"All a myth? Come and see for yourself." Place as holocaust witness in survivor and second generation memoirs of return.

Jilovsky, Esther

As long ago as 1993, James E. Young noted that "as many people now visit Holocaust memorials every year as died during the Holocaust itself" (Young 1993:x). Since then, the number of visitors has increased substantially: 1.38 million were recorded at Auschwitz in 2010 ("Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum" 2011:20--21). The existence of pilgrimages such as March of the Living, as well as the plethora of Holocaust memoirs which describe visits to sites of Holocaust memory, further suggests not only that traces of the Holocaust may be found at the places where it happened, but that such traces enable a form of witnessing by non-survivors.1 The description of trips for young Israelis to Holocaust sites by Jackie Feldman as creating "witnesses of the witnesses" is but one example of the powerful potential perceived in visiting sites of Holocaust memory (Feldman 2002:85). Yet what is often lost or at the very least ignored in this scenario is the inadequacy of place as a basis for bearing witness.

Through the analysis of two Holocaust survivor testimonies, Return to Auschwitz by Kitty Hart-Moxon (Hart 1981; Hart-Moxon 1997) and Seed of Sarah (1991) by Judith Magyar Isaacson, and two second generation memoirs, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (1996) by English journalist Anne Karpf and Jewels and Ashes (1991) by Australian writer Arnold Zable, this article illustrates the vast differences in these generations' descriptions of visiting Holocaust sites. The focus on the different roles of place in survivor and second generation Holocaust memoirs shows why it is problematic to draw on place to bear witness to the Holocaust, which sheds light on the consequences of Holocaust tourism for Holocaust memory.

Place in Holocaust Narrative

Despite the centrality of place and the associated themes of exile and displacement to Holocaust narratives, this aspect has not often been investigated in literary criticism (Kandiyoti 2004:305). In fact, the spatial aspect of the Holocaust has rarely been the focus of scholarly discourse. As Waitman Beorn et al. note, "no comprehensive interpretations have identified and investigated the spaces and geographical patterns of the Holocaust" (Beorn et al. 2009:563). This article therefore responds to Dalia Kandiyoti's appeal "for an expanded body of literary criticism on the Holocaust, one that treats place as an important category through which to interpret the narrative of the Holocaust survivor" (Kandiyoti 2004:304). By extending the analysis to second generation Holocaust memoirs--those by children of survivors--this article also grapples with intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory and the role of place in this process, expanding upon the limited research in this area, such as that by Marita Grimwood (Grimwood 2007:201). It therefore not only illuminates the spatial aspect of Holocaust memoirs, but adds a new aspect to the extensive discourse on descendants of survivors.

What is a Witness?

In order to analyse the way in which survivor and second generation memoirs draw on place to write about the Holocaust, this article deploys the concept of witnessing. The writing of Holocaust testimony by survivors is regarded as bearing witness (Waxman 2006:3), and while second generation writing about the Holocaust cannot be regarded in exactly the same way, second generation memoirs still bear witness to the effects of the Holocaust. Indeed, both Dvir Abramovich and Alan L. Berger refer to writing by the second generation as bearing witness to the Holocaust (Abramovich 2001; Berger 1990).

The term "Holocaust" is generally understood to mean the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. (2) However, the narratives described in Holocaust testimonies and second generation memoirs are personal versions of this historical event. Hence in this article, "Holocaust" refers to both these interpretations--the personal and the historical--and it is the interplay between the two which forms Holocaust witnessing. By utilising witnessing, this article does not seek to equate the experiences of the second generation with Holocaust survivors but to provide a theoretical framework to explore how visiting sites of Holocaust memory constructs the narratives of survivors and non-survivors alike.

