The Holocaust Experience

by Oeke Hoogendijk
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2002
VHS, 50 minutes, colour
Sale: $375; rental: $75
Distributor website: http://www.frif.com/.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

Sixty years after the Holocaust there are fewer and fewer eye witnesses but an ever-increasing number of representations of the subject. The memory of this event is thus becoming increasingly mediated. Yet Western philosophy and culture have traditionally located this event at the very limits of representation and human understanding. Perhaps it is because the Holocaust continues to pose the question: What kind of representation is possible? That the Herculean struggle to make some attempt at representation of this trauma continues. An authentic struggle to represent the Holocaust is a struggle to accommodate the event within the parameters of human existence without reducing its magnitude through aestheticism or some claim to total understanding.

Oeke Hoogendijk's film takes as its subject several of the new public representations of Holocaust memory. It takes us into the American Holocaust museums where visitors are given the identity cards of people who died in the camps and invited to identify with that person as they are guided through exhibits depicting the horrors of the Nazi regime, where visitors enter reconstructions of gas chambers, and look at photographs of two tonnes of human hair. At Auschwitz-Birkenau coach-loads of people are guided into the carefully preserved remains of real gas chambers and the camps themselves.

The strategy of both the American museums and the camp is to shock the visitor, to appeal to their emotions, and to try to induce an experience akin to trauma. An American rabbi says, "The story of the Holocaust is tragic so the story of it should be so. It should not be cold, distant, detached". A Holocaust survivor who tells her story to a museum audience explains how she "tries to stir them up" in order to make them think or comprehend. This anti-Brechtian strategy results in many visitors breaking down when confronted with the relics of such horror. Some attempt to articulate the reason for their emotions. One woman explains that although she knew about the Holocaust, it happened before she was born, but now, having seen the reality of it, and because it is so close to September 11, it has an over whelming presence for her. The Holocaust has become the archetype of trauma and tragedy.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau a group of lyrcra-clad Belgian bicyclists arrive and explain that while others may travel to Lourdes or Santiago de Compostella, they have decided to journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This announcement should not be surprising because it follows quite logically that if the Holocaust lies at the limits of human understanding ("the Holocaust sublime"), then it must inevitably feature in the construction of some people's religion.

But a journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau is not only a journey to the heart of darkness; other travellers are shown pre-occupied filming and videoing the camp, eating ice-creams, talking about how this camp compares with others they have visited. We are shown around a new visitor complex where there will shortly be a new pizzeria, a post office, kiosk, and souvenir shop. At one of the Holocaust museums a fund-raising dinner is shown where diners raise $1.8 million dollars while eating and socialising and listening to speeches celebrating the acts of survivors who are awarded medals. Holocaust memory has entered aspects of daily life without rupturing them.

The film also raises some of the complex ethical questions raised by the desire to preserve the memory of the Holocaust by displaying in a public place the material remains of the victims' clothes, possessions, and bodies. Should the hair of the victims be displayed to the public in an American museum? Why is this a problem for an American museum when the hair is already on display at the camp that took the victims' lives? Is a photograph an adequate substitute? Should the hair be preserved by applying chemicals to it like hairspray? Is it still the victims' hair if this is done?

Hoogendijk's film raises all these issues and more without advocating or criticising any of them. Her film is naïve and enquiring; it invites us to reflect on the ways in which we construct representations and communicate the Holocaust to a mass audience.