, it is important to remember that the colour and the sensory experiences are in the present, not the past. That being there and experiencing this cannot function as a step back in time but perhaps can gesture to the location of pain, memory and death. Yet, there are a few examples of places which have memorials to the Holocaust which are perhaps as fitting as it is possible for them to be. The former extermination camp of Sobibor, Poland, now consisting of a clearing in the forest displaying scant evidence of its former function, save a fragment of barbed wire attached to a tree trunk, is one such example. In contrast to heavily developed former concentration camp sites, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, also in Poland, and Sachsenhausen, Germany, the combination of a lack of visitor facilities and remote location means that Sobibor captures the essence of what non-survivors can know about the Holocaust. The fragment of barbed wire stuck on a tree

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trunk only hints at and provides a tiny clue as to what was there, what happened there and how this contrasts with what remains at the site. James E. Young’s remarks about the process for designing the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin describe a similarly suitable memorial: ‘Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions and exhibitions in Germany than any single “final solution” to Germany’s memorial problem. This way, I reasoned, instead of a fixed icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself – perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions – might now be enshrined.’2 Like the limited signifiers at Sobibor, Young’s idea of sustaining the debate as a memorial in itself manages to memorialize the Holocaust without dictating a fixed narrative. These examples encapsulate the indirect nature of non-survivors’ perspectives on the Holocaust, showing that the potential of place as a witness is limited to its ability to emphasize what nonsurvivors can never know.

Notes Preface 1 As Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt explain, ‘A misconstruction of history begins right in the parking lot: visitors think they have arrived at the periphery of Auschwitz I; in fact they are already in the middle of the camp as it existed in 1945.’ Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 234. The differences between the contemporary Auschwitz site and the Nazi death and concentration camp will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. 2 There was an orchestra at Auschwitz which played daily during the prisoners’ march to work. Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch survived Auschwitz due to her position in this orchestra. See Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 1939–1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (London: Giles de la Mare, 1996).

Introduction 1 In this book, the mass murder of European Jewry during the Second World War will be referred to as ‘the Holocaust’, a Greek term originally meaning ‘burnt offering’, rather than the Hebrew word Shoah (‘catastrophe’) or ‘Auschwitz’ in the metaphorically extended sense. For an explanation of how the term ‘Holocaust’ evolved, see Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, ‘Why Do We Call the Holocaust “The Holocaust”? An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels’, in Yehuda Bauer et al. (eds), Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda (II: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World; Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989). 2 March of the Living is a programme originally for Jewish high school students, which now also includes adults, that entails walking from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II Birkenau on Yom HaShoah – the day of Holocaust remembrance in the Jewish calendar. 3 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History : Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24, p. 22.

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8 9 10 11 12

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For visitor statistics to Auschwitz, see Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Report 2013 (Oświęcim: Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2014), p. 20. Jack Kugelmass, ‘Why We Go to Poland: Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), p. 178. ‘Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau’, http://en.auschwitz.org/m/ [accessed 15 November 2013]; Jochen Spielmann, ‘Auschwitz Is Debated in Oświęcim: The Topography of Remembrance’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London & New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 3. Dark tourism will be discussed in Chapter 4. Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Report 2013 (Oświęcim: Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2014), p. 20. There were 492,500 visitors to Auschwitz in 2001, compared with 1.33 million in 2013. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. x. Young, The Texture of Memory, p. viii. A ‘Jahrzeit’ is the anniversary of someone’s death in the Jewish calendar. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 7, 12. Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 5. For example, see Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London & Sydney : Croom Helm, 1984). Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Revised edn.; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). David Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory’, The Geographical Review, 65/1 (January 1975), pp. 1–36. John Wylie, Landscape (London & New York: Routledge, 2007). Wylie, Landscape, p. 7. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, p. 13. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1. Maoz Azaryahu and Kenneth E. Foote, ‘Historical Space as Narrative Medium: On the Configuration of Spatial Narratives of Time at Historical Sites’, GeoJournal, 73 (2008), pp. 179–94, p. 179. In another article, Foote and Azaryahu echo this point, writing that ‘The location itself, as the scene of past events, together with an available physical remains, can be used to create a sense of authenticity. Valued as relics, remains of the past serve as both “witnesses” and “evidence.” ’ Kenneth E. Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35/1 (Summer 2007), pp. 125–44, p. 128.

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17 Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place’, p. 7. 18 Ibid., p. 24. 19 See for example Young, The Texture of Memory, as well as his edited volume James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), which contains contributions on a wide range of Holocaust sites. Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork have focused on Auschwitz, detailing its long-term history in Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996). Judith Berman has researched how the Holocaust has been memorialized in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, see Judith Berman, ‘Australian Representations of the Holocaust: Jewish Holocaust Museums in Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney, 1984–1996’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 13/2 (Fall 1999), pp. 200–21. Judith Berman, Holocaust Agendas, Conspiracies and Industries? (London & Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006). On the topography of genocide, see: Andrew Charlesworth, ‘ The Topography of Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 216–52. Andrew Charlesworth and Michael Addis, ‘Memorialization and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites: The Cases of Płaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau’, Landscape Research, 27/3 (2002), pp. 229–51, p. 247. 20 There are many studies of Holocaust survivors and their experiences both during and after the Nazi period, such as Lawrence Langer’s study of video survivor testimony: Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991). Recent examples of scholarship devoted to Holocaust survivors include Dalia Ofer, Françoise Ouzan, and Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz (eds), Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). 21 Dalia Kandiyoti, ‘ “Our Foothold in Buried Worlds”: Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces’, Contemporary Literature, 45/2 (Summer 2004), pp. 300–30, p. 305. 22 In 2006, a group of scholars pointed out that ‘Although some scholars have dealt with particular geographical questions in regional studies and others have analyzed specific aspects of space or the built environment, no comprehensive interpretations have identified and investigated the spaces and geographical patterns of the Holocaust.’ Waitman Beorn et al., ‘Geographies of the Holocaust’, The Geographical Review, 99/4 (October 2009), pp. 563–74, p. 563. 23 Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York & London: Routledge, 2003). 24 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2010). 25 Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (eds), Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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26 See, for example, Marita Grimwood, ‘Imagined Topographies: Visions of Poland in Writings by Descendants of Survivors’, in Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (eds), Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Petra Fachinger, ‘Poland and Post-Memory in Second-Generation German Jewish Fiction’, Shofar, 4 (2009), pp. 49–65. Esther Jilovsky, ‘ “All a Myth? Come and See for Yourself ”: Place as Holocaust Witness in Survivor and Second Generation Memoirs of Return’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, XXV (2011), pp. 153–74. António Sousa Ribeiro, ‘Cartographies of Non-space: Journeys to the End of the World in Holocaust Literature’, Journal of Romance Studies, 11/1 (Spring 2011), pp. 76–86. Nina Fischer, ‘Searching for a Lost Place: European Returns in Jewish Australian Second Generation Memoirs’, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 4/1 (2013), pp. 31–50. Kandiyoti, ‘ “Our Foothold in Buried Worlds” ’, p. 304. 27 Kandiyoti, ‘ “Our Foothold in Buried Worlds” ’, p. 304. 28 Regarding Holocaust tourism, discussed in Chapter 4, see G.J. Ashworth, ‘Holocaust Tourism: The Experience of Kraków-Kazimierz’, International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 11/4 (2002), pp. 363–67. Griselda Pollock, ‘Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory’, in David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (eds), Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2003). ‘Heritage tourism’ is a further relevant concept for describing the types of trips to Holocaust sites discussed in this book, which describes ‘tourism related to what we have inherited’, where inheritance is expanded to include on a collective, societal level as well as on a personal, familial level. Gary McCain and Nina M. Ray, ‘Legacy Tourism: The Search for Personal Meaning in Heritage Travel’, Tourism Management, 24 (2003), pp. 713–17, p. 713. A sub-category of heritage tourism is ‘legacy tourism’, which aptly describes the purpose for journeys to Holocaust sites: ‘those that travel to engage in genealogical endeavors, to search for information on or to simply feel connected to ancestors and ancestral roots’. Ibid. 29 James E. Young, ‘Jewish Memory in Poland’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), p. 215. 30 Jack Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland’, in Ivan Karp, Christine M. Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 396. 31 The notion of trips to Holocaust sites as pilgrimage is discussed in Chapter 4. 32 Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe’, p. 400. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 411.

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35 Feldman’s research on visits by Israelis to Poland found that trips organized by the Israeli Ministry of Education for teenage Israelis are structured to enforce the view that the only safe place for Jews is Israel and that the Diaspora was, and still is, a place of anti-Semitism. Jackie Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective through the Poland “Experience” ’, Israel Studies, 7/2 (Summer 2002), pp. 84–114. Research by Lazar et al. has also linked such trips to an explicit Zionist message, finding that ‘Participation in the journey to Poland appeared to be the factor that influenced the positive relation between sense of identity and the Zionist lesson that “Israel is the only place for Jews.” ’ Alon Lazar et al., ‘Jewish Israeli Teenagers, National Identity, and the Lessons of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 18/2 (Fall 2004), pp. 188–204, p. 198. 36 Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 85. 37 Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the ‘Shoah Business’ (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. 110. 38 Cole writes that his notion of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-land arose from his visit there: ‘I didn’t know quite what to expect when I made this journey to Oswiecim, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to find two “Auschwitzs” in this town.’ Ibid., p. 97. Young, The Texture of Memory, p. xiii. 39 Grimwood, ‘Imagined Topographies’, p. 201. 40 Documentation of early Holocaust testimony can be found in Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Margaret Taft, From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness 1941–1949 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013). Zoë Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 41 For instance, second-generation memoirs The Fiftieth Gate by Mark Raphael Baker (Sydney : Flamingo, 1997) and The War After: Living with the Holocaust by Anne Karpf (London: Minerva, 1997), discussed in Chapter 2, are based on the authors’ experience as children of Holocaust survivors, in contrast with Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest by Andrea Simon, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), discussed in Chapter 3, which notes that the author’s grandmother migrated to America in 1923. 42 The novels analysed in this book are second-generation work Too Many Men by Lily Brett (Sydney : Pan Macmillan, 1999), discussed in Chapter 2, and thirdgeneration texts Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund (trans. Jessica Cohen (First English Language edn.; New Milford & London: The Toby Press, 2006)) and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (London: Penguin Books, 2003), which are discussed in Chapter 3. 43 While many Holocaust historians do have a personal or familial connection to the Holocaust, their research in these fields primarily relies on scholarly research rather than this personal link. For example, historian Saul Friedländer,

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author of several books on the Holocaust including Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), was a child survivor, described in his memoir When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979). Yet, for many literary critics with a family connection to the Holocaust, their research is explicitly informed by their perspective, for example, child of survivors Marianne Hirsch, author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1997). Scholars in literary criticism who devote a chapter to their connection to the Holocaust include Geoffrey H. Hartman, who was on the Kindertransport, in The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) and David G. Roskies, whose parents left Vilna in 1930, in Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1984). For a discussion of issues regarding the positionality of researchers in Holocaust Studies, see Pascale Bos, ‘Positionality and Postmemory in Scholarship on the Holocaust’, Women in German Yearbook, 19 (2003), pp. 50–74. 44 Jewish memory theorist Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi claims that ‘[the Holocaust’s] image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible’. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1983), p. 98. 45 On the development of early Holocaust testimony, see Jockusch, Collect and Record!; Taft, From Victim to Survivor; and Waxman, Writing the Holocaust. Since the late 1970s, there has been a concerted effort to record Holocaust survivor testimonies on video. Vast archives have been collected and stored by organizations such as the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (52,000 testimonies); the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies held at Yale University Library (4,400 testimonies); and the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia (1,300 testimonies) (all figures from March 2014). 46 Important early works in this field include Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1975); Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980) and Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust (New York & London: Holmes & Meier, 1988). Seminal works which address questions of representation and the Holocaust include Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Third printing, 1996 edn., Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance. The Jewish aspect of testimony is addressed by Roskies for example, who contextualizes Holocaust literature within a purely Jewish tradition, arguing for ‘a continuum of Jewish response to catastrophe’. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 13.

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47 For example, see the following thorough accounts: Taft, From Victim to Survivor and Waxman, Writing the Holocaust. 48 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary offers two definitions for witness: ‘a person who sees an event take place’ and ‘a person giving sworn testimony to a court of law or the police.’ ‘Witness’, in Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (eds), Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th edn.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). These definitions incorporate the two main elements of a witness: seeing an event and telling it to others. An ‘eyewitness’ is defined as ‘a person who has seen something happen and can give a first-hand description of it’. ‘Eyewitness’, in Soanes and Stevenson, Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 49 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 17. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 A particularly contentious interpretation is literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychiatrist Dori Laub’s book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, which posits that the Holocaust evokes a ‘crisis of witnessing’. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. xvii. They argue that because the Holocaust was a highly traumatic event, witnessing could not take place at the time but only afterwards through the giving of testimony by survivors in front of a witness. 53 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1988), pp. 63–64. 54 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 87. 55 Ibid., p. 137. 56 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. xi. 57 Waxman has demonstrated the importance of context, arguing that ‘It is only by exploring the social and historical context of Holocaust testimony that we can appreciate the sheer diversity of witnesses’ experiences.’ Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 1. 58 Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, trans. Patrick Camiller (London & New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 56. 59 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 22. 60 This book uses ‘non-survivors’ in the sense of Gary Weissman’s interchangeable terms ‘nonsurvivors’ and ‘nonwitnesses’. ‘Nonwitnesses’ was not chosen because it precludes witnessing by those who did not experience the Holocaust. See Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 5.