Just as the literature often distinguishes between primary and secondary witnessing (see for example: Assmann 2006:267-70), this article utilises these terms in order to theorise the fundamental difference between personal experience of the Holocaust and the lack thereof. Based on the dictionary definition, witness has two related meanings: "a person who sees an event take place;" and "a person giving sworn testimony to a court of law or the police" (Soanes and Stevenson 2004). Thus the two main elements of witness are seeing an event and relating it to others. Primary witnesses, such as the Holocaust survivors discussed in this article, are eyewitnesses: "a person who has seen something happen and can give a first-hand description of it" (Soanes and Stevenson 2004).

When it comes to secondary witnessing, there is little consensus in the literature despite widespread recognition of the phenomenon of witnessing by non-survivors, described by Geoffrey H. Hartman as "witnesses by adoption" (Hartman 1996:8); S. Lillian Kremer as "witness through the imagination" (Kremer 1989) and, as mentioned above, by Feldman as "witnesses of the witnesses" (Feldman 2002:85). Moreover, researchers such as Gary Weissman dispute the extension of witnessing to non-survivors, who are in his view also "nonwitnesses." Weissman writes that "the term nonwitness stresses that we who were not there did not witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization" (Weissman, 2004:20). While this is indeed true, it clearly does not stop people from trying to witness the Holocaust from their post-war perspective--which, incidentally, Weissman spends his entire book discussing.

The myriad opportunities for, as Weissman puts it, "listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony," means that some kind of terminology for encapsulating the view of the Holocaust gained from such experiences is useful. Thus, using the terms primary witnessing and secondary witnessing, as Aleida Assmann (2006:267) does, maintains a distinction between those who were there during the Holocaust and those who were not, but still allows for the possibility of interpreting non-survivors' representations of the Holocaust as a form of witnessing.

The Second Generation: Bearing Witness to the Holocaust through Place

For the children of Holocaust survivors--collectively known as the second generation--a trip to sites of Holocaust memory has particular significance. One reason for this is that second generation identity largely centres around a sense of absence, encapsulated by French child of survivors Nadine Fresco's description of the second generation as "people who have had a hand amputated that they never had" (Fresco 1984:421). This is because the second generation's connection to the Holocaust paradoxically emanates from their non-experience of the event itself. Theorised as forms of inherited memory, such as Ellen Fine's "absent memory" (Fine 1998:187) and Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory" (Hirsch 1997:22), the notion of the second generation as a collective experience of Holocaust survivors' children emerged from the incidence of trans-generational trauma noted by psychological professionals beginning in the 1960s. It was consolidated by self-identification through self-help groups from the late 1960s (Epstein 1988:204; Fogelman 1990:1434). Studies such as In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation by Aaron Hass, which documents the experience of the second generation based on interviews and questionnaires, confirm this generation's complex relationship to the Holocaust (Hass 1991). The many second generation memoirs which depict the narrator's visit to Holocaust sites also tell the story of their family members who experienced the Holocaust, and thus provide an insight into how Holocaust memory is created and constructed by those descended from Holocaust survivors. (3)

The role of visits to Holocaust sites in second generation memoirs is significant because it reveals how the second generation's knowledge of the Holocaust interacts with place to bear witness to the Holocaust. In other words, analysing the representation of visits to Holocaust sites in second generation memoirs illuminates the complex relationship between memory and place, confirming Pierre Nora's claim that "There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory" (Nora 1989:7). Thus, the lack of first-hand Holocaust memory by the second generation--the fact that they are secondary witnesses--means that they must rely on sites of memory because they lack what Nora terms "real environments of memory." For the second generation, visiting sites of Holocaust memory offers a window to the past which they did not experience but nevertheless has often had a significant effect on their lives.

While the role of place in secondary witnessing emerges in contrasting ways in Jewels and Ashes and The War After, both texts strongly suggest a desire for place to function as a witness to the Holocaust. Both significant publications in their respective countries--Jewels and Ashes won several prizes in the early 1990s, while The War After is credited in bringing the second generation to the attention of the British public in the late 1990s--these memoirs nevertheless differ in the way that place enables witnessing of the Holocaust in the text. (4) In Jewels and Ashes, the experience of being in Poland almost enables Zable to eclipse the process of secondary witnessing and become a primary witness, which is of course both an impossibility and a contradiction. However, in The War After, despite the suggestion of a similar process, the narrative remains rooted resolutely in the present.

