Holocaust tourism and what art has to say about it

A movie in which two cousins visit Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp; a graphic novel in which the artist recounts firsthand tales of Holocaust survival; a film in which a father and daughter journey to Auschwitz: three works, all released in the last six months, all grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust.

Dark tourism refers to the visiting of "incidences of death, disaster and atrocity" made while still "within living memory," according to the term's coiners, authors John Lennon and Malcolm Foley. Could be Hiroshima; could be Chernobyl. Lately, it is also absolutely Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Facing the 'enormity of the Holocaust'

"A Real Pain" is a new film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins who travel to Poland to honor their late grandmother's Jewish heritage. It is a "tender, touching film about how trauma cascades down generations" and is "essentially a Holocaust film set many years after the fact," said Tanya Gold in The Free Press.

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In the movie, cousins Benji and David spend time on trains, grappling to understand each other and the atrocities of their people's extermination. Ari Richter, author of "Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz," a graphic memoir from 2024 that wrestles with the ripples of Richter's own family's Holocaust experiences, said to Andrew Silow-Carroll in The Jerusalem Post that "'A Real Pain' expertly captures the contradictions felt by second and third-generation Jewish visitors" on pilgrimages to a "grim Jewish past."

In "Treasure," a movie released in 2024, Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry play a daughter and father who return to Poland and Auschwitz, where Fry's character survived and his family members did not. Dunham's character, Eisenberg's character and Richter himself in his graphic novel "share an intense self-consciousness," said Silow-Carroll in The Jerusalem Post, that focuses less strictly on the "history of the Holocaust or the experiences of the victims and survivors" than on the "interiors of the young protagonists." To be generationally removed from the Holocaust does not make you immune to its eddy; it does, these works suggest, shift how it occupies you.

No 'hardening your heart'

Tanya Gold, in an essay at Harper's about her trips to Auschwitz, mused, "I wonder if memorialization is a mirror in which you see only your own reflection so that you do not have to look into the past at all." Still, the protagonists of "A Real Pain," "Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz" and "Treasure" reflect even as they memorialize, often with optimism and humor.

Richter, reeling from a synagogue massacre and the rise of the American far-right, latches onto the words of his grandfather Karl: "I am ultimately an optimist — I have to be. Because the haters have won if they succeed in hardening your heart."

When the cousin protagonists of "A Real Pain" eventually find their grandmother's childhood home in Poland, they leave rocks on the site as visitation stones to honor her. An elderly neighbor reacts. "Sweet," he has his grandson tell them in English. Then the neighbor asks them to move the rocks because they are a tripping hazard. "It's a beautiful scene," said Gold in The Free Press. The pragmatic and ironic forever run headlong into the human need to memorialize and rationalize.