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61 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 1. Berel Lang emphasizes that ‘the principal access to the Holocaust is by way of the writings about it which are now available’, noting that ‘this has become true to some extent even for the survivors of the Holocaust’. Lang, Writing and the Holocaust, p. 14. 62 Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 20. 63 Ibid., p. 18. 64 Ibid., p. 20. 65 Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 1991), p. 30. 66 Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 8. Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 85. S. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 67 Caroline Wake’s theory of tertiary witnessing encapsulates another way of describing non-survivors’ encounters with testimony of the primary witnesses. In a direct critique of Felman and Laub’s theory, Wake deploys the concept of ‘spatiotemporal distance’ to describe the perspective of those viewing video testimony. In her interpretation, ‘viewers of video testimonies can be considered tertiary witnesses, defined by their paradoxical combination of spatiotemporal distance and emotional copresence’. See Caroline Wake, ‘Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Complexity of Copresence and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing’, History & Memory, 25/1 (2013), pp. 111–44, p. 113. 68 Alan L. Berger, ‘Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of the “Shoah” ’, Modern Judaism, 10/1 (February 1990), pp. 43–63, p. 56. 69 Ulrich Baer (ed.), ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’: Erinnerungskultur nach der Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 11. 70 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. xvii. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 57. 71 Laub, ‘Bearing Witness’, p. 57. Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 85. 72 Zoë Waxman, ‘Testimony and Representation’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 487. Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 2. 73 Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 21. 74 Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 85. 75 The Haggadah is a Jewish religious text ritually read aloud during the festival of Passover, which commemorates the biblical exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

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76 Berger, ‘Bearing Witness’, p. 44. 77 Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p. 17. 78 Eric J. Sundquist, ‘Witness Without End?’, American Literary History, 19/1 (Spring 2007), pp. 65–85, p. 67. 79 Scholars of the Holocaust who are members of the second generation include: Alan L. Berger, Helen Epstein, Aaron Hass, Marianne Hirsch, David G. Roskies and Margaret Taft. 80 Interview-based studies of Holocaust survivor families incorporate the perspective of several members in each family (and even each generation) in the analysis, which is generally impossible in a textual study. See, for example, Dan BarOn, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1995), Gabriele Rosenthal (ed.), The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (London & Washington: Cassell, 1998), and Julia Chaitin, ‘Issues and Interpersonal Values among Three Generations in Families of Holocaust Survivors’, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19/3 (2002), pp. 379–402. 81 For example, Hartman and Efraim Sicher both refer to post-Holocaust generations collectively as the ‘generation after’. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 111; Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 192. Conversely, some early works which consider the Holocaust through writing and as narrative do not fixate on matters such as whether the writer was a survivor or not, or their personal relationship to the Holocaust. Examples include: Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination and Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. 82 Schaumann, Memory Matters. 83 See Caroline Schaumann, ‘A Third-Generation World War II Narrative: Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper’, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, 4 (2005), pp. 259–80; Schaumann, Memory Matters, p. 14. 84 Schaumann, Memory Matters, p. 322. 85 Trans-generational trauma occurs when the effects of the parents’ trauma are evident in the children, who in turn even display trauma symptoms, although they did not actually undergo the traumatic experience. For a study of transgenerational trauma in children of Holocaust survivors, see Dani RowlandKlein and Rosemary Dunlop, ‘The Transmission of Trauma across Generations: Identification with Parental Trauma in Children of Holocaust Survivors’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 31 (1997), pp. 358–69. 86 Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, in Paul Kecskemeti (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), pp. 276–322.

Notes 87 88 89 90 91

92

93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100

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Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 304. Ernst van Alphen, ‘Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 27/2 (Summer 2006), pp. 473–88, p. 473. To sociologists, a generation is a category for classifying people, in a similar fashion to other markers such as class, nationality, race and gender. See for example S. N. Eisenstadt, From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure (The International Library of Sociology; London: Routledge, 1998), and June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics (Lanham & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002). In political science, a generation is defined as those who underwent similar experiences during their formative years, see Marvin Rintala, The Constitution of Silence: Essays on Generational Themes (Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 8.; Rudolf Heberle, Social Movements: An Introduction to Political Sociology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1951), p. 120. For historians, generations provide a mould to tell their narrative interpretation of the past. See for example Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Alan B. Spitzer, ‘The Historical Problem of Generations’, American Historical Review, 78/5 (December 1973), pp. 1353–85. Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 90. See Rintala, The Constitution of Silence, p. 8; Heberle, Social Movements, p. 120. Anton Gill states that the vast majority of Holocaust survivors were aged ‘in their teens and early twenties when they were in the camps’. Anton Gill, The Journey Back from Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p. 117. Chaitin, ‘Issues and Interpersonal Values among Three Generations in Families of Holocaust Survivors’, p. 384. Even though Simon’s memoir Bashert notes that her grandmother arrived in America in 1923, it is still designated a third-generation memoir not only because the remaining family was killed in the Holocaust, but also because the protagonist presents her relationship to the Holocaust through her grandmother. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago, 59/3 (2002), pp. 277–95, p. 277. Ibid. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid.; Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 49. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 49. Annelies Schulte Nordholt, ‘Writing the Memory of the Shoah at the Turn of the Century: An Introduction’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5/2 (July 2006), pp. 183–87, p. 184. Schaumann, ‘A Third-Generation World War II Narrative’, p. 260.

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102 For example, Hartman writes, ‘the “generation after” which did not participate directly in a great event that determined their parents’ and perhaps grandparents’ lives.’ Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 111. In a similar vein, Sicher uses ‘generation after’ to refer generally to the generation that did not experience the Holocaust, but who nevertheless feels deprived of its memory: ‘In the “generation after,” the symbolization of the “unrepresentable” Holocaust experience articulates the unknown or incomprehensible contents of psychic holes formed by the absence of memory related to personal and family history, identity and formative events.’ Efraim Sicher, ‘ “Tancred’s Wound”: From Repression to Symbolization of the Holocaust in Second-Generation Narratives’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5/2 (July 2006), pp. 189–201, p. 192. 103 Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 204. Eva Fogelman, ‘Survivors, Second Generation of ’, in Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), p. 1434. 104 Fogelman, ‘Survivors, Second Generation of ’, p. 1434. 105 van Alphen, ‘Second-Generation Testimony’, p. 476. Helen Epstein, ‘The Heirs of the Holocaust’, New York Times Magazine, 19 June 1977, pp. 12–15, 74–77; Epstein, Children of the Holocaust. Epstein’s 1977 article documents interviews with children of Holocaust survivors ranging in age from twenty-two to twenty-eight, while Epstein herself was twenty-nine. 106 Gill, The Journey Back from Hell, p. 38. 107 Epstein notes that ‘The last Displaced Persons camp – Foehrenwald in Bavaria – remained in operation until 1957.’ Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 95. 108 Thomas Fox explains that ‘in the worst episode in the history of Polish-Jewish relations [between 1944 and 1947], between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews were murdered. Pogroms occurred in approximately a dozen Polish towns and cities, the worst such attack being in Kielce in July 1946, when 42 Jews were murdered and over 100 wounded.’ Thomas C. Fox, ‘The Holocaust under Communism’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 420–39, p. 426. 109 Gill notes that ‘Strong too was the impulse to start a family – a replacement for the one that had been lost, and for many Jews especially an instinctive imperative to continue and reassert the race.’ Gill, The Journey Back from Hell, p. 45. 110 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (London: Vintage, 1998). 111 Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 96. 112 Esther Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Journey to Auschwitz’, Colloquy, 15 (2008), pp. 146–62, p. 147. 113 Ron Eyerman, ‘Intellectuals and the Construction of an African American Identity: Outline of a Generational Approach’, in Edmunds and Turner (eds), Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics, pp. 65–66.

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114 Rowland-Klein and Dunlop, ‘The Transmission of Trauma across Generations’, p. 359. 115 Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 9. 116 Tivka S. Nathan, ‘Survivors, Psychology of: Children of Survivors’, in Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), p. 1432. 117 Epstein emphasizes the diversity in the lifestyles, professions, religious beliefs and political orientations of her interviewees and stresses that ‘Despite this diversity, all described feelings of affinity to other children of survivors.’ Epstein, ‘The Heirs of the Holocaust’. Fogelman writes that ‘Despite their heterogeneity as a sociological group, they share the common bond of a shattered family heritage.’ Fogelman, ‘Survivors, Second Generation of ’, p. 1434. 118 Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 14. 119 For instance, Aaron Hass and Alan Berger are both members of the second generation who have conducted research on it. See Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust; Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture; Albany : State University of New York Press, 1997). 120 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 22. Ellen S. Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory: The PostHolocaust Generation in the Diaspora’, in Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 187. 121 van Alphen, ‘Second-Generation Testimony’, p. 474. 122 Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory’, p. 186. 123 Collective memory refers to memory accorded to a society or group. As Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam claim, ‘Collective memory is actually a fabricated version of that same personal memory adjusted to what the individual mind considers, rightly or not, as suitable in a social environment.’ Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is It?’, History & Memory, 8/1 (1996), pp. 30–50, p. 47. In other words, the perception of others assuming a certain generational identity in relation to the Holocaust causes people to identify with a similar generational identity. 124 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London & New York: Verso, 2000). 125 This is illustrated in the following example given by Weissman, who writes that ‘Following [a colleague’s] presentation I overheard two elderly survivors talking … . One expressed confusion as to whether or not the presenter was the grandchild of a survivor; when her friend told her the young woman had said she was not, the survivor angrily insisted that those who are not the grandchildren of survivors have no right to call themselves members of the third generation.’ Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 19. 126 Fogelman, ‘Survivors, Second Generation of ’.

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127 Rintala specifies these years as ‘from approximately seventeen to twenty-five’, while Heberle asserts that ‘it spans the period from twenty to thirty years of age, but in individual cases it may begin earlier and end later’. Rintala, The Constitution of Silence, p. 14; Heberle, Social Movements, pp. 120–21. 128 For example, third-generation group 3GNY, based in New York, emerged in 2005, while Melbourne-based 3GH emerged in 2006. See Daniel Brooks, ‘3GNY: A NYCBased Group for Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’, http://www.3gnewyork .org/ [accessed 4 December 2008]. ‘3GH – 3rd Generation Holocaust Descendants’, http://www.3gh.com.au/ [accessed 4 December 2008]. 129 Schaumann, ‘A Third-Generation World War II Narrative’, p. 259. 130 This will be discussed in Chapter 3. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 67. 131 Brooks, ‘3GNY: A NYC-Based Group for Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’, ‘3GH – 3rd Generation Holocaust Descendants’. 132 Aaron Biterman, ‘Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’ [Facebook Group], https://www.facebook.com/groups/3GsWorldwide/ [accessed 6 February 2015]. 133 Weissman notes that the definition of third generation ‘has been broadened to include most any Jewish American born in the 1960s and 1970s’. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 19. A further example is Isabella Matauschek’s article about Dutch and Danish ‘third generation’ perceptions of the Holocaust, which does not define the term specifically but suggests it refers to the generation whose grandparents lived at the time of the Holocaust and whose parents were born afterwards. See Isabella Matauschek, ‘Bringing the Holocaust Home. Danish and Dutch Third Generation’s Struggle to Make Sense of the Holocaust’, in Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Contemporary German youths are often referred to as third generation, whether their grandparents were explicit Nazi perpetrators or not. See Olaf Jensen, ‘ “One Goes Left to the Russians, the Other Goes Right to the Americans” – Family Recollections of the Holocaust in Europe’, in Davies and Szejnmann, How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives. 134 Alan L. Berger, ‘The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism’, Religion and American Culture, 5/1 (Winter 1995), pp. 23–47, p. 42. 135 Amelia Klein, ‘Memory-Work: Video Testimony, Holocaust Remembrance and the Third Generation’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 13/2–3 (Autumn/Winter 2007), pp. 129–50, p. 138. 136 Nicole Fox, ‘ “Their History Is Part of Me”: Third Generation American Jews and Intergenerational Transmission of Memory, Trauma and History’, Moreshet, 8 (Winter 2010), pp. 7–35, p. 7.

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137 Jessica Lang, ‘The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the Transmission of Holocaust Memory’, Journal of Modern Literature, 33/1 (2010), pp. 43–56, p. 46. 138 Steven L. Jacobs, Rethinking Jewish Faith: The Child of a Survivor Responds (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 11. 139 Ibid. 140 Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 157. 141 Melvin Jules Bukiet (ed.), Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 26. 142 Bennett Berger notes that generations are generally perceived to last approximately thirty years. See Bennett M. Berger, ‘How Long Is a Generation?’, The British Journal of Sociology, 11/1 (March 1960), pp. 10–23. 143 In his study of Holocaust survivors, Gill notes that ‘The majority of those I met were born in the Twenties, and were therefore in their teens and early twenties when they were in the camps’, thereby implying they were not much older at liberation. Gill, The Journey Back from Hell. Epstein writes that ‘By the end of 1947, thousands of Holocaust survivors had given birth to a new generation.’ Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 94. 144 See Eyerman, ‘Intellectuals and the Construction of an African American Identity’. 145 Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Paperback edn.; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 73. Kitty Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Granada, 1981). Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Illini Books edn.; Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 146 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate. Helena Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, trans. Moshe Kahn (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2001). Brett, Too Many Men. 147 Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead (London: Vintage, 2000). Karpf, The War After. Arnold Zable, Jewels and Ashes (Newham: Scribe Publications, 1991). 148 Alex Sage, For Esther (Sydney : Flamingo, 2000). Simon, Bashert. 149 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust. 150 Shimon Attie, The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994).

Chapter 1 1

As noted in the Introduction, 1.33 million people visited the Memorial AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum in 2013, a significant increase on the 492, 500 visitors in 2001. Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Report 2013 (Oświęcim: Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2014).

164 2 3 4

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Kitty Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Granada, 1981), p. 197. Ibid., p. 13. Kitty Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz (New revised edn.; Laxton: Beth Shalom Limited, 1997), p. 211; Hart, Return to Auschwitz, pp. 218–19. Return to Auschwitz was first published in 1981 and a revised, updated edition was published in 1997. This book refers to both editions. 5 Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (Yorkshire Television, 1979), Peter Morley (dir.). The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive consists of approximately 52,000 ‘audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides’, most of which were interviews recorded in the survivors’ homes. ‘About the Visual History Archive’, http://sfi.usc.edu/what_is_the_vha [accessed 4 September 2013]. ‘Collecting Testimonies’, http://sfi.usc.edu/explore/collecting _testimonies [accessed 4 September 2013]. 6 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 211. 7 Ibid., p. 199. 8 Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, trans. Patrick Camiller (London & New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 56. 9 Frank was in hiding with her family (father Otto, mother Edith and sister Margot) and four others in Amsterdam from 6 July 1942 until they were betrayed and arrested on 4 August 1944. She started keeping a diary a month before they went into hiding. She died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in early March 1945, aged fifteen. Frank’s father Otto was the only survivor of the eight in hiding together. See Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, trans. Susan Massotty (New York: Doubleday, 1995). Klemperer was Professor of French Literature at the Technical University of Dresden until 1935, when the Nuremberg laws forbade Jews to practise such professions. He was one of only 175 Jews who remained in Dresden in early 1945, mainly because he had converted to Protestant Christianity and thus survived the Holocaust. See Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, trans. Martin Chalmers (1st edn.; New York: Random House, 1998). Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (1st edn.; New York: Random House, 1999). 10 Cited in the ‘Einleitung’ (Introduction) to Ulrich Baer (ed.), ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’: Erinnerungskultur nach der Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 10. 11 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 30. 12 Ibid.

