How not to write about the Holocaust

As anyone who knows me or reads my work knows, I have an infinite amount of interest in writing about the Holocaust, in whatever genre: history, fiction, essay, travelogue, diary, memoir, poetry, whatever.

I also have an infinite appetite for voices in writing about the Holocaust: sardonic, ironic, bemused, impatient, poignant, heroic, anti-heroic, sociological, callow, creepy, fantastical, comedic, whatever.

But the article in the September issue of Harper’s, “My Auschwitz Vacation,” by the writer Tanya Gold, tested my patience.

It’s unbearably familiar and hackneyed. How many articles can we read on the silliness and stupidity of a tourist’s response to an extermination camp? Teenagers go to Auschwitz and take selfies. Justin Bieber visits the Anne Frank House and writes in the guestbook that Frank would have been a “belieber.” There’s no business like Shoah business. We get it!

While we’re on the topic, why should a tourist’s response to Auschwitz be any more elevated or sophisticated than their response to Chartres or the Louvre? Or the Smithsonian or the Golden Gate Bridge? I’ll confess, I’m never certain how to respond to any tourist site, whether it is a site of exaltation or hell on earth. Not knowing how to respond myself, I’m unclear how to judge the response of others. Does Gold know? I’m not quite sure. She leaves no room for any response to Poland other than her own, which is conveniently not a response to Poland at all but to other people’s responses to Poland. Smug and small, that’s how the article reads.

At points, it’s presumptuous, substituting the author’s own speculations about what people are thinking for evidence of what they are thinking. It’s filled with comments from taxi drivers and tour guides, who provide about as much insight into man’s inhumanity to man as anyone who’s read a Thomas Friedman column on, well, anything, would expect.

And it’s sentimental, closing with the following observation from one of Gold’s interview subjects:

Gebert says, “We live in a bubble, from Britain to Warsaw. A rich, protected bubble. We just pretend we don’t realize it.” The real world is not here, he says, and he is right. The real world, he says, is Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah.’

Why are Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah, the real world? Why is suffering the only thing in the world that’s real? (Not to mention that there’s suffering in Britain and Warsaw and all sorts of places that are not the sites of war crimes and mass murder.) And how is this little shopping list of international inhumanity, with all its nods to the world’s currently approved hot spots of concern, any less superficial than the observations on Auschwitz and Kraków that Gold cites and sniffs at?

The article is one long pastiche of Holocaust writing over the last sixty years, which nowise warrants the author’s assumption of superiority over the subject.