Holocaust Awareness Week Looks at Dark Tourism & Survival

The Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester is hosting Holocaust Awareness Week in March 2013.

As part of the week a series of events is taking place, jointly organised with the History Society, and supported by the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Jewish Society, and the University’s Department of Criminology.

On Wednesday 13 March George Pogány will give a talk entitled ‘A Hungarian Holocaust Survivor tells his story’.

His talk takes place from 6-7.30pm in Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 1 (KE LT1). George Pogány, born in 1928 in the small Hungarian town of Orosháza, experienced the German occupation when he was 16 years old. He was shocked by the indifference he encountered among the local people he had known all his life.

In his memoir, When Even the Poets Were Silent: The Life of a Hungarian Holocaust Survivor under Nazism and Communism, George Pogány tells of life in the town’s Jewish ghetto, his family’s journey in a sealed cattle-wagon to Vienna, and their experiences in a forced labour camp there before being liberated by Soviet troops.

On Thursday 14 March Dr Sarah Hodgkinson, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Leicester, will speak on ‘Dark Tourism – The concentration camp as a site of Holocaust Tourism?’

Her talk takes place from 6-7.30pm in Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 3 (KE LT3). In 2006, critically acclaimed documentary film director Rex Bloomstein released KZ – described as the first postmodern Holocaust documentary – it aimed to tell the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of those that visit the town and concentration camp memorial site of Mauthausen (and those who live and work there).  Using excerpts from the documentary, it is revisited in the light of the growing literature on ‘dark tourism’, and more specifically ‘Holocaust tourism’

Why do so many people choose to visit former concentration camps, often when they have little personal connection with the site or with the Holocaust?

When do remembrance, and the search to understand cultural heritage, become tourism? How do films such as KZ further our understanding of the Holocaust?  These questions will be discussed within the context of Holocaust memorialisation and representation, and the conflicting emotions we feel about the morality of ‘re-packaging the Holocaust’ for mass consumption.

 The events are open to the public and free of charge. For additional information, please contact Stefanie Rauch (sr189@le.ac.uk).

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