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13 Zoë Waxman notes that ‘Between 1945 and 1949, seventy-five memoirs were published in a variety of European languages’. Zoë Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 100. 14 Janina Fischler-Martinho, Have You Seen My Little Sister? (London & Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), p. 268. 15 Some other Holocaust testimonies which describe return visits are: Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Volume One 1928–1969, trans. Alfred A. Knopf Inc. (1st edn.; London: HarperCollins, 1996), and Livia Bitton-Jackson, Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2009), as well as many of the yizker-bikher cited in Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Second, Expanded edn., Bloomington & Indianapolis; Washington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998). Steven Cooke and Donna-Lee Frieze have analysed videotestimonies of survivors who have returned to sites of atrocity in recent decades, see Steven Cooke and Donna-Lee Frieze, ‘ “It’s Still in Your Body”: Identity, Place and Performance in Holocaust Testimonies’, in Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton (eds), Travel and Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014). 16 As explained in the Introduction, Susan Rubin Suleiman notes that ‘for if all those who were there experienced trauma, the specific experience of children was that the trauma occurred (or at least, began) before the formation of stable identity that we associate with adulthood, and in some cases before any conscious sense of self.’ See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago, 59/3 (2002), p. 277. 17 Hart, Return to Auschwitz. 18 While in Return to Auschwitz Hart-Moxon writes that ‘Some fifteen years before first setting eyes on Auschwitz I opened my eyes to a more attractive world in Bielsko’, being born in 1926 means she must have been 16 or 17 when she arrived at Auschwitz in 1943. Ibid., p. 33. 19 A revised edition appeared in 1974: Kitty Hart, I Am Alive (Corgi revised edition with preface edn.; London: Corgi Books, 1974). 20 Peter Morley, ‘Kitty – Return to Auschwitz’, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 159. 21 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, pp. 218–19. 22 Morley, ‘Kitty – Return to Auschwitz’, p. 159. 23 Judith Berman, ‘Holocaust Commemorations in London and Anglo-Jewish (Dis)Unity’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 3/1 (2004), p. 60. 24 Emily Moore, ‘Lessons in Death’, Guardian, 9 November 1999, http://www.guardian .co.uk [accessed 3 November 2014]. Morley, ‘Kitty – Return to Auschwitz’, p. 159.

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25 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 219. 26 Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Illini Books edn.; Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 27 Ibid., p. 67. 28 For instance, Waxman notes that ‘the development of Women’s Studies meant that women’s Holocaust memoirs appearing from the mid-1970s onwards emphasize gender-related experiences – such as the loss of femininity, pregnancy and fear of rape – to a much greater extent than is the case in earlier women’s memoirs’, citing Seed of Sarah as an example. Zoë Waxman, ‘Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories: The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences’, Women’s History Review, 12/4 (2003), pp. 661–77, p. 666. Furthermore, Louise O. Vasvári describes the text as ‘suffused with women’s experiences’. Louise O. Vasvári, ‘Emigrée Central European Jewish Women’s Holocaust Life Writing’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 11/1 (March 2009), pp. 1–12, p. 6. 29 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 171. 30 Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Paperback edn.; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 17. 31 Ibid., p. 192. 32 Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: eine Jugend (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992). 33 Caroline Schaumann, ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of Her “German Book” for an American Audience’, The German Quarterly, 77/3 (Summer 2004), pp. 324–39, p. 324. 34 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 264. 35 Linda Schulte-Sasse, ‘ “Living on” in the American Press: Ruth Kluger’s “Still Alive” and Its Challenge to a Cherished Holocaust Paradigm’, German Studies Review, 27/3 (October 2004), pp. 469–75, p. 469. 36 For example, Erin McGlothlin argues that weiter leben and Still Alive form one autobiography, written for different audiences but each informing the other, combining to reflect Kluger’s various identities. Erin McGlothlin, ‘Autobiographical Re-vision: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and Still Alive’, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, 3 (2004), pp. 46–70. In a similar vein, Schaumann contends that weiter leben was written for a German audience and Still Alive for an American audience and therefore shows that the Holocaust is not universal, but particularized for certain national or cultural contexts. Schaumann, ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001)’. Reviews in the British press heaped lavish praise on Landscapes of Memory, for example The Independent declared it ‘as important as The Diary of Anne Frank – and equally unforgettable’; while The Guardian described it as ‘wise, witty, blunt, brutally honest and unsentimental’. Julia Pascal, ‘Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, by Ruth Kluger’, Independent, 27 February 2003. Elena Lappin, ‘Saved by a Lie’, Guardian, 15 March

Notes

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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2003, sec. Features & reviews, p. 11. Some American reviews of Still Alive were less favourable, which Linda Schulte-Sasse attributes to the fact that ‘Kluger thus frustrates our redemptive Holocaust paradigm with two oppositional strategies, the intermingling of a Holocaust story with personal recollections that are too close, and with a narrative attitude that’s too far away.’ Schulte-Sasse, ‘ “Living on” in the American Press’, p. 474. In other words, this reviewer argues that by eschewing the Holocaust as an ennobling experience, the text falls outside of what a Holocaust narrative is expected to be. Yet, herein lies its power and attraction: it forces the reader to question pre-conceived notions of a Holocaust narrative by challenging them directly. Pascale Bos, German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation’. Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 199. Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 145. Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 15. Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 264. Ibid. Rudolf Heberle, Social Movements: An Introduction to Political Sociology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1951), p. 118. Alan Rosen, ‘ “The Language of Dollars”: Multilingualism and the Claims of English in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust’, in Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (eds), Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 47. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants’, Poetics Today, 17/4 (Winter 1996), pp. 639–57, pp. 643–44. Ibid., p. 644. Rosen, ‘ “The Language of Dollars” ’, p. 47. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 160. Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, pp. 96–97. Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 109. Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, pp. 135–37. Ibid., pp. 64–65. Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 14. For an analysis of the differences between survivors and members of the second generation and third generation visiting Holocaust sites, see Esther Jilovsky, ‘The Place of Memory or the Memory of Place? The Representation of Auschwitz in Holocaust Memoirs’, in Karen Auerbach (ed.), Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2015).

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56 Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Introduction’, in Charlotte Delbo (ed.), Auschwitz and After (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xi. 57 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 6. 58 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 15. 59 Ibid. 60 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, p. 219. 61 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 258. 62 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. xi. 63 Ibid., p. 38. 64 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 183. 65 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 138. 66 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, p. 31. 67 Ibid., p. 32. 68 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 19. 69 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 146. 70 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 203. 71 Ibid., p. 199. 72 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 1. 73 Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (Morley (dir.)). 74 See Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, pp. 158–59. 75 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, pp. 29–30. 76 Ibid., p. 30. 77 Ibid., p. 31. 78 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 16; Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (Morley (dir.)). 79 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, p. 30. 80 Ibid., p. 29. 81 Ibid., p. 216. 82 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 183. Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 131. 83 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 183. 84 Ibid., p. 133. 85 Ibid., p. 170. 86 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 131. 87 Ibid., p. 62. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., p. 256. 90 Ibid., p. 100. 91 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 1. 92 See Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp. 125–33.

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93 Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 69. Feldman writes that ‘Effective witnessing is anchored in the visual [sic] and sensory contexts of significant remains and the body of the witness’, thus emphasizing the importance of the witness being at the site of memory. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. 94 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 74. 95 Ibid., p. 73. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., p. 131. 98 Shoah (Eureka, 2007), Claude Lanzmann (dir.); Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 72. 99 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 135. 100 Ibid., pp. 136–37. 101 Hart, Return to Auschwitz, pp. 29–30. 102 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 207. 103 Ibid., p. 200. 104 Ibid., p. 199. 105 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 73. 106 Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (Morley (dir.)). 107 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 201. 108 Andrew Charlesworth and Michael Addis, ‘Memorialization and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites: The Cases of Płaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau’, Landscape Research, 27/3 (2002), pp. 229–51, p. 240. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. 109 Feldman, Above the Death Pits, pp. 149–50. 110 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 70. 111 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 264. 112 See Schaumann, ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001)’ . 113 Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 264. 114 See Bos, German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust. 115 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, p. 133. 116 Ibid., p. 141. 117 Ibid., p. 183. 118 Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 200. 119 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. xii–xiii; Jochen Spielmann, ‘Auschwitz is Debated in Oświęcim: The Topography of Remembrance’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), pp. 171–72.

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Chapter 2 1 2

3

4

5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13

Lily Brett, Too Many Men (Sydney : Pan Macmillan, 1999), p. 576. This categorization of the second generation ‘in the shadows of the Holocaust’ is evident in the titles of pivotal works such as Aaron Hass’s study In the Shadow of the Holocaust and Geoffrey H. Hartman’s book The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. See Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1991). Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). Mark Raphael Baker, The Fiftieth Gate (Sydney: Flamingo, 1997). Brett, Too Many Men. Helena Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, trans. Moshe Kahn (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2001). An earlier version of the analysis of Too Many Men, Lektionen des Verborgenen and The Fiftieth Gate appeared in Esther Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Journey to Auschwitz’, Colloquy, 15 (2008), pp. 146–62. This article was developed from ideas first expressed in Esther Jilovsky, ‘Die Reise nach Auschwitz: Ein Vergleich zwischen drei autobiographischen Zeugnissen aus Australien und Deutschland’, Honours Thesis (The University of Melbourne, 2004). Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead (London: Vintage, 2000). Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London: Minerva, 1997). Arnold Zable, Jewels and Ashes (Newham: Scribe Publications, 1991). Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 13. See, for example, Efraim Sicher, ‘The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives’, History & Memory, 12/2 (Fall/Winter 2000), pp. 56–90, p. 66. Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms, ‘Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/biography’, in Julie Rak (ed.), Auto/Biography in Canada: Critical Directions (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), pp. 31–51, p. 43. Ibid., p. 41. Nina Fischer, ‘Searching for a Lost Place: European Returns in Jewish Australian Second Generation Memoirs’, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 4/1 (2013), pp. 31–50, p. 32. Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 148. Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 7.

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14 Kathy Grinblat (ed.), Children of the Shadows: Voices of the Second Generation (Crawley : University of Western Australia Press, 2002), p. 2. 15 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, pp. 5–6. 16 Alan L. Berger, ‘The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism’, Religion and American Culture, 5/1 (Winter 1995), pp. 23–47, p. 24. 17 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 22. Ellen S. Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory: The PostHolocaust Generation in the Diaspora’, in Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 185–200, p. 187. 18 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 149. While postmemory is no doubt constructed by collective memory, it overrides collective memory because of the personal connection. 19 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 22. 20 Ibid. 21 Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory’, p. 187. 22 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, pp. 149–50. 23 Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory’, p. 187. 24 Robert Eaglestone for instance criticizes what he interprets as Ruth’s and therefore Brett’s prejudice towards Poles, writing that ‘None of the Polish characters has any redeeming features’, and arguing that this stems from a ‘fixity of memory and opinion’ that does not allow for working through the past. However, this reaction to visiting Poland – perhaps enabled by Brett’s choice to write fiction rather than a memoir – is no less valid than a child of survivors who chooses to engage with Poland in a more positive manner. See Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 114. 25 Richard Freadman, ‘Sister Pacts’, Meanjin, 61/1 (2002), pp. 186–95, p. 193. 26 Ibid. 27 Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 30. 28 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 628. 29 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 150. 30 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate, p. 2. 31 Ibid., p. 128. 32 Ibid., p. 130. 33 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 7. 34 Ibid., p. 81. 35 Ibid., p. 226. 36 Ibid., p. 225. 37 Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory’, p. 187. 38 Zable, Jewels and Ashes, p. 8.

172 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62

Notes Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid. Anne Karpf, ‘Children of the Holocaust’, Guardian, 25 June 1996, sec. The Guardian Features Page, p. T.002. Anne Karpf, ‘The Week in Books: Holocaust Memorials’, Guardian, 24 January 2009, sec. Features & reviews p. 5. Karpf, The War After, p. 94. Ibid., p. 95. Helena Janeczek, Lezioni di tenebra (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1997). James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 160. Maria Cristina Mauceri, ‘Writing Outside Borders: Personal Experience and History in the Works of Helga Schneider and Helena Janeczek’, in Susanna Scarparo and Rita Wilson (eds), Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), p. 143. Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 93. Ibid., p. 166. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 226. Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 151. Nadine Fresco, ‘Remembering the Unknown’, The International Review of PsychoAnalysis, 11/4 (1984), pp. 417–27, p. 421. Melvin Jules Bukiet (ed.), Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 16. For a study of trans-generational trauma in children of Holocaust survivors, see Dani Rowland-Klein and Rosemary Dunlop, ‘The Transmission of Trauma across Generations: Identification with Parental Trauma in Children of Holocaust Survivors’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 31 (1997), pp. 358–69. Karpf, The War After. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 103. Erin McGlothlin, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester: Camden House, 2006), p. 3. Efraim Sicher, ‘ “Tancred’s Wound”: From Repression to Symbolization of the Holocaust in Second-Generation Narratives’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5/2 (July 2006), pp. 189–201, p. 194. Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger (eds), Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (1st edn., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 227.

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63 F.K. Clementi, ‘Helena Janeczek’s Lessons of Darkness: Uncharted Paths to Shoah Memory Through Food and Language’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 6/1 (March 2012), pp. 1–19, p. 12. 64 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 69. 65 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 12. 66 Ibid., p. 184. 67 Ibid., p. 376. 68 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate, p. 312. 69 Ibid., p. 252. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 254. 72 For a study of Lektionen des Verborgenen compared with third-generation Holocaust memoir Eine exklusive Liebe by Johanna Adorján (2009), see Esther Jilovsky, ‘ “Weil wir keine Deutschen sind”: Memory, Narrative and Identity in GermanJewish Holocaust Memoirs’, in Alan Corkhill and Alison Lewis (eds), Intercultural Encounters in German Studies (Transpositions: Australian Studies in German Literature, Philosophy and Culture; St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2014), pp. 305–20. Johanna Adorján, Eine exklusive Liebe (München: btb Verlag, 2009). 73 Lynn Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust: Memory, Identity and JewishGerman Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 26. 74 Ibid., p. 132. 75 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 23. 76 Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, p. 138. 77 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 25. 78 Ibid. 79 Mauceri, ‘Writing Outside Borders’, p. 141. 80 Other members of the second generation mention this feeling of exclusion and differentiation from surrounding society. Hass recalls that ‘When asked, “Fin vanit bist du? (where are you from?)” by someone from the old country, I would respond “Ich bin a Lubliner.” Even though before 1987 I had never been to Lublin, Poland, where my parents and grandparents lived before the war, I felt [sic] as though that were my home’. Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 2. 81 Sicher, ‘The Future of the Past’, p. 80. 82 Zable, Jewels and Ashes. 83 Karpf, The War After, p. 94. 84 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 8. 85 Ibid. 86 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Angela Richards (ed.), On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (The Pelican Freud Library, 11; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 251–68.