The narrative of Jewels and Ashes entwines Zable's 1987 visit to Poland with his recollections of the memories of his parents, who immigrated to Australia in the 1930s. While they did not go through the Holocaust, both lost their extended families, and, as Richard Freadman explains, "However apparently comfortable their lives in the antipodes, they have lived in the shadow of displacement, loss, bewilderment, and rage" (Freadman 2005:118). Given a broad definition of Holocaust survivor including those whose lives were affected by Nazi rule from 1933 onwards, Zable is indeed a member of the second generation. Consequently, his trip to Poland is an attempt to bridge his perspective with his parents' stories. He writes: "It was a fragile romance, my dream of the shtetl. And it was vague" (Zable 1991:105). By visiting the site himself, Zable attempts to change this, in the same sense that Jack Kugelmass writes about American Jewish tourists to Poland, whose "sentiments about their ancestral homes, if a sense of these places is conveyed at all to them through the narratives of their parents and grandparents, lack the clarity of place that only direct experience can provide" (Kugelmass 1992:400). In other words, Jewels and Ashes suggests that visiting Poland enables Zable to develop a more nuanced view of the Holocaust simply by being there.

Moreover, Jewels and Ashes provides very clear examples of how being there, in Poland, allows Zable to say, "I was there," referring to the mythologised past of his parents, thereby potentially positioning him as a primary witness to what occurred before his birth. As Kugelmass has shown, "Jewish visitors go to Poland to see the past" (Kugelmass 1992:396). Furthermore, the absence of Zable's parents on the journey allows for this episode of potential primary witnessing, because their presence would render it impossible. Essentially, without his parents there to remind him that his experience cannot be what he imagines it to be, Zable writes as if he was also present in his parents' time. For instance: "Although it is barely a month since I entered Poland, Bialystok has become a home of sorts, a focal point around which the journey revolves" (Zable 1991:110). By basing himself in his parents' hometown during his stay in Poland, Zable emphasises identification with them by also considering Bialystok his home.

Furthermore, at points in the text Zable writes as if he really had been there in his parents' time:

What shall we do? Stay in Poland or leave? And when the doors are sealed, the New World cut off: which way shall we go? To the trains or the forests? And at the end of the journey, at the gates of Auschwitz, Doctor Mengele waits, white gloves on his hands, as he points left or right, the ovens or slave labour. [...] Children of the Annihilation, we know it well: life is so fragile (Zable 1991:138).

In this passage, Zable puts himself in the shoes of the victims; by writing about the choices facing his parents and their Eastern European Jewish contemporaries in the 1930s as if he was facing the same choices, he posits himself as a primary witness. Yet in this same passage, there is an oblique reference to his generation--"Children of the Annihilation"--which reminds the reader that Zable was not in fact a primary witness but was born after these events. His post-Holocaust perspective is further evident in the mention of the nature of Auschwitz; something not known to those in the 1930s. By including this explicit nod to the perspective of the generation born after, Jewels and Ashes encapsulates second generation witnessing. That is to say, Zable immerses himself in his parents' story, even writing about it as if it happened to him, but nevertheless includes a caveat denoting that this is not in fact the case.

The power of the journey is also attested to in Jewels and Ashes as Zable describes how being in Poland confirms his prior knowledge of the reality of the Holocaust. He writes that "From the moment I first entered Poland, across the Soviet border, I was struck by one overriding thought: this landscape is Judenrein. [italics in original] I had never before been so confronted with the enormity of this fact" (Zable 1991:162). In this case, seeing it with his own eyes makes it real: an act of witnessing. Being in Poland causes Zable to realise what he had known, but not fully understood. He continues:

I became remote from the other passengers, my eyes riveted on the countryside. Here my ancestors had lived in a vast network of settlements which teemed with a way of life that had evolved for a millennium; they had created a kingdom within kingdoms, a universe pulsating to its own inner rhythms. Then it had vanished (Zable 1991:162).

