Who Controls the Narrative?

A few weeks ago, some enterprising entrepreneur set up a food truck selling ice cream and waffles just outside the perimeter of the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, whereupon a gigantic firestorm of criticism exploded across the blogosphere and in the Jewish press.

On the one hand, the idea sounds almost reasonable. The camp—the worst of all the Nazi camps, a place of unspeakable tragedy and horror where 1.1 million Jewish people were murdered alongside thousands of Poles, Gypsies, and others deemed by the Reich unworthy of living in the world—the camp is now a national Polish museum that attracts something like 2 million visitors annually. The atmosphere is appropriately somber. There is no gift shop, no snack bar, no restaurant. It is not permitted to eat or drink on the site; even talking on the phone or taking pictures is restricted to certain specific areas. So it was probably inevitable that someone would have the idea of trying to sell snacks to visitors on their way out.

On the other hand, the decision to position the ice cream truck directly outside the infamous red-brick Death Gate, through which incoming trains brought their doomed passengers directly to the selection ramp could have been guaranteed to offend. But, at least to me, the debate regarding the ice cream truck masks a deeper, more serious issue, one much more difficult to resolve. The truck, after all, could just be moved to some less fraught location. Probably, that is what will eventually happen. But the issue behind the question of the truck’s location has to do, not so much with the noble goal of memorializing the martyrs as much as with the much stickier and more difficult issue of how exactly to make that remembering happen. And how much control we can realistically hope to exert over it.

Surely, no one wishes for the Auschwitz memorial not to exist at all. And, given that it does exist, surely we are all in favor of people visiting it—to learn from it, to be shocked by the experience of actually being in that place, to remember the people who died in that place, to feel chastened by a forced confrontation with the depths to which a nation can sink when it embraces the demonic and gives itself over to barbarism and unbridled savagery. But we live in an imperfect world and some of those people will inevitably not behave well. Some will show up dressed inappropriately for a visit to hell. Others, shocked by what they see, will seek comfort in sick jokes or other forms of vulgarity or tastelessness. Still others, unable to fathom where they are and what they’re seeing, will give in to the urge to deny, to insist that what they are told happened in that place can’t really have happened, that this whole Holocaust thing must be some sort of monstrous hoax. All of this can be predicted. It all has happened. It will all continue to happen for as long as millions upon millions of non-pre-selected visitors descend on Oświęcim, the Polish name for Auschwitz and the current name of the adjacent town, to experience that place in person. We want them to come. We want them to behave. We want them not to take selfies in front of the Death Gate eating ice cream cones. But we cannot have all of the above. And by now we should all know that.

My first visit to a concentration camp was to Dachau. It was 1977. I was a young man of 24. My friend Andrew and I spent a week in Paris, then parted ways. I can’t quite recall where Andrew set off for, but I myself took the train to Munich with the specific intention of visiting Dachau.

I found my way first to the town of Dachau, a quaint village about ten miles north of Munich. The residents of Dachau seemed intent on making it clear to visitors that they neither ran nor supported the concentration camp named for their village, that they mightily resented the fact that the name of their adorable village will forever be linked to the great evil the Nazis perpetrated down the road a piece. My German was plenty good enough to get the idea. But one hardly needed German to seize the concept: the shops selling “Ich ❤️ Dachau” t-shirts and coffee mugs made the point more than clearly enough. (I am not making this up. And, no, I didn’t buy one of either.)

And then I continued on to Dachau. It was a warm August day. I was prepared for reality in black-and-white, therefore was wholly unprepared to find a lush, verdant place beyond the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, a rural-ish setting complete with birds twittering around in the trees and buildings bathed in warm sunlight. After only thinking of Dachau as a place of misery and ugliness, it was shocking to see the place in full summer mode. And then I came across the gas chamber.