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87 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), p. 72. 88 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 158. 89 Marita Grimwood, ‘Imagined Topographies: Visions of Poland in Writings by Descendants of Survivors’, in Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (eds), Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations After the Holocaust (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 201. 90 Clementi, ‘Helena Janeczek’s Lessons of Darkness’, p. 14. 91 Arlene Stein, ‘Trauma and Origins: Post-Holocaust Genealogists and the Work of Memory’, Qualitative Sociology, 32 (2009), pp. 293–309, p. 295. 92 Alan L. Berger, ‘Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of the “Shoah” ’, Modern Judaism, 10/1 (February 1990), pp. 43–63, p. 45. 93 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 268. 94 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 6. 95 Jack Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland’, in Ivan Karp, Christine M. Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 396. 96 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 11. 97 Ibid., pp. 129–30. 98 Ibid., p. 111. 99 Ibid., p. 114. 100 Ibid., p. 109. 101 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate, p. 4. 102 Ibid., p. 7. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., p. 57. 105 Ibid., p. 56. 106 Ibid., p. 58. 107 Ibid. 108 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 162. 109 Ibid., p. 163. 110 Ibid. 111 Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Illini Books edn.; Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 166. 112 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 164. 113 Ibid. 114 Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe’, p. 396. 115 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 529. 116 Ibid., p. 534.

Notes

175

117 Ibid., p. 525. 118 Rowland-Klein and Dunlop include ‘reverse parenting’ in their definition of transgenerational trauma. Rowland-Klein and Dunlop, ‘The Transmission of Trauma across Generations’. 119 Brett, Too Many Men, pp. 525–26. 120 Ibid., p. 528. 121 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate, p. 160. 122 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 157. 123 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 141. 124 Ibid., p. 143. 125 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 158. 126 Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 144. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Zable, Jewels and Ashes, p. 9. 130 Karpf, The War After, p. 293. 131 Ibid., p. 300. 132 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 72. 133 Jack Kugelmass, ‘Bloody Memories: Encountering the Past in Contemporary Poland’, Cultural Anthropology, 10/3 (August 1995), pp. 279–301, p. 279. 134 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 77. 135 Ibid., p. 81. 136 Ibid., p. 83. 137 Zable, Jewels and Ashes, p. 110. 138 Ibid., p. 138. 139 Ibid., p. 162. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., p. 163. 142 Karpf, The War After, p. 294. 143 Ibid., p. 295. 144 Bukiet (ed.), Nothing Makes You Free, p. 13. 145 Karpf, The War After, p. 296. 146 Ibid., p. 298. 147 See Chapter 1. 148 Karpf, The War After, p. 300. 149 Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Paperback edn.; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 74. Karpf, The War After, p. 300. 150 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, pp. 99–100. 151 Ibid., p. 102. 152 Ibid., p. 109. 153 Ibid., pp. 109–10.

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154 Ibid., p. 110. 155 Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 109. 156 Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory?’, p. 158. 157 Apel, Memory Effects, pp. 108–09. 158 Baker, The Fiftieth Gate, p. 316. 159 Zable, Jewels and Ashes, p. 210. 160 Karpf, The War After, p. 317. 161 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, p. 232. 162 Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 20.

Chapter 3 1

For a study of the third generation that includes both academic and personal pieces by and about members of the third generation from a range of countries, see Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki (eds), In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (London & Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015). 2 Jack Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland’, in Ivan Karp, Christine M. Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 411. 3 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 184. 4 Ibid., p. 115. 5 Alan L. Berger, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and Identity in Third Generation Writing About the Holocaust’, Shofar, 28/3 (2010), pp. 149–58, p. 158. 6 James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 7 Ibid., p. 67. 8 Ibid. 9 Alan L. Berger, ‘The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism’, Religion and American Culture, 5/1 (Winter 1995), pp. 23–47; Melvin Jules Bukiet (ed.), Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002); Kathy Grinblat (ed.), Children of the Shadows: Voices of the Second Generation (Crawley : University of Western Australia Press, 2002). 10 Berger, After the End, p. 67.

Notes

177

11 Ibid. 12 Jessica Lang, ‘The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the Transmission of Holocaust Memory’, Journal of Modern Literature, 33/1 (2010), pp. 43–56, p. 46. 13 Berger, After the End, pp. 67–68. 14 Lang, ‘The History of Love’, p. 46. 15 Furthermore, due to the relatively high rate of intermarriage amongst the second generation, many third-generation members may have only one second-generation parent, in contrast with most of the second generation, which generally has two survivor parents. 16 Andrea Simon, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002). 17 Melanie McMillan, ‘A Terrible Truth’, Litchfield County Times, 21 November 2002. 18 Simon, Bashert, p. 49. 19 Ibid., p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. xv. 21 Alex Sage, For Esther (Sydney : Flamingo, 2000). 22 Savta (‘grandmother’). Ibid., p. 33. 23 Studies which do not feature Everything Is Illuminated as one of their focal texts but nevertheless devote a section to it include Erin McGlothlin, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester: Camden House, 2006); Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008). Schaumann introduces the novel as an introduction to the grandchildren texts she analyses. Ibid., p. 242. 24 Oliver Burkeman, ‘Voyage of Discovery: At 19, Jonathan Safran Foer went looking for the Ukrainian who saved his grandfather’, Guardian, 4 December 2002, sec. Guardian Features Pages, p. 5; Janet Maslin, ‘Searching for Grandfather and a Mysterious Shtetl’, New York Times, 22 April 2002 p. E6. 25 For example, the following reviews all note that Everything Is Illuminated is based on a trip Foer took to the Ukraine when he was twenty: Burkeman, ‘Voyage of Discovery’; Suzie Mackenzie, ‘Something Happened’, Guardian, 21 May 2005; Joyce Wadler, ‘Seeking Grandfather’s Savior, and Life’s Purpose’, New York Times, 24 April 2002, p. B2. 26 Jonathan Safran Foer, ‘Guardian Book Club: Week three: Jonathan Safran Foer on the fruitless trip to Ukraine that preceded Everything Is Illuminated’, Guardian, 20 March 2010, sec. Guardian Review Pages, p. 6. 27 Ibid. 28 Schaumann, Memory Matters, pp. 242–43. 29 For an analysis of Everything Is Illuminated in terms of magical realism, see Chapter 1 in Jenni Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the

178

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

Notes Traumatic Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Menachem Feuer argues that the novel ‘begins with a contemporary blend of the comic mode and one of its derivations, the quest Romance’. Menachem Feuer, ‘Almost Friends: PostHolocaust Comedy, Tragedy, and Friendship in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated’, Shofar, 25/2 (2007), pp. 24–48, p. 25. Foer, ‘Guardian Book Club’. Mackenzie, ‘Something Happened’; Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 98. Foer, ‘Guardian Book Club’; Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 61. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 128. Amir Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, trans. Jessica Cohen (First English Language edn.; New Milford & London: The Toby Press, 2006). Elrud Ibsch wrote that ‘Our Holocaust, together with David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), belongs to the most remarkable representations of the Shoah in Israeli literature’. Elrud Ibsch, ‘Comfort and Scandal of Memory: Anne Michaels and Amir Gutfreund: Two authors of the second-and-a-half generation’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5/2 (July 2006), pp. 203–12, p. 207. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 49; Ibsch, ‘Comfort and Scandal of Memory’, p. 208. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 49. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 405–6. In contrast to second-generation writers, such as Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who writes on behalf of children of Holocaust survivors that ‘We are, I believe, unique in that while we did not experience the Holocaust, we have a closer personal link to it than anyone other than our parents’, those writing about the third generation, such as Amelia Klein, cite distance. See Menachem Z. Rosensaft, ‘Reflections of a Child of Holocaust Survivors’, Midstream, 27/9 (November 1981), pp. 31–3, p. 32. Amelia Klein, ‘Memory-Work: Video Testimony, Holocaust Remembrance and the Third Generation’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 13/2–3 (Autumn/ Winter 2007), pp. 129–50. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), p. xv. Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp. 125–33. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., pp. 127–28. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 129.

Notes

179

48 Caroline Schaumann, ‘A Third-Generation World War II Narrative: Tanja Dückers‘s Himmelskörper’, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, 4 (2005), pp. 259–80, p. 259. 49 Julia Chaitin, ‘Issues and Interpersonal Values Among Three Generations in Families of Holocaust Survivors’, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19/3 (2002), pp. 379–402, p. 381. 50 Klein, ‘Memory-Work’, p. 143. 51 Daniel Brooks, ‘3GNY: A NYC-Based Group for Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’, http://www.3gnewyork.org/ [accessed 4 December 2008]. 52 ‘3GH – 3rd Generation Holocaust Descendants’, http://www.3gh.com.au/ [accessed 4 December 2008]. 53 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, p. 185. 54 Mark Raphael Baker, The Fiftieth Gate (Sydney: Flamingo, 1997), p. 177. 55 Ibid. 56 Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 1991), p. 158. 57 Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London: Minerva, 1997), p. 260. 58 Sylvie K. Schapira, ‘Working with the Second Generation of Holocaust Survivors’, Self & Society, 26/5 (November 1998), pp. 4–10, p. 10. 59 Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 162. 60 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, p. 185. 61 Although Everything Is Illuminated does mention Jonathan’s grandmother, the text focuses on what happened to his grandfather. 62 Sage, For Esther, p. 1. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Simon, Bashert, p. 258. 66 Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, pp. 84–85. 67 Ibid., 326. 68 Ibid., 328–29. 69 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 179. 70 Schaumann, Memory Matters, p. 225. 71 Sage, For Esther. 72 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 70. 73 Sage, For Esther, p. 1. 74 Sabah (‘grandfather’). Ibid., p. 44. 75 Ibid., p. 92.

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76 Ibid., p. 106. 77 Ibid. 78 Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 162. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, p. 185. 79 Sage, For Esther, p. 67. 80 Ibid., pp. 145, 152. 81 Ibid., p. 187. 82 Ibid., p. 210. 83 Berger, After the End, pp. 67–68. 84 Sage, For Esther, p. 217. 85 Ibid., p. 280. 86 Richard Freadman, ‘Sister Pacts’, Meanjin, 61/1 (2002), pp. 186–95, p. 193. 87 Sage, For Esther, p. 280. 88 Laub, ‘Bearing Witness’, pp. 70–71. 89 Sharon Kangisser Cohen, ‘ “Remembering for Us”: The Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Commemoration’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 13/2–3 (Autumn/Winter 2007), pp. 109–28, p. 124. 90 Simon, Bashert, p. 7. 91 Ibid., p. 8. 92 Ibid., p. 43. 93 Ibid., p. 13. 94 Ibid., p. 23. 95 Ibid., p. 31. 96 Ibid., p. 216. 97 Schaumann, Memory Matters, p. 242. 98 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 59. 99 Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe’, p. 400. 100 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 115. 101 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 5. 102 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 116. 103 Ibid., p. 118. 104 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, p. 130. 105 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 147. 106 See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24, p. 7. 107 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 154. 108 Kitty Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz (New revised edn.; Laxton: Beth Shalom Limited, 1997) 109 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, p. 188.

Notes 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

181

Ibid., p. 36. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 163. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 191. Karpf, The War After; Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead (London: Vintage, 2000). Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 51–52. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, p. 13. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 32. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 94. Karpf, The War After, pp. 125–26. Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, p. 97. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 357. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 22. As noted in the Introduction, Young observes that ‘how events are remembered depends … on the texts now giving them form’. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 1.

Chapter 4 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Shimon Attie, The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994). Jochen Spielmann, ‘Auschwitz Is Debated in Oświęcim: The Topography of Remembrance’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), pp. 171–72. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. xiii. Esther Jilovsky, ‘Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Journey to Auschwitz’, Colloquy, 15 (2008), p. 154. Young, The Texture of Memory, p. xiii. Richard Crownshaw, ‘Performing Memory in Holocaust Museums’, Performance Research, 5/3 (2000), p. 19. Ulrich Baer, ‘To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition’, Representations, 69 (Winter 2000), p. 42. Ibid., p. 44.

182

Notes

9 Lily Brett, Too Many Men (Sydney : Pan Macmillan, 1999), p. 315. 10 Moreover, the following sections on key Holocaust sites confirm Cole’s statement that ‘In Europe, unlike in the United States or Israel, a further consideration [for Holocaust memorials] is the choice of a site specifically because of (a selective focus upon) what happened there in the Holocaust past.’ Tim Cole, ‘Turning the Places of Holocaust History into Places of Holocaust Memory: Holocaust Memorials in Budapest, Hungary 1945-95’, in Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (eds), Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 274. 11 Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), p. 232; William F. S. Miles, ‘Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 29/4 (2002), p. 1175; Janet Jacobs, ‘From the Profane to the Sacred: Ritual and Mourning at Sites of Terror and Violence’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43/3 (2004), pp. 311–15, p. 314; Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the ‘Shoah Business’ (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. 110. In the United Kingdom, Holocaust Memorial Day is held on 27 January, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. 27 January has also been designated by the United Nations as an International Day of Commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. See ‘The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme’, http://www.un.org/ holocaustremembrance/ [accessed 4 February 2010]. 12 Statistic taken from ‘Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau’, http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Ite mid=13&limit=1&limitstart=1 [accessed 16 October 2014]. 13 See Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London & Sydney : Croom Helm, 1984). Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Revised edn.; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). David Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory’, The Geographical Review, 65/1 (January 1975), pp. 1–36. John Wylie, Landscape (London & New York: Routledge, 2007). 14 To further cement the experience of visiting Auschwitz as different from visiting anywhere else, many researchers include personal reflections on it in their academic work. See, for example, Cole, Images of the Holocaust, and Griselda Pollock, ‘Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory’, in David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (eds), Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2003), pp. 175–89. 15 Brett, Too Many Men, p. 531. 16 Kitty Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz (New revised edn.; Laxton: Beth Shalom Limited, 1997).

Notes

183

17 Andrew Charlesworth, ‘The Topography of Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 217. Wylie, Landscape, p. 99. 18 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 119. 19 Foote, Shadowed Ground, p. 5. 20 Charlesworth, ‘The Topography of Genocide’. 21 Young, The Texture of Memory, pp. 120–21. 22 Foote defines sanctification as follows: ‘Sanctified places can often be recognized by their distinctive appearance in the landscape. First, they are often clearly bounded from the surrounding environment and marked with great specificity as to what happened where. Second, sanctified sites are usually carefully maintained for long periods of time – decades, generations, and centuries. Third, sanctification typically involves a change of ownership, often a transfer from private to public stewardship. Fourth, sanctified sites frequently attract continued ritual commemoration, such as annual memorial services or pilgrimage. Fifth, sanctified sites often attract additional and sometimes even unrelated monuments and memorials through a process of accretion.’ Foote, Shadowed Ground, pp. 7, 9. It is clear that each of these criteria is fulfilled in the case of Auschwitz. 23 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 24 The official Auschwitz website recommends visiting both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II: ‘It is essential to visit both parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, in order to acquire a proper sense of the place that has become the symbol of the Holocaust.’ ‘Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau’, http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/ [accessed 4 February 2010]. 25 Dwork and van Pelt, ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, p. 232. 26 Foote, Shadowed Ground, p. 28. 27 Cole, Images of the Holocaust, p. 97. 28 Dwork and van Pelt, ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, p. 234. 29 Andrew Charlesworth et al., ‘ “Out of Place” in Auschwitz? Contested Development in Post-War and Post-Socialist Oświęcim’, Ethics, Place & Environment, 9/2 (June 2006), pp. 149–72, p. 164. 30 Dwork and van Pelt, ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, pp. 236–37. 31 Cole, Images of the Holocaust, p. 110. 32 Kenneth E. Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35/1 (Summer 2007), pp. 125–44, p. 129. 33 One of the main controversies surrounding the use of the Auschwitz site in the 1980s and 1990s was the 1984 establishment of a Carmelite convent next to Auschwitz I. For a detailed discussion of this as well as a later supermarket development, see Charlesworth et al., ‘ “Out of Place” in Auschwitz?’ .