By projecting his knowledge onto the landscape, through dreaming as a means of escaping the present, Zable imagines what is no longer there. He associates the Polish countryside with the absence of Jews, including his ancestors, echoing Kugelmass' point that "Jewish tourists see nothing quaint about the local culture, either Jewish or non-Jewish; their interest is the dead rather than the living" (Kugelmass 1992:396). In explicitly linking the place with the absence--the site of memory with the (inherited) memory--Zable draws on place to bear witness. In other words, he embellishes his knowledge and understanding of events through bearing witness via place itself. Toward the end of this passage, which describes the entwinement of his physical journey with the one of discovery, he includes the phrase "as I near the final days of liquidation" (Zable 1991:163).

The sense of ambiguity surrounding the referent of this phrase--whether it simply refers to Zable's re-telling of the story or to his journey through Poland--adds weight to the interpretation of his memoir as attempting to perform primary witnessing of the Holocaust. While it is likely that the phrase really does refer to both interpretations, it demonstrates how Zable constructs second generation witnessing as emanating from attempting to become a primary witness. The telling of his ancestors' story, as well as describing his journey to Poland, confirms Jewels and Ashes as an example of second generation witnessing.

In contrast, The War After presents a different form of second generation witnessing, where the narrator is very much aware of the ultimate futility in trying to become a primary witness, yet continues to do so. At the beginning of her trip to Poland, Karpf describes sitting in a cafe in the main square of Krakow: "I kept thinking that, had it not been for the war, this would have been one of my cafes and this my life" (Karpf 1997:294). This imagining of what would have been is quickly tempered by Karpf's realisation of its impossibility:

Yet just when I felt myself on the brink of being overwhelmed by sentiment [...], it rudely dawned on me that had the war not occurred, I probably wouldn't have existed at all: my mother would have remained married to Julius Hubler and given birth to a different set of children (Karpf 1997:295).

In contrast to Zable's dreamings, which seem to wander off unheeded, Karpf's imaginative wanderings into the past are tempered by a reality check. This passage also draws attention to the contradictory feelings that members of the second generation may have about the Holocaust: while it can be the cause of detrimental after-effects, most of them would not exist if it had not occurred. In the words of second generation writer Melvin Jules Bukiet: "The Second Generation's very existence is dependent on the whirlwind their parents barely escaped" (Bukiet 2002:13). These contradictory elements encapsulate Karpf's experience in Poland which precludes primary witnessing.

When Karpf finds her mother's house, on the outskirts of Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow, it provokes an uncharacteristic outpouring of emotion. Even though the building is entirely different from what she had imagined, Karpf nevertheless finds it to be significantly symbolic. She explains that

The contrast between my charged fantasy and the pedestrian reality (I'd somehow imagined something of at least nineteenth-century antiquity, not this relatively modern-looking block) was enormous, and yet to me the building was extraordinarily totemic, as if its pores had soaked up parts of my family's past which were now preserved in its very fabric (Karpf 1997:296).

Her disappointment that the building's appearance did not live up to her expectations is nevertheless a reaction which changes her opinion of her mother's past, and therefore demonstrates how the journey can affect such perceptions. In a sense, it brings Karpf closer to primary witnessing, because now her mental perception of her mother's house is closer to reality, albeit fifty years later. Furthermore, it provokes a strong desire to experience the past, which is described in perhaps the most unusual passages in the text. This paragraph is written entirely in the third person, and appears to describe Karpf walking round Kazimierz whilst crying:

Other people hurry by but they're in a different time zone and occupy an adjacent, unconnected reality--a present without a past, while she's unable to relinquish a past without a present. The woman sobs as if the sheer unexpected extent of the tears of a stylish young woman for the dead might somehow revive them (Karpf 1997:298).

