HOLOCAUST

Sixty years on from the defeat of the Nazis, some of the infamous sites of their crimes, those they could not destroy to hide the evidence, have turned out to be important tourist attractions. Moreover, visitor numbers to the numerous Holocaust museums in North America and worldwide are soaring.

The motivations are various, including celebrity of the site; a fascination with death and disaster; and pilgrimage. At the same time, this provides an opportunity for museum and exhibition directors to grapple with a gruesome episode of our recent past, and engage in appropriate educational endeavours.

Even so, personalizing the history makes it easier for the visitor to grasp and perhaps understand, whether by focusing on Anne Frank or Oscar Schindler. Some sites, such as the Imperial War Museum in London, or the new Yad Vashem, make very effective use of survivor video testimonies, which are becoming more important given ever increasing Holocaust denial.

Stone P.R (2005) Deaths, disasters and atrocities in touristic form are becoming an increasingly pervasive feature within the contemporary tourism landscape. Indeed, the seemingly macabre within tourism includes people gazing upon former sites of war and battle, whereby organised violence is brought back to life by tour guides offering accounts of heroism, tragedy and personal torment. Similarly, the present day ‘tourist’ can take in Ground Zero, the site of mass murder and carnage on September 11, whilst on a trip to the Big Apple. Other examples of this death-related tourism include excursionists sightseeing in the ruins of New Orleans (after Hurricane Katrina), day-trippers touring the Gulags of the former Soviet Union, and visitors purchasing an ‘atrocity experience’ at former genocide sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Consequently, the phenomenon by which people visit, purposefully or as part of a broader recreational itinerary, the diverse range of sites, attractions and exhibitions which offer a (re)presentation of death, suffering and the macabre is ostensibly growing within contemporary society. Indeed, it is this seemingly proliferation of ‘tourists’ gazing upon death and ‘other’ suffering that has ushered in the rather emotive label of ‘dark tourism’ into academic discourse.

Dark tourism, the generic term for travel associated with death, tragedy and disaster has, over the past few years, witnessed increasing attention from the academic community and media alike. As a result, the area of dark tourism has become a fascinating and important subject to research, both with its implications for the tourism industry, in addition to exploring fundamental relationships with the wider cultural condition of society. Nevertheless, to date, the dark tourism literature remains both eclectic and theoretically fragile. That is, various gaps in our knowledge of dark tourism remain, despite an increasingly number of academics who are beginning to turn their attention to this intriguing research area.

With regard to commemorative sites, they are not, nor could they be, just as they were. A compromise has to be found between making them accessible for tourists and others, and proper maintenance is required. Moreover, reconstructions are inevitable, not least since much had to be destroyed straight after liberation because of infestation and disease.

From 1940 to 1945, a concentration camp located in Mauthausen, Austria was a place of torture and murder for hundreds of thousands of people during World War II. Prisoners consisted of men, women and children from various races and creeds. By 1945, more than 15,000 or over 19% of the total prison population were children that were being forced into labor. The camps most notorious way of putting their detainees to death was extermination through labor KZ Mauthausen a Glimpse

The KZ Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp was home to a rock quarry that the prisoners were forced to work in. The effects of malnutrition left the prisoners underweight and weakened. These prisoners were forced to carry rocks weighing up to 100 lbs up 186 stairs, known as the “stairs of death.” They were forced to climb one directly behind the other so that when one would collapse, they would fall back onto those behind them and cause a domino effect. If they were unable to work or to complete their tasks they were either shot, beaten to death, or taken to the gas chamber. The number of people who where killed at KZ cannot be proven definitively because the

Nazi’s attempted to destroy all records when they left the camp in 1945. However, through eyewitness accounts and records kept by those who worked at the camp it has been determined that somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 people lost their lives. The KZ camp was the last to be liberated at the end of World War II. When the U.S. Army arrived to liberate the prisoners, the prisoners affected a small amount of revenge upon their tormenters when they turned on the approximately 30 guards who remained and hung them.

The torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners led to the installation of a museum at the camp. Today, people from all over the world go through the museum to learn more about the people who lost their lives there. The hours of operation are Tuesday - Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm. They offer explanations in German and English

and have descriptive flyers in Polish, French and Italian. The point of the museum is to remind us all what happened there and why we can never allow it to happen again. For more information about the museum you can contact the KZ Gusen Visitors Center by telephone at ++43 7238 2269 or online at http://www.gusen.org/ - The site provides

detailed information about the history of the camp, the current museum tours and much more

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