184

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34 Maoz Azaryahu and Kenneth E. Foote, ‘Historical Space as Narrative Medium: On the Configuration of Spatial Narratives of Time at Historical Sites’, GeoJournal, 73 (2008), pp. 179–94, p. 180. 35 Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Illini Books edn.; Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 183. 36 Konstanty Gebert, ‘The Dialectics of Memory in Poland: Holocaust Memorials in Warsaw’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), pp. 121–29, p. 121. 37 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 130. 38 Gebert points out that ‘the museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau was, until recently, called the Museum of Martyrology of the Polish and Other Nations. A long alphabetical list of these “other nations” – from Bulgaria, through France, to the Ukraine – was displayed, but no reason was given for the Nazis deporting their citizens thousands of kilometers away to send them to gas chambers in Poland. The Jewish dimension was concealed, if not outright denied.’ Gebert, ‘The Dialectics of Memory in Poland’, p. 121. Furthermore, Young writes that ‘From its conception … the memorial at Auschwitz assumed a decidedly internationalist cast. Unlike the barracks at Majdanek, the blocks at Auschwitz-I were converted into national pavilions, each with an exposition devoted to the national memory of a different country’s citizens at Auschwitz. Here Belgians, Hungarians, Austrians, Jews, and others from nineteen countries were invited to remember their own. By collecting a composite memory of Auschwitz, these national pavilions preserve the essential diversity of memory here. On the other hand, Jews came to see in this pluralization of memory a splintering of Jewish suffering into so many national martyrdoms.’ Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 130. Thus, the representation of Jewish memory at Auschwitz itself does not concur with the wider, collective notion, thereby emphasizing the idea of Auschwitz as separate from the site of Auschwitz. 39 See, for example, Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz, p. 201. 40 Helena Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, trans. Moshe Kahn (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2001), p. 149. 41 Charlesworth, ‘The Topography of Genocide’, p. 218. 42 Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place’, p. 28. 43 Andrew Charlesworth and Michael Addis, ‘Memorialization and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites’: The Cases of Płaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau’, Landscape Research, 27/3 (2002), pp. 229–51, p. 239. 44 Ibid., p. 240. 45 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 119. 46 Charlesworth and Addis, ‘Memorialization and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites’, p. 240. 47 Ibid. 48 Foote, Shadowed Ground, p. 8.

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49 For a discussion of the evolution of memorials at Auschwitz, see Young, The Texture of Memory, pp. 128–44. 50 Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place’, p. 27. 51 Charlesworth and Addis, ‘Memorialization and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites’, p. 247. 52 See, for example, Jackie Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective Through the Poland “Experience” ’, Israel Studies, 7/2 (Summer 2002), pp. 84–114; Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008); Jack Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland’, in Ivan Karp, Christine M. Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) and Jack Kugelmass, ‘Why We Go to Poland: Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994). 53 See Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 54 For a thorough discussion of sacred sites as tourist attractions, see Myra Shackley, Managing Sacred Sites: Service Provision and Visitor Experience (London: Thomson, 2001). 55 Jacobs, ‘From the Profane to the Sacred’, p. 311. 56 Ibid., p. 314. 57 Ian Reader, ‘Introduction’, in Ian Reader and Tony Walter (eds), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (Basingstoke & London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1993), p. 8. 58 Feldman, Above the Death Pits, p. xvii. 59 Yom HaShoah is the Holocaust remembrance day in the Jewish calendar, held on the twenty-seventh day of the month of Nisan. 60 ‘March of the Living International’, http://www.motl.org/ [accessed 4 February 2010]. 61 Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 84. 62 Kugelmass, ‘Why We Go to Poland’, p. 175. 63 Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience. 64 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 3. 65 Kugelmass, ‘Why We Go to Poland’, p. 175. 66 Ibid. 67 Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 95. 68 Ibid. 69 Feldman notes that ‘A group [of Israeli high school students] will perform between three and eight group ceremonies in the course of an eight-day trip.’ Feldman, Above the Death Pits, p. 189.

186 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Notes Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 95. Ibid., p. 106. Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe’, p. 396. Feldman, Above the Death Pits, p. 72. Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 138. Ibid. Ibid., p. 139. Andrea Simon, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), p. 9; Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, p. 57. Simon, Bashert, p. 9. Janeczek, Lektionen des Verborgenen, pp. 56–57. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid. Feldman, ‘Marking the Boundaries’, p. 92. Alon Lazar et al., ‘Jewish Israeli Teenagers, National Identity, and the Lessons of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 18/2 (Fall 2004), pp. 188–204. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 199. For a general introduction to ‘dark tourism’, see John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London & New York: Continuum, 2000). Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 6. ‘Inside Auschwitz – Oprah.com’, http://www.oprah.com/world/Inside-Auschwitz/ [accessed 4 February 2010]. ‘Your Guide to Night and Elie Wiesel – Oprah.com’, http://www.oprah.com/ oprahsbookclub/Your-Guide-to-Night-and-Elie-Wiesel/ [accessed 4 February 2010]. Brett, Too Many Men, p. 411. Ibid., p. 524. Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London: Minerva, 1997), p. 299. Ibid., p. 300. Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 72. Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Paperback edn.; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 246–47. Primo Levi, ‘Revisiting the Camps’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York & Munich: Prestel, 1994), p. 185. Ibid. Brett, Too Many Men, p. 532. Ibid., p. 467.

Notes 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

187

Ibid. Attie, The Writing on the Wall. Ibid., p. 9. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 264. Attie, The Writing on the Wall, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid. Ibid. Kluger, Landscapes of Memory, p. 74. Karpf, The War After, p. 300. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 264. Feldman, Above the Death Pits, p. 72.

Conclusion 1 2

Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Paperback edn.; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 74. James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 191.

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Index Note: Page references with letter ‘n’ followed by locators denote note numbers. abandonment 6, 124, 140 absent memory 20, 62–3, 66 abstract trauma 42 active generation 34 Adams, J. 177 n.29 Addis, M. 51–2, 128–30, 152 n.19, 169 n.108, 184 n.43, 184 n.46, 185 n.51 adolescence 30, 33 Adorján, J. 173 n.72 African American identity 19, 24 Agamben, G. 9, 156 n.49 alter ego 57, 101–2, 108 amnesia 36, 68, 114, 122 And Here My Troubles Began (Spiegelman) 60 annihilation 72, 79, 86, 124 anniversaries 2–3 annual memorial services 183 n.22 anonymity 78 anticlimax 89 anti-Semitism 114, 132, 154 n.35 Apel, D. 13, 91–2, 157 n.73, 176 n.155, 176 n.157 Appignanesi, L. 18, 60–2, 65, 73, 85, 89–92, 117, 163 n.147, 170 n.4, 170 n.13, 171 n.15, 171 n.33, 173 n.84, 175 n.132, 175 n.134, 175 n.150, 176 n.161, 181 n.114, 186 n.95 Losing the Dead (1999) 25, 58, 61–2, 65–6, 85–6, 89–90, 92, 117, 140 Arbeit Macht Frei gate 82, 126–7 archival footage 148, 155 n.45, 164 n.5 archival research 74, 89, 107 archives 3, 115, 119, 143–4 art 122 artifacts 6, 122 Ashworth, G.J. 153 n.28 assimilation 59, 67, 71, 142, 144 Assmann, J. 103, 168 n.92, 178 n.43 Attie, S. 142–4, 163 n.150, 181 n.1, 187 n.102, 187 n.105

Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter (1994) 25, 122, 142–4 audiovisual testimonies 164 n.5 see also video testimonies Auschwitz contemporary site 123–30 controversies surrounding use of 183 n.33 descriptions of the site across literature 124 dual aspects of landscape 124–5 evolution of natural environment 123–30 in Fiftieth Gate, The 81 Foote’s typology 125–6, 183 n.22 landscape of 27, 42, 51–2, 85, 123–30 in Lektionen des Verborgenen 81, 83 liberation of 2, 182 n.11 manipulated topographies 123–30 Memorial and Museum 163 n.1, 182 n.12, 183 n.24, 184 n.38 orchestra at 150 n.2 pilgrimage 131 Pope’s visit to 128–9 presence of grass 27, 42, 51, 121, 128–30 in Return to Auschwitz 26–7, 31, 33–4, 38, 40–5, 50–2, 54, 116, 125 as a sanctified site 125–6, 183 n.22 in Seed of Sarah 31–2, 44–7, 127 in Too Many Men 57, 64, 81–2, 124–5, 139–41 as a tourist attraction 2–3, 123–30 Auschwitz II (Birkenau) 3, 26–7, 36, 52, 85, 124, 126, 129–32, 140, 148, 150 n.2, 183 n.24, 184 n.38 Auschwitz III (Monowitz) 126 ‘Auschwitz-land’ 7, 52, 124, 127, 154 n.38 Australia Amelia Klein’s survey of the third generation 104

Index Jewish migrants in 18, 23, 71, 99, 104, 111 third-generation group (3GH) 21–2, 104, 162 n.128 Austria accounts of revisiting 33, 47 Nazi invasion of 32 autobiographies 14, 43, 57, 60, 64, 69, 166 n.36 Azaryahu, M. 4, 127, 151 n.16, 183 n.32, 184 n.34 baby boom 23 Baer, U. 12, 123, 132, 157 n.69, 164 n.10, 181 n.7 Baker, M.R. 18, 25, 58, 60, 71, 78–9, 82, 105, 154 n.41, 163 n.146, 170 n.3, 171 n.30, 173 n.68, 174 n.101, 175 n.121, 176 n.158, 179 n.54 Fiftieth Gate, The (1997) 25, 58, 64–5, 71, 76–9, 80–4, 92, 105 barbarism 47, 62 barbed wire 19, 51, 134, 148–9 Bar-On, D. 158 n.80 barracks 51, 128, 141, 184 Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (Simon) 25, 95, 101–2 fictional grandparent–grandchild relationship 108, 111–13, 159 n.94 journey to Eastern Europe 98–9, 135–6 similarities to second generation texts 98–9 transmission of memory 106 battlefields 138 Baumel-Schwartz, J.T. 152 n.20 Bavaria 32, 160 n.107 Belarus 98, 135 Beorn, W. 5, 152 n.22 Bergen-Belsen 26, 164 n.9 Berger, A.L. 12–13, 62, 70, 75, 96–7, 157 n.68, 158 n.76, 158 n.79, 161 n.119, 162 n.134, 171 n.16, 172 n.62, 174 n.92, 176 n.5, 176 n.9 Berger, B.M. 163 n.142 Berger, J. 21–2, 162 n.130, 176 n.6, 176 n.10, 177 n.13, 180 n.83 definition of Holocaust generations 21–2, 96–7, 110

201

Berlin 142 in Attie’s book of photographs 25, 122, 142–4 Holocaust museum in 1 Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe 149 Berman, J. 152 n.19, 165 n.23 Bialystok 66, 86, 89 Bielsko 26, 30–1, 43–6 Biterman, A. 162 n.132 Bitton-Jackson, L. 165 n.15 Bos, P. 33, 155, 167 n.37, 169 n.114 Boyarin, J. 165 n.15 Brett, L. 18, 61, 63–4, 141, 154 n.42, 163 n.146, 170 n.1, 170 n.3, 171 n.24, 171 n.28, 173 n.65, 174 n.94, 174 n.96, 174 n.115, 175 n.119, 182 n.9, 182 n.15, 186 n.91, 186 n.99 Too Many Men (1999) 25, 57–8, 67, 71, 77–84, 124–5, 139 British Holocaust memorialization 31 Brona Gora massacre (1942) 98 Brooks, D. 104, 162 n.128, 162 n.131, 179 n.51 Buchenwald 36, 118–19 Budapest 5, 49–50 Bukiet, M.J. 23, 68, 88, 96, 163 n.141, 172 n.55, 175 n.144, 176 n.9 Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (2002) 23 Bulgaria 184 n.38 burial sites 121 Burkeman, O. 177 n.24, 177 n.25 camps, Nazi see also specific camps concentration camps 2–3, 6–7, 19, 26, 36, 41, 48–9, 57, 76, 78, 89, 123–4, 126–7, 140, 148, 150 n.1 death camps 2–3, 6, 26, 41, 57, 76, 92, 123–5, 129, 131, 139, 150 n.1 Canada 25, 58 Jewish migrants in 18, 23 catastrophe 119, 150 n.1, 155 n.46 cemeteries, Jewish see Jewish cemeteries Chaitin, J. 104, 158 n.80, 159 n.93, 179 n.49 definition of Holocaust survivor 16 investigation of Israeli families 104 Charlesworth, A. 51–2, 125–6, 128–30, 152 n.19, 169 n.108, 183 n.17. 183