Thus Karpf clearly describes using the place to experience the past and therefore bear witness. Being there, in the area where her mother lived before the Holocaust, allows Karpf to not only imagine the people who once lived there, but to grieve for them. The use of the third person draws the reader away from the more inward focus of the rest of the text, allowing them to perceive Karpf from the outside rather than inside perspective. Simultaneously, this carves a space between the narrator and Karpf, drawing attention to what seems to be an out of body experience. Furthermore, it is an attempt at primary witnessing, using the place to experience the past.

Yet Karpf realises the incongruity of such a sentiment--she is certainly aware of what she is doing, which nevertheless, does not prevent her from doing it. A few pages later, she concedes as much:

I also see that (like many others before me) I've confused time and place, history and geography, as if coming in person to the site of terrible events which occurred fifty years ago could somehow yield them up for us to transform them--they might actually extrude through the stones and earth and be mitigated by modern sorrow (Karpf 1997:300).

Although Karpf is aware of confusing the past and the present, and over-embellishing the meaning of place, she still regards place as an important mediator of memory. In contrast to Zable, who uses place to almost become a primary witness without acknowledging the incongruity of the exercise, Karpf does so while also being conscious of its inherent impossibility. Admitting that she has "confused time and place, history and geography" (Karpf 1997:300), Karpf's attempt at using her visit to Poland to become a primary witness is denied, because she acknowledges the impossibility.

Survivor Memoirs of Return: Place as Problematic Holocaust Witness

While both Jewels and Ashes and The War After draw on place to bear witness to the Holocaust, the act of revisiting Holocaust sites documented in survivor memoirs of return suggests a different role for place in bearing witness. The dual representation of place in these texts--as locations of Holocaust experiences as well as return visits in a later decade--recalls Lawrence Langer's notion of "durational time" as opposed to "chronological time" (Langer 1995:14). Durational time accounts for the bridge to the past that sites of memory represent: "I n the realm of durational time, no one recovers because nothing is recovered, only uncovered and then re-covered, buried again beneath the fruitless struggle to expose 'the way it was'"(Langer 1995:15).

Simply being back at the locations of traumatic events can challenge chronological time--which "is needed to intrude on this memory by those who insist on rescuing belief, closure, and certainty from testimonies about the disaster. Durational time resists and undermines this effort" (Langer 1995:15). Langer's theory hence provides a framework for analysing survivor testimonies of return, because it presents a way to distinguish between the "Holocausttime" place and the present one. Encapsulating how memories of the "Holocaust-time" place intrude when revisiting, these testimonies deploy certain narrative techniques to express the differences perceived. These narratives therefore emphasise the fallibility of place as a witness, showing that it is the survivor rather than the site that bears witness to what happened.

Embarking on a visit to Holocaust sites is, unsurprisingly, a very difference experience for Holocaust survivors than for the second generation. They witnessed the very events that caused these places to be recognised as sites of Holocaust memory. Their relationship to the place therefore emanates from experience and memories, rather than inherited and collective memory. However, that some Holocaust survivors return to sites of Holocaust memory as part of the testimony-writing process shows that place is also entwined in the bearing witness process for them. In contrast to second generation texts, descriptions of these visits in survivor testimony illustrate how different they find Holocaust sites on return visits.

This has implications for the interpretation of non-survivors' visits to Holocaust sites; as the generation of survivors dwindles, their perceptions of Holocaust sites are in danger of being forgotten. These sites are increasingly visited by non-survivors, who are oblivious to the inherent limitations of linking these places with the Holocaust. That the second generation has already created a genre of memoir which documents their visits to Holocaust sites--often as part of a narrative which describes the difficulties they have faced as a result of being a child of Holocaust survivors--suggests that the tenuous link between Holocaust sites and events is being overlooked. The remainder of this article, which analyses survivor testimonies, illustrates why it is important to read survivor memoirs of return in conjunction with second generation texts.

