When Prince Harry recently sported a swastika arm band to a costume party, the Simon Wiesenthal Center responded by suggesting the young royal take a trip to Auschwitz. They were not alone: Jewish groups, among others, were furious over the offensive costume “malfunction.” But while I can appreciate the visceral need to educate the offender, there is, nevertheless, something disturbing about the implication that a trip to Auschwitz will cure every anti-Semitic ill. In the end, the Prince didn’t take the Wiesenthal Center’s suggestion, but had he done so, it would have amounted to little more than a publicity stunt, more damage control than any sincere effort to learn about the Holocaust.
When I revealed these thoughts to some friends at a Shabbat dinner, no one could see my point of view. “Let him go to Auschwitz,” said one adamantly. “He’ll learn something.” And he might, but there is a potential cost. The Jewish community seems to have accepted the notion that a simple trip to Auschwitz guarantees a life-changing event. As someone who has been there, I am convinced that at the very least, that is not uniformly the case. More importantly, reflexively offering the obligatory “trip-to-Auschwitz” prescription for every offense carries the danger of trivializing the memory of the perished.
Before college I spent a year studying in an Israeli seminary, where a popular Passover break activity was to take a trip to Poland. Along with my friends, I boarded Lot Polish Airlines and made my way through the ruins of a thousand years of Jewish life and death. It was indeed a life-changing experience. But it wasn’t the death that moved me – it was the life. Walking through old yeshivas and synagogues, once populated by the scholars who have shaped my own religious ideology, had a greater impact on my identity as a Jew – and went further to cement my bond with the perished – than did experiencing the concentration camps themselves. Seeing the incredible life that once existed made me appreciate just how much was lost.
I am not suggesting that it’s not important to bear witness to the death and destruction of the Holocaust. On the contrary, I believe that it is a sacred moral obligation on the part of every Jew. But, in addition to the potential for trivialization, I find myself discomforted by our seeming insistence as a community on the notion that our identity is found in disproportionate measure through death and persecution. Jews have been persecuted mercilessly throughout history – but that shouldn’t be the basis of our Jewish identity. And when we do decide to emphasize that part of our history, it certainly shouldn’t be used as a publicity stunt to sooth the conscience of a public figure after a major gaffe.
There is a further danger in making Auschwitz—and I mention it because of my experiences there, though it holds true for any other death camp—some sort of “trip to the woodshed” or other form of punishment. On my trip to Poland, the first camp we visited was Treblinka, which unlike Auschwitz, has no rooms full of shoes, no barracks, no infamous “Arbeit Macht Frie” sign. Seeing these artifacts in front of you can be a powerful punch to the gut. But at Treblinka, there’s nothing left. You are simply informed that thousands of your people died right where you’re standing.
Then the tears are expected to flow, and if they don’t, you feel like a monster. That night, a friend of mine cried over how guilty she felt about not crying at Treblinka. It may be easier to cry at Auschwitz, but should it be? As important as these sites should be in our Jewish education, they shouldn’t become manufactured triggers for tears – because when they do, those tears are only to quell our own guilt. Guilt for not having been the ones to have been murdered, guilt for having a good life, or guilt for letting a public figure wear a Nazi costume only 60 years after the Holocaust. We need to make sure that that guilt doesn’t turn Auschwitz into a trite experience for the purpose of producing tears, or, even worse, allowing a moral offender to use a perfunctory trip to Auschwitz to gain absolution for his desecration of the memory of the 6 million martyrs.