202

Index

n.20, 183 n.29, 183 n.33, 184 n.41, 184 n.43, 184 n.46, 185 n.51 children/grandchildren of Holocaust survivors 1–2, 8, 11–15, 17–25, 53–4, 58, 60–4, 69, 73, 75–81, 85–6, 91, 105, 158 n.85, 161 n.117, 172 n.56, 178 n.41, see also specific generations of the Holocaust Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Epstein) 18–20, 160 n.107 second-generation identity in 60, 160 n.105 vivid Holocaust-related imagery in 19 child survivors 11–12, 15–17, 33, 102, 155 n.43, 165 n.16 chronological time 37–42 churchyards 138 Chust 99 Clementi, F.K. 75, 173 n.63, 174 n.90 closeness vs. distance 24, 63, 68, 93, 103, 120, 147 Cohen, S.K. 154 n.42, 161 n.119, 178 n.34, 180 n.89 Cole, T. 7, 127, 152 n.23, 154 n.37, 154 n.38, 182 n.10, 182 n.11, 182 n.14, 183 n.27, 183 n.31 ‘Auschwitz-land’ 7, 52, 124, 127, 154 n.38 Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (2003) 5 collective identity 19–20, 137 collective memory 19, 21, 35, 43, 48, 127, 137, 147, 161 n.123, 171 n.18 commemoration 2–3, 111, 115, 157 n.75, 182 n.11, 183 n.22 common memory 38 communicative memory 48, 103 concentration camp see camps, Nazi connection to the Holocaust familial 1, 8, 14, 21–2, 83, 93, 99, 120, 139, 153 n.28, 154–5 n.43 personal 24, 55, 62, 81, 104, 113, 137, 154–5 n.43, 171 n.18, 178 n.41 Cooke, S. 165 n.15 Cosgrove, D.E. 151 n.12, 151 n.14, 151 n.15, 182 n.13 ‘crisis of witnessing’ 12, 156 n.52 Crownshaw, R. 122, 181 n.6

cultural memory 48, 61, 103 Czechoslovakia 34, 99 Czernowitz 68, 76 Dachau 48, 51 Daniels, S. 4, 151 n.15 Danube river 39–40 dark tourism 3, 138 death camp see camps, Nazi death rites 131 death sites 138 deep memory 38 delayed generational consciousness 17 delayed memory 60 Delbo, Charlotte 38 dementia 61, 65, 85–6 designation, category of 125–6 diary entries 29, 164 n.9 Diaspora 132–4, 154 n.35 digital format 9–10 Displaced Persons camp 6, 18, 23, 63, 160 n.107 displacement 1, 18, 61 documentary 26–7, 43–4, 46, 49–50 documenting 1, 7–8, 10, 12, 20, 48–50, 75, 89, 98, 101, 107, 117, 119, 147–8, 154 n.40 Dresden 164 n.9 Dubnow, Shimon 29 Dunlop, R. 19, 158 n.85, 161 n.114, 172 n.56, 175 n.118 durational time 37–42 Dwork, D. 126, 150 n.1, 152 n.19, 182 n.11, 183 n.25, 183 n.28, 183 n.30 Eaglestone, R. 101, 114, 171 n.24, 178 n.33, 180 n.104 Eastern Europe 6–7, 20, 25, 58, 68, 73, 78, 86, 99, 112, 116–17, 121, 132, 135–6, 142–3 Jewish cemeteries in 78 Jews/Jewish life in 121, 142–3 journeys to 6–7, 20, 25, 58, 68, 73, 86, 99, 112, 116–17, 132, 135–6 Edmunds, J. 159 n.91, 160 n.113 Egan, S. 60–1, 170 n.9 Eichmann, Adolf 9 Eisenstadt, S.N. 159 n.91 Elam, Y. 161 n.123

Index emotions emotional distance 45, 157 n.67 emotional reaction 30, 45, 48–50, 69, 81, 84, 89, 132 emotional trauma 26, 88 empty memory 62–3 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust 21 English, use of 30, 32–3, 35–7, 67, 70–1, 98 enmeshment 19 Epstein, H. 18–19, 60, 158 n.79, 160 n.103, 160 n.105, 160 n.107, 160 n.111, 161 n.115, 161 n.117, 161 n.118, 163 n.143, 170 n.5 Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979) 18–20, 60, 160 n.105, 160 n.107 New York Times article (1977) 18, 160 n.105 Europe absence of Jews from 142 Holocaust/Holocaust memorial sites 36, 93, 142, 149, 150 n.1, 182 n.10 Jewish migrants from 16, 18 Nazi 29, 94 trips to 45, 92 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer) 25, 95, 99–102, 106–7, 113–16, 119, 133, 143–4 climax 100 comedy 100, 178 n.29 fictionalized description of the shtetl at Trachimbrod 113–16 magical realism in 100–1, 177 n.29 novelistic style 100–1 prizes/positive reviews 99–100, 177 n.25 realist style 100–1 themes 100 third-generation identity/witnessing 106–8, 119 exclusion 63, 93, 134, 173 n.80 exile 1, 6 Eyerman, R. 19, 161 n.113, 163 n.144 eyewitness 2, 9, 29, 41, 58–60, 94, 96–7, 103, 108, 145, 147–8 definition 156 n.48 Facebook 22 Fachinger, P. 153 n.26

203

faction 63–4, 110 family grave 80 Feldman, J. 7, 48, 52, 134, 137, 144, 154 n.35, 154 n.36, 157, 157 n.66, 169 n.93, 169 n.109, 185 n.52, 185 n.58, 185 n.61, 185 n.67, 185 n.69, 186 n.70, 186 n.73, 186 n.82, 187 n.111 Felix, Lola 26, 43 Felman, S. 12–13, 156 n.52, 157 n.67, 157 n.70, 157 n.71, 169 n.110, 179 n.72 femininity, loss of 31 festivals 3, 157 n.75 Feuer, M. 178 n.29 fiction 14, 63–4, 95, 110, 171 n.24 fifth generation 24 Fiftieth Gate, The (Baker) 25, 58, 71, 80 languages and identities 71 meaningfulness of place 81–4 second-generation identity 92 second generation with survivors at sites of memory 77–9 theme 92 third-generation identity 105 transfer of memory 64–5, 76 visit to Auschwitz 81–3 ‘figures of memory’ 103 films 1, 6, 8–9, 26, 31, 40, 43–5, 49–52, 54, 93 Fine, E.S. 20, 62–3, 161 n.120, 161 n.122, 171 n.17, 171 n.21, 171 n.23, 171 n.37 Finkelstein, N. 21, 161 n.124 Fischer, N. 61, 153 n.26, 170 n.11 Fischler-Martinho, J. 30, 165 n.14 fixed memory 103 Foer, J.S. 25, 95, 99–101, 107, 114–15, 154 n.42, 163 n.149, 176 n.3, 177 n.24, 177 n.25, 177 n.26, 178 n.30, 178 n.31, 178 n.32, 179 n.69, 180 n.98, 180 n.100, 180 n.102, 180 n.105, 180 n.107, 180 n.109, 185 n.64 Everything Is Illuminated (2002) 25, 95, 99–102, 106–7, 113–16, 119, 133, 143–4, 177 n.25 Fogelman, E. 18, 160 n.103, 160 n.104, 161 n.117, 161 n.126 Foley, M. 138

204 Foote, K.E. 4, 125–7, 151 n.12, 151 n.16, 182 n.13, 183 n.19, 183 n.22, 183 n.26, 183 n.32, 184 n.34, 184 n.48 typology for sites of violence 125–6, 129 foreign identities 2, 18, 35, 71, 73, 77, 134 foreign language 35–6 For Esther (Sage) 25, 95, 102, 106 fictional grandparent–grandchild relationship 99, 108–12 meta-text, use of 110 structure and story 99 forgiveness 32, 45–7 Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University 155 n.45 fourth generation 23–4 Fox, N. 22, 162 n.136 Fox, T.C. 160 n.108 France, Jewish migrants in 18, 184 n.38 Frank, A. 29, 164 n.9, 166 n.36 Frank, E. 164 n.9 Frank, M. 164 n.9 Frank, O. 164 n.9 Freadman, R. 63–4, 171 n.25, 180 n.86 French language 34, 36 French resistance 38 Fresco, N. 68, 172 n.54 Freud, S. 74, 173 n.86 Mourning and Melancholia 74 working through 74, 92 Friedländer, S. 154 n.43, 155 n.46 Frieze, D.-L. 165 n.15 full memory 62 Fürstenhagen women’s camp 41 Garber, Z. 150 n.1 gas chambers 83, 132, 184 n.38 Gebert, K. 127, 184 n.36, 184 n.38 Gedi, N. 161 n.123 gender 14, 32, 159 n.91, 166 n.28 generation, definition 159 n.91 ‘generation after’ 17, 158 n.81, 160 n.102 generational distance 62, 105–6 generational identity 19, 161 n.123 generations of the Holocaust classification of 14–24

Index ‘delayed generational consciousness’ 17 ‘generation units’ 16 sense of identification 14–15 genocide 18, 124, 131, 152 n.19, 164 n.5 German language 12, 32–4, 36–9, 47, 53, 67, 70–1, 91, 166 n.36 Germany Displaced Persons camps 18, 63 as a Heimat 72 Holocaust memorial 149 Holocaust testimony 32–3 national identity 72 Nazi 2, 15–16, 26, 108, 123, 148 post-war 72 third generation 162 n.133 trips to 32–3, 38–9, 44–7, 53, 78 ghettos 9, 76, 117 in Budapest 5 deportation to 6, 31–2 Jewish quarters and 143 Kaposvár 31, 39 Lublin 26 Riga 29 Warsaw 77, 89–90, 135 Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Hirsch and Spitzer) 5 Gill, A. 18, 159 n.92, 160 n.106, 160 n.109, 163 n.143 ‘Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’ (Facebook Group) 22 grass 27, 42, 51, 121, 128–30 graves family 79–80, 92, 98 mass 49, 85 as memorials 78 gravestone 80 Grimwood, M. 7, 153 n.26, 154 n.39, 174 n.89 Grinblat, K. 61, 96, 171 n.14, 176 n.9 Grodzisk 89 Gross-Rosen concentration camp 26, 32 Guardian, The 66, 99–100, 166 n.36 Guardian First Book Award, The 99–100 guided tours 122 guilt 32, 46, 69, 100, 105, 114, 135 Gutfreund, A. 25, 95, 101–2, 118, 154 n.42, 159 n.98, 159 n.99, 163 n.149,

Index 178 n.34, 178 n.35, 178 n.36, 179 n.66, 181 n.111, 181 n.115, 181 n.119, 181 n.123 Our Holocaust (2006) 17, 25, 95, 106–7, 113, 116–19 Haggadah 13, 157 n.75 Hart, David 54 Hart, K. see Hart-Moxon, K. Hartman, G.H. 12, 17, 150 n.1, 153 n.29, 155 n.43, 155 n.46, 157 n.66, 158 n.81, 160 n.102, 170 n.2, 182 n.11 Hart-Moxon, K. 24, 26–7, 30–5, 38–54, 116, 125, 128, 164 n.4, 164 n.6, 165 n.18, 166 n.25, 167 n.39, 167 n.41, 168 n.70, 168 n.78, 169 n.102, 169 n.107, 169 n.118, 180 n.108, 182 n.16, 184 n.39 deemed as ‘prominent Holocaust survivor’ in the UK 31, 35 I Am Alive (1961) 31 Return to Auschwitz (1981/1997) 24, 26–31, 33, 35, 38, 40–5, 48, 50–4, 116, 125, 164 n.4, 165 n.18 Hass, A. 12, 23, 64, 105, 109, 157 n.65, 158 n.79, 161 n.119, 163 n.140, 170 n.2, 171 n.27, 173 n.80, 179 n.56, 179 n.59, 180 n.78 Hassidic garb 144 Heberle, R. 16, 21, 159 n.91, 159 n.92, 162 n.127, 167 n.44 Hebrew 98, 101, 134, 144, 150 Helms, G. 60–1, 170 n.9 heritage tourism 95, 113, 133, 153 n.28 see also Holocaust tourism; legacy tourism Hessisch Lichtenau 31, 45–6 Hirsch, M. 5, 60, 62, 68, 76, 142–3, 152 n.24, 155 n.43, 158 n.79, 161 n.120, 170 n.7, 171 n.17, 171 n.19, 172 n.52, 174 n.93, 187 n.104, 187 n.110 postmemory 20, 60, 62–3, 68, 76 historical memory 67 historiography 1, 14 Hitler, Adolf 29, 66, 141 Hoffman, E. 18, 74, 103–6, 109, 118, 160 n.110, 174 n.87, 178 n.42, 179 n.53, 179 n.60, 180 n.78, 181 n.118 Holocaust, evolution and use of term 150 n.1

205

Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (Cole) 5 Holocaust historiography 1, 14 Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January), UK 182 n.11 Holocaust sites ambiguity of 55–6 and architecture 141 authenticity and proof 122–3 categorization of 125–6 changes in 121–30 development of 123–30 dual role of temporal distance 37–8 Foote’s typology 125–6 fundamental aspect 1–8 imaginary sites of memory 147 as ‘inert and amnesiac’ 122 interpretation and transmission of memory 122–3 manipulated representation 121–3 paradox of place as a witness 121–45 pilgrimages 130–2 post-war development 122 potential to transmit memory 122–3 role in bearing witness 121–2, 138–40 as sacred 130–2 as tourist attractions 138–40 visiting as a three-dimensional experience 148 visitors as essential to the function of 7, 122–3 Holocaust texts 8, 10, 14, 59–61, 70, 76, 94, 97, 101, 120, 147 see also specific writers and works Holocaust tourism 1, 6, 25, 145, 147 criticism of 140–2 dark tourism 3, 138 organized tours 132–8 pilgrimage and 130–2 process of bearing witness using place 138–40 survivors’ perspective 140–2 Holocaust witnessing 9, 12–13, 21, 24, 93, 95, 109, 116, 119–20 Hungary 24, 30–1, 36, 39, 45, 49–50, 53, 99, 184 n.38 Ibsch, E. 178 n.34, 178 n.35 incarceration 6, 19, 26, 31–2, 44–5, 51

206

Index

index cards 107, 119 individual identity 137 installations 10, 143 International Day of Commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust (27 January) 182 n.11 interviews 1, 9–10, 60, 67, 74, 98–100, 107, 148, 158 n.80, 160 n.105, 161 n.117, 164 n.5 see also video testimonies Iron Curtain, collapse of 6, 138 Isaacson, Ilona 32, 40, 45, 53 Isaacson, Irving 32, 41 Isaacson, J.M. 24, 28, 30, 31–7, 39, 41, 44–50, 52–4, 88, 127, 163 n.145, 166 n.26, 166 n.29, 167 n.52, 168 n.62, 168 n.65, 168 n.69, 168 n.82, 168 n.83, 169 n.99, 169 n.115, 174 n.111, 184 n.35 Seed of Sarah (1990) 24, 28, 31–3, 35–7, 39–42, 44–7, 49, 52–4, 80, 127, 166 n.28 Israel descriptions of 101 Independence Day 132 Jewish migrants in 18, 23, 101, 132 Julia Chaitin’s investigation of Israeli families 104 memorial service 65 Ministry of Education 132, 154 n.35 organized Holocaust tours 7, 13, 48, 52, 132–5, 137, 154 n.35, 185 n.69 Italian Jews 9, 140 Italian language 67, 70 Jacobs, J. 131, 182 n.11, 185 n.55 Jacobs, S.L. 23, 163 n.138 Janeczek, H. 18, 25, 58, 61, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 79–81, 83–4, 134–6, 163 n.146, 170 n.3, 172 n.47, 172 n.49, 172 n.50, 173 n.64, 173 n.75, 173 n.77, 174 n.108, 174 n.111, 174 n.112, 175 n.123, 175 n.126, 184 n.40, 186 n.74, 186 n.77, 186 n.79 Lektionen des Verborgenen (Lessons of Darkness) (1997/1999) 25, 58, 67–8, 70–3, 75–6, 78–81, 83–4, 92, 134–7 Jensen, O. 162 n.133 Jerusalem