It is of course important to recognise the mediated nature of Holocaust testimony. The representation of experience in Holocaust testimony cannot be separated from the text itself (Young 1988:1). The act of writing testimony requires choices of inclusion and exclusion, as Andrea Reiter explains, "Temporal structuring and selection read a certain meaning into experience" (Reiter 2000:56). Moreover, Holocaust survivors writing testimony in a post-Holocaust environment rely not just on their memories, but on knowledge of the Holocaust obtained through other means. Berel Lang emphasises that "the principal access to the Holocaust is by way of the writings about it which are now available," noting that "this has become true to some extent even for the survivors of the Holocaust" (Lang 1988:14). This is why Zoe Waxman argues that "It is only by exploring the social and historical context of Holocaust testimony that we can appreciate the sheer diversity of witnesses' experiences" (Waxman 2006:1). It is thereby clear that Holocaust testimony is not a straightforward recollection of events, but a mediated representation of memory.

Hart-Moxon's Return to Auschwitz and Isaacson's Seed of Sarah are two of the few Holocaust testimonies which describe revisiting sites of Holocaust memory as well as their memories of the Holocaust. The entwinement of returning to Holocaust sites and the writing of testimony differs in each text, demonstrating that the order of writing experience does not affect the pattern produced. For Hart-Moxon, a visit to Auschwitz in 1978 for Peter Morley's 1979 film Kitty--Return to Auschwitz prompted her to write a longer and more detailed version of her memoir, specifically because "Now I believe I can see it all in a truer perspective than I could have hoped to do then. The return trip to Auschwitz set the seal on it" (Hart 1981:219). Hart-Moxon's assertion that she now has "a truer perspective" demonstrates the role of temporal distance in accessing memory: the trip was crucial in instigating this more detailed version of her memoirs.

In this case, place was the instigator of breaking chronological time with durational time. In contrast, Seed of Sarah suggests the reverse order of travelling and writing: that Isaacson's multiple return trips to Hungary and Germany take place after she has written the memoir. The Preface stipulates that she began to write after giving a talk about her experiences in 1976: "That night I dreamt of Lichtenau, woke at five in the morning, sleepwalked to the typewriter and started to write" (Isaacson 1991 :xi). Indeed, the chapter describing Isaacson's first post-war visit to Hungary--entitled "Return to Kaposvar"--takes place in 1977, suggesting that Isaacson wrote her testimony before her various travels. Here, chronological time does not intrude on durational time: Isaacson's impression of leaving her hometown Kaposvar forever is preserved. These differences in order of writing versus travelling do not affect the interplay of chronological and durational time: each text records differing impressions that result from a return visit.

Bearing witness simultaneously to war-time and post-war memories of a place serves to emphasise the unreachable nature of the Holocaust and pre-Holocaust past. In Seed of Sarah, Isaacson carefully sketches the significant differences between her memories of Kaposvar and what she discovers in 1977 with daughter Ilona: "We entered the gate of the Pogany house, a slum tenement now, the garden choking with weeds. The spacious porch, where I had enjoyed so many gracious meals, held a rusty icebox, a broken baby carriage, and three overflowing garbage pails" (Isaacson 1991:138). While Isaacson's memories of happier times may have similarly embellished her impression of her best friend's house, and the present appearance of the house is also a result of natural decay, this quotation still illustrates the gulf between her perception of it pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust. In other words, the significance of the post-Holocaust description emerges only in its comparison with Isaacson's pre-Holocaust memories. Moreover, even though place is not a witness, it is a powerful evoker of memory. Thus the inaccuracy of place shows that it is problematic when used as a witness

