Erik Stackelberg is a fourth-year student in Media, Information, and Technoculture. During Reading Week 2009, he traveled to Eastern Europe with his “Communicating Holocaust History” seminar class and professor Amanda Grzyb.
On Feb. 13, after a relatively uneventful transatlantic flight, the Media, Information and Technoculture fourth-year honours seminar group – consisting of nine students and one very patient professor – arrived in Munich.
With the support of a generous grant from Western’s International Curriculum Fund, we spent 12 days visiting the sites of local culture in Germany, investigating the winding streets of Prague in the Czech Republic, and exploring both Krakow and Warsaw in Poland.
Of course, as students in Amanda Grzyb’s ‘Communicating Holocaust History’ media studies seminar, we arrived with a very specific imperative: to survey and experience Holocaust representation through an examination of monuments, memorials and local memory.
Jump ahead 12 days and we return to Canada, exhausted after backpacking, hostel-hopping, and inscribing every one of our thoughts into our travel journals. As I returned to my regular routine and re-established contact with family and friends, the questions began to pour in: How was the trip? What was the favourite part? Oddly, I found myself unable to answer.
To say the trip was simply “awesome” or “a great time” seemed inadequate. Other students in my seminar expressed similar sentiments. Sure, we had visited Eastern Europe in all its magnificence. But we had also confronted Dachau, Terezín, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. How could – or should – we respond?
What is interesting about this dilemma, I think, is the way in which it exemplifies the very blurriness we set out to inspect on this journey. Unlike an average tourist group, we entered Europe with the goal of meta-analysis. We sought not simply to learn more about the Holocaust – the events as they transpired, the actors as they became involved – but to ask questions about how we learn of these events, and how, in a place like Dachau or the former Jewish ghetto of Prague, we are taught.
How do the Poles remember the Holocaust? Why? Why did the Krakow tour guide address certain issues, but not others? How? What ideologies, national identities, and cultural politics are at work in German Holocaust memory?
Uncomfortably, while certain Eastern European towns seemed banal or average, their pleasant, snow-peaked roofs also housed overwhelmingly somber sites of atrocity. In Terezín, for example, current Czech inhabitants go about their daily lives in the midst of a Nazi crematorium, museums, and memorials that commemorate the 33,000 Jews who died there.
One may argue to visit Auschwitz is to know the Holocaust. But just as we might demand that the average person respect the singularity of the Holocaust, so too we found that each site of atrocity demands its own singular reading, largely influenced by the ways in which specific cultures choose to construct collective memory. We were struck, for example, by the radical differences between the extensive tourist infrastructure that supports streams of visitors to Auschwitz and our complicated journey to Treblinka, where the silence, simplicity and isolation of the memorial moved us profoundly.
Some of the most memorable experiences of this trip, I felt, were those that exceeded the boundaries of rehearsed presentation and really exposed the contingency of Holocaust representation. Our fascinating experience in Prague is emblematic: Between prepared lectures, our Czech educator described how her ability to study the Holocaust, as a young Jewish woman, only became possible with the fall of Soviet communism.
What the Holocaust means to a Czech or Pole – having had the freedom to explore religious, cultural, and national identity for only 25 years – differs greatly from the meaning Canadians bring to the same issue. Often we found ourselves perplexed with discrepancies between real-world images and our own imagined meanings, gathered from academic, narrative, and filmic representations.
Our inability to encapsulate our experience also seems to reflect a key lesson of this trip, namely, that “key lessons” depend significantly on the intention and context of their teaching.
Our journey was not necessarily about uncovering specific answers, but about asking questions of those answers, as a way of understanding the larger picture.
Evidently, questions about the frame, rather than strictly the photo, help to clear the fingerprints from the glass.