Eichmann trial 9 Holocaust museum in 1 Jewels and Ashes (Zable) 25, 58 climax 92 encounters at sites of memory 85–7 primary witnessing in 73, 87–8, 90 second-generation identity 66, 87–8, 92 theme 92 traces of trauma 73 transfer of memory 66, 73 visit to Poland 85–7, 89–90 Jewish cemeteries 3, 6, 53, 76, 78–80, 83, 85, 121, 124, 130, 138, 140 Jewish Historical Institute 89 Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne 155 n.45 Jewish life destruction of 6–7, 132, 134 photographs depicting 142–4 pre-Holocaust 1, 6, 30–1, 43, 48, 65, 121, 124, 130, 142, 147–8 restoring 124, 133 Jewish memory 127–9, 141, 155 n.44 Jewish pavilion 127–8 Jewish quarters/ghettos 143 Jewish theology 23 Jewish tradition 13, 131, 144, 155 n.46, 157 n.75 Jewish trips to Holocaust sites (pilgrimage) 130–8 Jews American 7, 21, 75, 98, 133–5 assimilation of 144 biblical exodus from Egypt 157 n.75 in Displaced Persons camps 6, 18, 23, 63, 160 n.107 in Eastern Europe 7, 78, 121, 132, 143 in Germany 72–3, 124, 135, 142–4 incarceration of 6, 19, 26, 31–2, 44–5, 51 Italian 9, 140 migration to other countries 18, 72–3 murder of 3, 17–18, 25, 58, 70, 83, 98, 100, 123–4, 130, 134, 138–9, 149, 150 n.1, 160 n.108 persecution of 8, 12, 16–18, 29, 35, 47, 64, 72, 139 Polish 6–7, 18, 26, 89–90, 124, 127–9, 160 n.108

Index pre-war life 1, 6, 30–1, 43, 48, 65, 121, 124, 130, 142, 147–8 survivors 9, 18, 30, 140 of Volchin 98 Jilovsky, E. 153 n.26, 160 n.112, 167 n.55, 170 n.3, 170 n.12, 171 n.18, 171 n.22, 171 n.29, 172 n.53, 173 n.72, 174 n.88, 175 n.122, 175 n.125, 176 n.1, 176 n.156, 181 n.4 Jockusch, L. 154 n.40, 155 n.45 Kaddish 131 Kandiyoti, D. 5–6, 152 n.21, 153 n.26, 153 n.27 Kaposvár 31–2, 39–40, 45–6, 50, 53–4, 80, 88 Karpf, A. 25, 58, 60, 66–7, 69, 73, 85, 87–92, 105, 117–18, 139–40, 143, 154 n.41, 163 n.147, 170 n.4, 172 n.43, 172 n.44, 172n.45, 172 n.57, 173 n.83, 175 n.130, 175 n.142, 175 n.145, 175 n.148, 175 n.149, 176 n.160, 179 n.57, 181 n.114, 181 n.122, 186 n.93, 187 n.109 War After: Living with the Holocaust, The (1996) 25, 58, 66–7, 69, 73, 85, 87–92, 105, 117–18, 139–40, 143 Kazimierz, Krakow 88 Kielce pogrom 18, 160 n.108 Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (documentary; dir. Morley) 26–7, 31, 40, 43–4, 50–1, 54 Klein, A. 22, 104, 162 n.135, 178 n.41, 178 n.50 Klemperer, V. 29, 164 n.9 Kluger, R. 17, 24, 28, 30, 32–6, 38–40, 44, 46–9, 51–3, 89, 140, 147, 163 n.145, 166 n.30, 166 n.32, 166 n.34, 166 n.36, 166 n.37, 167 n.40, 167 n.42, 167 n.51, 168 n.61, 168 n.64, 168 n.82, 168 n.86, 169 n.94, 169 n.98, 169 n.105, 169 n.111, 169 n.113, 175 n.149, 186 n.96, 187 n.109 Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) 17, 24, 28, 32–6, 38–40, 46–9, 52–3, 89, 140, 147 Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2003) 32, 166–7 n.36

207

Klüger, R. weiter leben: eine Jugend (1992) 32–4, 38–9, 53, 166 n.36 kosher food 133 Krakow 30, 87–9, 141 Kremer, S.L. 157 n.66 Kugelmass, J. 6–7, 77, 81, 85, 95, 113, 133–4, 151 n.4, 153 n.30, 153 n.32, 165 n.15, 174 n.95, 174 n.114, 175 n.133, 176 n.2, 180 n.99, 185 n.52, 185 n.62, 185 n.65, 186 n.72 Lager B III 54 landscape of Auschwitz 27, 42, 51–2, 85, 123–30 Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Kluger) 17, 24, 32–6 choice of places visited 46–8 concept of timescape 48–9, 52, 89, 147 German version 32, 38–9 language 35–6 positive reviews 166 n.36 representation of return 38–40 return as transmission of memory 53 Lang, B. 155 n.46, 157 n.61 Lang, J. 22, 97, 163 n.137, 177 n.12, 177 n.14 Langer, L.L. 10, 37–8, 41–2, 152 n.20, 155 n.46, 156 n.56, 158 n.81, 167 n.54, 168 n.56, 168 n.57, 168 n.58, 168 n.68 Lanzmann, C. 169 n.98 Shoah (film; 1985) 49 Lappin, E. 166 Lasker-Wallfisch, A. 150 n.2 Latin 9, 134, 144 Laub, D. 12, 156 n.52, 157 n.70, 157 n.71, 169 n.110, 179 n.72, 180 n.88 Lazar, A. 137, 154 n.35, 186 n.83 legacy tourism 153 n.28 Lektionen des Verborgenen (Lessons of Darkness) (Janeczek) 58 climax 92 German edition (1999) 67 Italian version (1997) 67 language 67 meaningfulness of place 83–4 organized trips to Eastern Europe 135–7

208 second-generation identity 71–2, 92 second-generation with survivors at sites of memory 75–6, 78–81, 83–4 structure 75 theme 92 transfer of memory 67–8, 76 visit to Auschwitz 83–4 Lennon, J. 138 letters 32, 75, 99–100, 106, 109–10, 148 Levi, P. 9, 140–1, 156 n.53, 186 n.97 liberation 2–3, 18, 23, 26, 30–2, 46, 67, 99, 163 n.143, 182 n.11 Lichtenau 39 life-changing trauma 30, 37 lifespan 23–4, 103, 114 life story 30, 43, 57, 61, 63, 66 living link to the Holocaust 2, 21, 24, 94, 96–7, 103–5, 108, 110, 112, 114, 119, 145 living memory 1, 103 London 92 Holocaust museum 1 Jewish tour to Poland 135 Losing the Dead (Appignanesi) 58, 61–2, 117, 140 encounters at sites of memory 85–6, 89–90 on Holocaust tourism 85, 140 theme 92 transfer of memory 65–6 visit to Poland 85–6, 89–90 loss 18–19, 30–1, 50, 63, 65, 68, 73–4, 78, 80, 89, 91, 94, 96–7, 104–5, 131, 142, 166 n.28 Lovell, S. 159 n.91 Lowenthal, D. 4–5, 128–9, 151 n.12, 152 n.17, 182 n.13, 184 n.42, 185 n.50 Lublin Ghetto 26, 173 n.80 Mackenzie, S. 177 n.25, 178 n.31 magical realism 100, 177 n.29 Mannheim, K. 16, 158 n.86 March of the Living 1, 7, 132, 150 n.2 marriage 18, 177 n.15 martyrdom 7, 129, 139, 184 n.38 Maslin, J. 177 n.24 massacre sites 98, 123–4, 138, 142 mass media 138

Index mass shootings 6 Matauschek, I. 162 n.133 Mauceri, M.C. 67, 72–3, 172 n.49, 173 n.79 mausoleums 138 Maus (Spiegelman) 60 Mauthausen 99 McCain, G. 153 n.28 McGlothlin, E. 69, 166 n.36, 172 n.60, 177 n.23 McMillan, M. 177 n.17 media coverage 138–9 mediated representations 4, 6, 8–10, 36, 46, 60, 113 memoirs, Holocaust see specific writers and works memoirs of return ambiguity of place in 55–6 choice of places visited 42–8 English language, use of 29, 35–7 illusion of timescapes 48–52 representation of return 37–42 as sub-genre of Holocaust testimony 29 transmission of memory 52–5 memorabilia 31 memorial(s) activities 59 at Auschwitz 123–31, 163 n.1, 184 n.38 in Australia 152 n.19 in Britain 152 n.19 creation/erection of 4, 6, 31, 114, 122, 124, 148 in Europe 182 n.10 exhibitions 51, 149 as ‘figures of memory’ 103, 115, 122–3 function of 122–3 gardens 3 in Germany 148–9 graves as 78 ‘inert and amnesiac’ 122 lack of preservation 123–4 living 114 ‘moveable memorial sites’ 143 and museums 3–4, 128 naturally evolved 123–4 in New Zealand 152 n.19 services 65, 183 n.22 Sobibor 148–9

Index stone 116 visitor’s essential role 7, 122–3 visit to see Holocaust tourism Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 163 n.1, 182 n.12, 183 n.24, 184 n.38 Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin 149 memory absent 63 authentic or traditional 91 childhood 40, 92 collective 19, 21, 35, 43, 48, 127, 137, 147, 161 n.123, 171 n.18 common 38 communicative 48, 103 cultural 48, 61, 103 deep 38 delayed 60 empty 62–3 ‘figures of ’ 103 fixed 103 full 62 historical 67 inherited 2, 11, 59–60, 63, 91, 93, 117 Jewish 127–9, 141, 155 n.44 living 1, 103 object of 144 passive transmission of 53 personal 27, 62, 161 n.123 Polish 127–8 Polish-Catholic 127 post memory 19–20, 60, 62–4, 66–8, 75, 86–7, 91, 117, 119, 171 n.18 role of 20 social 27 transfer of 54, 64–7, 76, 109 transmitted 2, 15, 34, 52–5, 60, 64–5, 67, 71, 73, 76, 83, 97, 105–6, 122–3, 147 and trauma 5, 12–14 traumatic 24, 27, 34–5, 37, 40–2, 59, 69 Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Schaumann) 15 metamorphosis 97, 131 metaphor 6, 11, 75, 92, 115, 150 n.1 Miles, W.F.S. 182 n.11 Miller, N.K. 5, 152 n.25 Monowitz 126

209

monuments 3, 103, 122, 132, 140, 148, 183 n.22 Moore, E. 165 n.24 Morley, P. 26, 31, 164 n.5, 165 n.20, 165 n.22, 165 n.24 Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (1979) 26–7, 31, 40, 43–4, 50–1, 54 motif 1, 61, 70, 95, 98, 108, 113, 128 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 74 ‘moveable memorial sites’ 143–4 mud 27, 42, 51–2, 85, 129 multimedia installation 10 multisensory pilgrimage 130, 132 Munich 67 murder sites 138 Museum of Martyrology of the Polish and Other Nations 184 n.38 museums in Auschwitz 45, 126–7, 131, 139–40 in Berlin 1 building 4, 45 displays 27, 128 as ‘figures of memory’ 103 in Jerusalem 1 in London 1 mediated nature of 6 memorials and 3–4, 123 in Washington 1 mysticism 67 Nathan, T.S. 161 n.116 national identity 72, 137 nationality 16, 30, 159 n.91 National Jewish Book Award 99–100 national pavilions 184 n.38 Nazi(s) anti-Jewish laws 32 atrocities 12, 16, 29, 47, 94, 119, 124, 184 n.38 camps see camps, Nazi Europe 29, 94 Germany 2, 15–16, 108, 140 invasion of Austria 32 regime 16, 26, 45, 47, 72, 104, 134, 152 n.20 and slave labour 90 Nazism 47, 140 newspapers 148 New York Times 18, 100

210 Night (Wiesel) 139 non-Jews 38, 134 non-witness 11–12, 75 nostalgia 40, 89, 143 Nothing Makes You Free: Writing by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (Bukiet) 23 novels see specific writers and works Novick, P. 21, 131, 133, 161 n.124, 185 n.53, 185 n.63 Nuremberg laws 164 n.9 obliteration, category of 125–6 odyssey 6, 60, 106 Ofer, D. 152 n.20 Ohrdruf concentration camp 123 1.5 generation 16–17 in Landscapes of Memory 17, 33 Oprah Winfrey Show, The 138–9 oral history 103 orphanages 99 Ostjuden 142, 144 Oświęcim 3, 86 Our Holocaust (Gutfreund) 17, 25, 95 Attorney Perl’s hardware store 106–7, 119 climax 101 fictionalized description of places 117–19 story 101 third-generation identity/witnessing 106–7, 116–19 transmission of memory 106, 119 2.5 generation, depiction of 17, 95, 101–2 Ouzan, F. 152 n.20 Palestine 18 paradox of place as a witness 121–45, 147 parent–child relationship 82 Pascal, J. 33, 155 n.43, 166 n.36, 167 n.37 passive generation 34, 106 passive transmission of memory 53 Passover 13, 157 n.75 ‘past time present’ 7, 95 persecution 8, 12, 16–18, 29, 35, 47, 64, 72, 139 personal memory 27, 62, 161 n.123 ‘phantom pain’ 68

Index photographs 45, 65, 75, 93–4, 100, 116, 123, 126, 128, 148 Attie’s book of 25, 122, 142–4 pierogi 77 pilgrimage 7, 25, 46, 61, 92, 98, 122, 130–8, 144–5, 183 n.22 placards 107, 119 plaque 80 poetry 9 pogroms 18, 141, 160 n.108 Poland 6 anti-Jewish purges 127–8 descriptions of 77, 81, 85–7, 89–91 Jewish life in 6–7, 30, 77, 124, 132, 134, 141 journey to 2–3, 6–8, 13, 43–4, 48, 57, 65, 71, 75–9, 85–7, 89–91, 98, 116–17, 133–6, 154 n.35, 171 n.24 memorials in 148 synagogues in 124 war 127 Polish-Catholic memory 127 Polish delicacies 77 Polish-Jewish relations 160 n.108 Polish language 36, 77, 98 Polish memory of Auschwitz 127–8 Pollock, G. 153 n.28, 182 n.14 pontshkes 77 Pope’s visit to Auschwitz 128–9 post-Holocaust constructions 124, 131 post-Holocaust identity 15, 29, 35, 36–7, 40, 70, 86, 133–4 postmemory 19–20, 60, 62–4, 66–8, 75, 86–7, 91, 117, 119, 171 n.18 postmodern parody 89 postmodern societies 131 post-war period 1, 11, 29–30, 39–40, 43–4, 47, 51, 72, 119, 122, 126–7, 129 poverty 99 Prague 101 pre-Holocaust history 1, 3, 25, 40, 58, 78, 94, 121, 124 primary witness definition 9–10 perspective of 49 role of 13, 78 testimony of 8–10, 13, 48, 157 n.67 vs. secondary witnessing 11–14, 54–5, 61, 68, 76, 78, 83–4, 93 prison camp 31, 45

