Is There a Café at Auschwitz?
Or when two realities collide
Content warning: I want to flag that this piece talks about the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and describes a sequence in the film, The Zone of Interest.
I was telling my sister about my plan to see The Zone of Interest. I’d chosen to go in the afternoon, because I didn’t like the idea of going in the evening and then going to bed straight afterwards. She asked me if I could / would have a snack, I said I didn’t think I’d want to. But this exchange reminded me of something: ‘there’s a café at Auschwitz,’ I told her.
I have not been to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, so the fact that I know this is thanks to a piece I read a few years ago about dark tourism. I think the phrase dark tourism is unfortunate in a way, as it implies something voyeuristic, but actually points to a real challenge: how do we reconcile tourism and suffering? When sites where atrocities have been committed become memorials and museums, how do we bring together the everyday and the horrific?
I’m not here to judge anyone, and I fully believe in the importance of memorial and keeping the memory of these place alive. But I have never visited any concentration camp, though I’ve had the opportunity. And the simple reason is—I don’t know how. It feels singularly inappropriate to go and judge one on its interpretation / visitor offer, but I don’t know if I can switch that part of my brain off. The historian in me feels overwhelmed at the prospect, and yet worries about the overwhelm, that my brain will stay in some kind of horror-satiation loop, unable to comprehend what I’m witnessing —an effect I’ve experienced in Holocaust museums where appalling objects and stories are massed as testament to the scale of the horror. To be clear, this is not a criticism of the display strategy, more a criticism of my own response.
Evidently I’m not the only one who worries about how to be a visitor in these circumstances. If you google, ‘is there a café at Auschwitz?’, you will find that many people have asked this question before you, but also—perhaps not surprisingly—there is no information on the official memorial website. People posting on message boards confirm that there are some vending machines, a shop and a café as part of the wider site. I think they are located in the carpark, or between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, so in the hinterland around the camps, as it were. I believe that eating or drinking within the camps themselves is not allowed.
I wrote my Masters thesis on the role of the museum café in shaping the visitor experience—exploring how a good café could enhance the overall visit. I don’t think it occurred to me at the time to consider the role of a museum café whose brief had nothing to do with enhancement, but almost the opposite. A café whose purpose could only—and should only ever—be to provide the most basic visitor comfort. A café which might be there simply because the site is far away from anywhere, and it’s big and sprawling, and people come from long distances, and that includes older people and pregnant people. In the end, it seems a weird distortion of what we’ve learnt from the Holocaust to think that even the limited physical suffering involved in not having food and water available would be appropriate.
And yet—there’s a part of me that baulks at the notion.
Which takes me back to the cinema, and The Zone of Interest. Yes, there were people eating snacks during the film. And it was disconcerting to smell popcorn—even more, to hear people eating—during this particular film. But even as I clocked my own discomfort I thought—this is what happens when two spaces collide. The cinema space, which is part of our leisure time, where we eat popcorn and watch films … and the story space, which in this case puts us in an irredeemably bleak situation, right there at the boundary wall (the so-called ‘zone of interest’) of Auschwitz.
There’s a moment in the film, where the camera takes us right up to the wall and zooms in on a beautiful red rose growing on it, and then we go beyond the filmed image, to colour and then just sound.
This is a film about the collision of spaces, or realities. To underline this there’s a moment towards the end of the film where the film jumps to the present day and shows cleaners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: sweeping the floors, polishing the machinery and wiping the glass of display cases filled with camp uniforms.
And so this is the message, or the message I took away. Yes, there are cleaners at the Auschwitz Memorial. Yes, there is a café there too. This is what life is like: two seemingly dissonant realities sit beside each other. A seemingly charming domestic scene sits alongside a concentration camp. The concentration camp becomes a museum. And it is inevitably difficult to negotiate the transition between the two. It is hard to know the ‘right’ way to be in these spaces; in fact, I suspect there is no ‘right’ way to be in these spaces.
But what’s the alternative? Never to cross over?
Food For Thought
The website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
Dark Tourism is a phenomenon that has been much written about in recent years, although as various people point out, the concept of visiting sites of death and destruction is an ancient one. This National Geographic piece is a good overview, and for a deeper dive I also found this interesting public health paper on the psychology of dark tourism.
This piece about the pizza restaurant across the road from Auschwitz manages to be short and thought-provoking: Across the continent, people became complicit in the murder of their neighbours. So how far does the shadow of Auschwitz reach? How far do you need to be from the gates of Auschwitz before it is okay to have that slice of pizza?
I linked to this interview with Jonathan Glazer about The Zone of Interest a few weeks ago, but I think it’s worth reposting.