Of the 200,000 incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945, 40,000 were murdered. But most were either shot or shipped off elsewhere to be asphyxiated; the actual gas chamber at Dachau was apparently not used to murder inmates. Perhaps that detail is what gave me the courage to step inside—which I was amazed to see was permitted, if not quite encouraged—and, even if just for a long moment, to stand there and to take it all in. My regular readers know how profound a part of my journey through adolescence the experience of learning about the Shoah played. I read voraciously, if mostly secretly. I felt drawn to survivors, although I mostly obeyed my mother’s clear instructions never to quiz them about their stories. But this was completely different, something unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt paralyzed, unable even to gather my thoughts coherently, let alone recite a psalm or a prayer. (I was a year away from ordination in 1977, so should have been able to think of something. But I felt empty. Empty and queasy and adrift from the world.) And then I suddenly had company: two Italian teenaged girls wearing short shorts and bright yellow halter tops, and eating ice cream cones they had probably bought in Dachau Town and brought along to the camp, came to join me. In shaky English, they politely asked if I would do them the favor of holding their ice cream cones while they took each other’s pictures. (This was in the old days when you needed two hands and a camera to take a picture.) So there I was, alone in a Nazi-built gas chamber with chocolate ice cream melting all over my hands while they snapped pictures of each other. It was over in a minute. They thanked me, took back their cones, left. And there I was again, all alone in that place…except now with my hands disgustingly sticky with melted ice cream. I remember thinking to myself that no matter how long I might yet live and no matter what could ever happen to me in the future, there was never, ever, going to be a stranger moment for me to live through than the one I had just experienced. So far, I seem to have been right.

What is it with ice cream? If that truck in Poland was selling cold bottles of water or bags of peanuts, would it have aroused the same reaction? People have to eat! And yet I was as outraged as anyone by that image, one that belongs in a Luis Buñuel movie and not in a news story about real life in today’s Poland.

When it comes to the Shoah, we want a lot of things. But those things come with other things in their wake that we don’t want. And so we are left on the horns of a mighty dilemma: will we take A and B for the sake of having A, or will we skip both if that’s the price of avoiding B? That is the question the ice cream truck sets at our feet.

We want the world always to remember. But that means making Auschwitz and Dachau and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam into tourist sites and then being unable to control who shows up to take a look around. And it also means leaving the telling to the Polish or German or Dutch governments, the natural administrators of sites in their own counties and thus the legal guardians of their legacies. We want Holocaust Education to be part of the curriculum in every American high school. But that means the material being taught by people with no personal, let alone visceral, connection to the subject matter, people all too eager to contextualize the Shoah by setting it against other horrific massacres in history rather than teaching it as a unique event in history and, at that, one that was the direct outgrowth of millennia of anti-Semitic teachings promulgated by people like Martin Luther, a figure whom the nation’s high school teachers are surely not prepared to vilify in public even if they are not personally affiliated with the Lutheran Church. In short we want to control the narrative—because it is our story to tell—despite the fact that there is no actual way to do that.

In the summer of 1298, mobs of anti-Semites under the leadership of a man named Rindfleisch crossed the southern German landscape destroying Jewish communities and murdering their Jewish residents. In the end, it is estimated that 146 communities were utterly demolished and about 20,000 Jews were murdered. This narrative, we own: the Rindfleisch massacres are not part of high school curriculum, nor would the man’s name be familiar to any but specialists in medieval German history. But the fact is the whole horrific episode is lost to us as well: I doubt one Jewish soul in a thousand has ever heard of Rindfleisch, let alone say who he was and what great evil he perpetrated.

No one wants Heydrich and Eichmann to go the way of Rindfleisch. But elevating the Shoah to the level of world-historical event will inevitably entail—has already entailed—relinquishing control of the narrative. And that is probably both as it must be and possibly even as it should be. In the end, no one is going to ask my opinion about the ice cream truck. Nor, other than with respect to the vulgar tastelessness of setting the truck where it currently sits, do I really care if tourists eat ice cream—or anything—after visiting the camp. More than I want to be in charge of the Auschwitz Memorial Site, I want the world to remember the people who died there.