A gift shop at Auschwitz? New films and a graphic memoir explore the contradictions of ‘dark tourism’
In a fraught moment in the film “A Real Pain,” Kieran Culkin, playing the more volatile of a pair of Jewish cousins who go on a roots tour of Poland, berates his fellow travellers for riding in a first-class train car in a country where so many Jews rode cattle cars to their deaths.
A few scenes later, after breaking away from the tour group, he happily sits in first class, essentially telling his cousin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, “Screw it. We’re owed this.”
“I love that scene,” said Ari Richter, the author and illustrator of “Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz,” a “graphic family memoir” describing Richter’s own visits to the places where his Holocaust survivor grandparents lived and suffered. Richter said that in the train scenes, “A Real Pain” expertly captures the contradictions felt by second and third generation Jewish visitors like him on pilgrimages to a grim Jewish past.
In his book, Richter describes those emotions on a visit to the Dachau camp memorial. He is both impressed by the efforts made by the German curators to focus on “the nexus of German cruelty and Jewish suffering” (unlike the Polish guides at Auschwitz, where he learns “mostly about the suffering of non-Jewish Poles”) and touched by small gestures, like the “kosher-friendly options” on the menu at the Dachau café.
And yet …
“In a way, I know they seek my absolution,” Richter ruminates back at the hotel, “and I resent that I offer it by accepting their kindness.”
Richter’s is a multilayered book, published last summer, about his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ imprisonment in Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. the lives they made in America (including Tampa, Florida, where Richter grew up); and what Richter calls the safe, “white American identity” he inherited. Richter draws on the survivor memoirs written and recorded by his relatives, collaging actual photographs with his own scratchy but realistic drawings.
“There’s a certain point where I realized that my parents weren’t going to be the ones telling their parents’ story, so it sort of fell into my lap generationally,” Ari Richter said of his graphic memoir. (Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)
But two important episodes in the book feature his roots-slash-research trips – in 2019 and 2021 — that included stops at Auschwitz, Dachau, Jewish cemeteries and his grandparents’ hometowns in present-day Poland and Germany.
The book describes a process familiar to Jewish visitors to........
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