Index Protestantism 164 n.9 Pruszków 90 psychoanalysis 13 psychological conditions 19, 69, 75 Pulitzer Prize 60 race 159 n.91, 160 n.109 radio 9 railway yard 90–1 Rapaport, L. 72, 173 n.73, 173 n.76 rape 31, 166 n.28 Ray, N.M. 153 n.28 Reader, I. 131, 163 n.137, 177 n.12, 185 n.57 real-life experiences 100–1 reconciliation 47, 68, 77 rectification, category of 125–6 refugees 16, 66 Reiter, A. 10, 29, 36, 156 n.58, 164 n.8, 167 n.50 religious artifacts 6 religious beliefs 161 n.117 religious conviction 16 religious pilgrimage see pilgrimage religious rituals 131, 133 remembrance rituals 13, 80, 121–2, 131 ‘rephotographing’ 143 resistance 3, 38, 139 Return to Auschwitz (Hart-Moxon) 24, 26–31, 33, 50–4, 116, 125, 164 n.4, 165 n.18 choice of places visited 43–4, 47–8 English language, use of 35 film version see Kitty – Return to Auschwitz representation of return 38, 40–2 return as transmission of memory 53–4 sensory descriptions 41 timescapes, notion of 50–2 reverse parenting 19, 175 n.118 Ribeiro, A.S. 153 n.26 Riga Ghetto 29 Rintala, M. 16, 21, 159 n.91, 159 n.92, 162 n.127 Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (Hirsch and Miller) 5 rituals cultural 131, 134 religious 131, 133

211

remembrance 13, 80, 121–2, 131 societal/secular 78, 133 Rosen, A. 35, 167 n.45, 167 n.48 Rosenfeld, A. 155 n.46 Rosensaft, M.Z. 178 n.41 Rosenthal, G. 158 n.80 Roskies, D.G. 155 n.43, 155 n.46, 158 n.79 Rowland-Klein, D. 19, 158 n.85, 161 n.114, 172 n.56, 175 n.118 Russian language 98 Sachsenhausen, Germany 148 sacred places, Holocaust sites as 125, 130–2, 137, 141 Sage, A. 25, 95, 99, 108–11, 163 n.148, 177 n.21, 179 n.62, 179 n.71, 179 n.73, 180 n.79, 180 n.84, 180 n.87 For Esther (2000) 25, 95, 99, 102, 106, 108–12 Salzwedel 26 sanctification, category of 125–6, 129, 183 n.22 Schapira, S.K. 105, 179 n.58 Schaumann, C. 14–15, 17, 21, 33, 100, 104, 108, 113, 158 n.77, 158 n.82, 158 n.83, 158 n.84, 159 n.101, 162 n.129, 166 n.33, 166 n.36, 169 n.112, 177 n.23, 177 n.28, 179 n.48, 179 n.70, 180 n.97 Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (2008) 15 Scheunenviertel, Berlin 142–4 Schulte Nordholt, A. 159 n.100 Schulte-Sasse, L. 166 n.35, 167 n.36 secondary witness 11–14, 25, 52–5, 57–9, 61, 68, 73, 75–82, 93, 96, 130 role of 54, 58, 93 role of place 13, 91–3 terminology to describe 12 vs. primary witness 11–14, 54–5, 61, 68, 76, 78, 83–4, 93 second generation 17–21 affinity amongst 20 Berger’s definition 96 burden of inherited memory 60 categorization of 57, 170 n.2 collective identity 19–20 criticism of terminology 20–1

212

Index

emergence of 18, 104 intermarriage amongst 177 n.15 journeys to sites of Holocaust memory 57–93 memory, role of 20–1, 61–8 shared experiences and circumstances 18–19 trans-generational trauma 19 2.5 generation 17 second-generation identity 92–3 second-generation memoirs 57–93 concepts of memory 62–8 experiences of the second generation 75–91 journeys portrayed in 59–62, 73–5 meaning of the sites 75–81 primary and secondary witnessing 75–81, 91–3 role of place 91–3 traces of trauma 69–73 visiting Holocaust sites of memory 75–91 visits to Auschwitz 81–4 Second World War 16, 22, 29, 32, 99, 150 n.1 50th anniversary of the end of 59–60 Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Isaacson) 24, 31–3, 80, 127 choice of places visited 44–8 English language, use of 35–7 representation of return 39–42 return as transmission of memory 53–4 timescapes, notion of 49–50, 52 women’s experiences 31–2, 166 n.28 self-help groups 18 sensory experience 1, 41, 130, 132, 148, 169 n.93 Shackley, M. 185 n.54 Shoah 75, 106–7, 111, 113, 117–19, 124 museums 140 Shoah (film; dir. Lanzmann) 49 shootings 6, 8 shtetl 68, 89, 95, 100, 113–16, 136 Sicher, E. 17, 69, 73, 158 n.81, 160 n.102, 161 n.120, 170 n.8, 171 n.17, 172 n.61, 173 n.81 silence 3, 42, 63, 66 Silverstein, J. 176 n.1 Simon, A. 25, 95, 98–9, 106, 111–13, 135, 154 n.41, 159 n.94, 163 n.148, 177

n.16, 177 n.18, 179 n.65, 180 n.90, 186 n.77, 186 n.78 Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002) 25, 95, 98–9, 101–2, 106, 108, 111–13, 135 Six-Day War (1967) 127–8 slavery 3, 5, 26, 86, 90 collective memory of 19, 24 Slucki, D. 176 n.1 Sobibor 123, 148–9 social memory 27 space and time 5, 7, 27, 61, 88–9, 114, 143–4 spatiotemporal distance 93, 157 n.67 Spiegelman, A. 60, 170 n.6 Maus (2003) 60 Spielmann, J. 54, 122, 151 n.5, 169 n.119, 181 n.2 Spitzer, A.B. 159 n.91 Spitzer, L. 5, 152 n.24 Star of David 134, 144 Stein, A. 75, 174 n.91 Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Kluger) 32, 166–7 n.36 stone throwings 141 St Petersburg 98, 135 suffering 2, 22, 44, 69, 76, 82, 118, 125, 184 n.38 see also catastrophe Suleiman, S.R. 16–17, 33, 35–6, 159–95, 165 n.16, 167 n.38, 167 n.46 Sundquist, E.J. 14, 158 n.78 survivors see also specific generations of the Holocaust child 11–12, 15–17, 33, 102, 155 n.43, 165 n.16 children/grandchildren of 1–2, 8, 11–15, 17–25, 53–4, 58, 60–4, 69, 73, 75–81, 85–6, 91, 105, 158 n.85, 161 n.117, 172 n.56, 178 n.41 collective identity 19–20, 137 as courtroom witnesses 9 definition 16 formative experience 16 identity of 12, 64 lifespan of 23–4, 103, 114 memoirs of return 1–2, 26–56 perspective on Holocaust tourism 140–2 trans-generational trauma 15, 19, 69, 91, 158 n.85, 172 n.56, 175 n.118

Index transmitted memory 2, 15, 34, 52–5, 60, 64–5, 67, 71, 73, 76, 83, 97, 105–6, 122–3, 147 trauma, loss and displacement 18–19, 105 traumatic memory 24, 27, 34–5, 37, 40–2, 59, 69 Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, A (Spiegelman) 60 Sydney 111 synagogues 6, 121, 124 Taft, M. 154 n.40, 155 n.45, 156 n.47, 158 n.79 Talmud 89 television 9, 26, 43–4, 138–9 tertiary witnessing 157 n.67 testimony, Holocaust audiovisual 164 n.5 context, importance of 10, 29, 156 n.57 historical importance of 13 Jewish aspect of 155 n.46 Laub’s theory 12–13, 52, 108–10 listening to 11–13, 52, 108–10, 112–13 literary see Holocaust texts medium/format 9–10, 116 production and reception of 10 video 8–10, 26, 67, 94, 104, 148, 155 n.45, 157 n.67, 165 n.15 writing or recording 9–10 written in English 30, 32–3, 35–7, 67, 70–1, 98 theme 1, 5–6, 19–20, 45, 92, 100, 110, 118, 136 Theresienstadt Ghetto 32, 47 third generation 21–23 Alan Berger’s view 96 as the ‘bridging generation’ 94, 97, 103–8 crucial in transmission of history 104 defined by distance 22 definitions 21–2, 97, 104, 162 n.133 emergence of 21–2 empirical studies 104 generational distance vs. continuity 104–8 Holocaust witnessing 94–120 James Berger’s definition 97 memory, role of 22–3 peer groups 104

213

role in remembering 104 role of 106–7 vs. second generation 23, 97–8, 103–8 third-generation texts 94–120 elements of witnessing 97 fictional representation of Holocaust 94–119 grandparent–grandchild relationship 108–13 imaginary places 113–19 role in Holocaust memory 120 transmission of memory 104–8 3GH 21–2, 104, 162 n.128 3GNY 21–2, 104, 162 n.128 time and place 5, 7, 27, 61, 88–9, 114, 143–4 timescapes 48–52, 89, 147 Too Many Men (Brett) 25, 57–8, 71, 124–5 criticism of 171 n.24 criticism of Holocaust tourism 141 meaningfulness of place 81–2, 84 second-generation identity 92 second generation with survivors at sites of memory 75–7 theme 92 transfer of memory 63–4, 76 visit to Auschwitz 81–2, 139–41 torture 8, 68 Trachimbrod in Everything Is Illuminated 95–6, 100–1, 107, 113–16, 119, 143–4 transfer of memory 54, 64–7, 76, 109 trans-generational trauma 15, 19, 69, 91, 158 n.85, 172 n.56, 175 n.118 transmitted memory 2, 15, 34, 52–5, 60, 64–5, 67, 71, 73, 76, 83, 97, 105–6, 122–3, 147 trauma abstract 42 childhood 30, 165 n.16, 172 n.56 deep imprint of 20, 38 everyday 22 and loss 18, 94 memory and 5, 12–14 see also transgenerational trauma; traumatic memory past times of 30, 34, 38 physical and emotional 26 reawakening of 34, 40–1 in second-generation Holocaust texts 69–70, 73–4

214

Index

symptoms 19, 158 n.85 traces of 59, 69, 73 traumatic memory 24, 27, 34–5, 37, 40–2, 59, 69 treaties 3 Turner, B.S. 159 n.91, 160 n.113 Ukraine 5, 78, 95–6, 100–1, 107, 111, 114, 133, 177 nn.24–6, 184 n.38 uncertainty 92–3, 110 United Kingdom 31, 35, 66 Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January) 182 n.11 Jewish migrants in 23, 26, 35 United Nations 182 n.11 United States 35 collective memory of Holocaust 21 Holocaust memorials 182 n.10 Jewish migrants in/American Jewish identity 7, 18, 21, 23, 32, 50, 75, 98, 133–5, 154 n.41 third-generation group (3GNY) 21–2, 104, 162 n.128 unmarked sites 126–7, 148 burial sites 121 USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive 155 n.45, 164 n.5 van Alphen, E. 16, 20, 159 n.90, 160 n.105, 161 n.121 van Pelt, R.J. 126, 150 n.1, 152 n.19, 182 n.11, 183 n.25, 183 n.28, 183 n.30 Vasvári, L.O. 166 n.28 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) 91 victimhood 20 victims 29, 35, 46, 53, 64, 70, 78, 83, 96, 104, 111, 133–4, 139, 142, 147 experience of 11–12, 86 fate of 45 -perpetrator typology 100–1 photographs of 93 testimonies/witnessing 6, 9, 12, 36, 41 video testimonies 8–10, 26, 67, 94, 104, 148, 155 n.45, 157 n.67, 165 n.15 Vienna 24, 32, 46–7, 53 visitors, as essential to the function of memorials 7, 122–3 vivid Holocaust-related imagery 19

voices imaginary 25, 79, 98–100, 110–13, 120 survivors’ 120, 135, 138, 145 Wadler, J. 177 n.25 Wake, C. 157 n.67 War After: Living with the Holocaust, The (Karpf) 25, 58, 105, 117, 139 encounters at sites of memory 85, 87–9 theme 92 third-generation identity 105 transfer of memory 66–7 visit to Poland 85 warehouses 6 Warsaw Ghetto 77, 89–90, 135 war-time narratives 31–2, 39, 41, 43, 126–7 Washington, Holocaust museum 1 Waxman, Z. 13, 16, 154 n.40, 155 n.45, 156 n.47, 156 n.57, 157 n.72, 159 n.92, 165 n.13, 166 n.28, 168 n.74 Weissman, G. 10–12, 93, 156 n.60, 157 n.62, 161 n.125, 162 n.133, 176 n.162 weiter leben: eine Jugend (Kluger) 32, 38–9, 53, 166 n.36 Western Europe 133 Wierzbnik 65, 78–9 Wiesel, E. 138–9, 165 n.15, 186 n.90 Night 139 visit to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey 138–9 Wieviorka, A. 9–10, 156 n.54 Winfrey, Oprah Book Club 139 visit to Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel 138–9 ‘witnesses by adoption’ 12 ‘witnesses of the witnesses’ 7, 12–13 ‘witness through the imagination’ 12 witness/witnessing definitions for 9, 93, 156 n.48, 169 n.93 fourth/fifth generation 23–4 primary 8–10 role of place in 121–46 second generation 11–14, 17–21, 57–93 third generation 21–3, 94–120

Index women’s experiences in Seed of Sarah 31–2, 166 n.28 working class 142 working through the past 8, 47, 50, 68, 74, 91–2, 171 n.24 writing, as remembrance 8–9, 27, 35–7, 39 Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter (Attie) 25, 122, 142–4 Wylie, J. 4, 125, 151 n.12, 151 n.13, 182 n.13, 183 n.17 Yale University Library 155 n.45 Yerushalmi, Y.H. 155 n.44 Yiddish language 29, 36, 66, 70–1, 98, 135 Yom HaShoah 132, 150 n.2 Yorkshire Television 26, 43 Young, J.E. 3, 6–7, 10, 29, 35–6, 42, 44, 48, 54, 67, 114, 122, 125, 127–9,

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149, 151 n.4, 151 n.5, 151 n.7, 151 n.8, 151 n.11, 152 n.19, 153 n.29, 154 n.38, 156 n.59, 157 n.61, 158 n.81, 164 n.11, 167 n.49, 168 n.72, 168 n.91, 169 n.119, 172 n.48, 180 n.101, 181 n.2, 181 n.3, 181 n.5, 181 n.127, 183 n.18, 183 n.21, 184 n.36, 184 n.37, 184 n.38, 184 n.45, 185 n.49, 185 n.52, 186 n.97, 187 n.2 youth 65–6, 99, 162 n.133 Zable, A. 25, 58, 60, 66, 73, 85–90, 92, 163 n.147, 170 n.4, 171 n.38, 173 n.82, 175 n.129, 175 n.137, 176 n.159 Jewels and Ashes (1991) 25, 58, 66, 73, 85–90, 92 Zawiercie 68, 78–80, 83, 136 Zionism 135, 154 n.35 Zuckerman, B. 150 n.1