In Return to Auschwitz, the differences apparent in Hart-Moxon's revisit are portrayed even more strikingly. When recording her arrival at Auschwitz in 1978 for the filming of Kitty--Return to Auschwitz, she notes feeling a sense of surprise that it was still there: "The situation grew more incredibly as we approached the gates. I had left the camp in November 1944, yet here it still was, waiting for me" (Hart 1981:31). In order to emphasise the distance she feels from it, HartMoxon describes Auschwitz, the place, as belonging to another time. Yet it resists this attempt to box it in chronological time, and persists in durational time, as shown by Hart-Moxon's confusion upon arriving at Auschwitz:

Past and present got hopelessly jumbled up. All I could be sure of was that I belonged here. And anyway, there wasn't anywhere else in the world. Never had been, never would be. I was not visiting a deserted museum, years and years after some historic reality. No: I was seeing the camp as crowded as it had always been, hearing the crack of whips, the screams, the dogs, smelling the burning flesh (Hart 1981:32).

Being back at the site of memory allows durational time to intrude on chronological time. Hart-Moxon's admission of conflating the past with the present is not only indicative of strongly recalling memories but provides a model for non-survivors seeking meaning in Holocaust sites. Langer's explanation of chronological time suggests why this is so: "Surviving victims bear witness to the impossibilities of their lives then; we tend to translate them into possibilities by easing them into chronological time as wounds to be healed, insults to be paid for, pains to be forgotten, deaths to be transcended or redeemed" (Langer 1995:19). Hart-Moxon's description of being back at Auschwitz reminds non-survivors how different the site is today and that the events that made it Auschwitz cannot exist outside their time, not even by visiting the place and experiencing it for oneself. Thus, once again, place proves to be problematic if used as a witness.

Despite the sheer inability of place to bear witness to the Holocaust, both Return to Auschwitz and Kitty--Return to Auschwitz suggest that for Hart-Moxon, the site of Auschwitz embodies truth and proof of her experiences. For instance, Hart-Moxon cites her reasons for visiting Auschwitz as an attempt to counter Holocaust denial (Hart 1981:2930). The final chapter of the text, called "Return to Auschwitz" in both editions and written as direct speech, is a version of the documentary film. It explicitly challenges such deniers: "Let those who deny the existence of such places come with me and walk around" (HartMoxon 1997:207). Thus for Hart-Moxon, visiting Auschwitz presents an opportunity to prove that what happened to her actually happened: "All a myth? Come and see for yourself" (Hart-Moxon 1997:200). Inviting the reader (or viewer) to come to Auschwitz in order to "see" what happened shows that Hart-Moxon regards place as proof and truth. Yet, paradoxically, her narrative both in the film and the written text emphasises the gulf between what she witnessed at Auschwitz and what is evident there now.

In both the film and the text, grass is a crucial element in differentiating the present from the past. In Kitty--Return to Auschwitz, while the viewer is presented with a landscape of brick barracks and barbed-wire fences surrounded by green grass, Hart-Moxon says: "Now, you see grass, but I don't see grass. I see mud. Do you know what would have happened if there had been one blade of grass? You would have eaten it" (Morley 1979). By drawing attention to the differences between what is there now and what she remembers, Hart-Moxon shows the extent to which the post-war site differs from the Auschwitz she experienced. The following passage is a similar example from Return to Auschwitz: "Outside, the 'meadow' is green with grass. That's something I simply can't get used to. It was never like that when we stood for hours waiting for roll-call numbers to match up. Never like that when women collapsed and died in the mud or froze to death on the hard winter ground" (Hart-Moxon 1997:201).

Once again, by stressing how the present site of Auschwitz is crucially different from her memories of it during the Holocaust, Hart-Moxon highlights the limited capabilities of the site as proof and truth. The presence of grass at post-war Auschwitz but not during the Holocaust is confirmed by Andrew Charlesworth and Michael Addis, whose assessment of the plan for ecological preservation at Auschwitz-Birkenau indicated that "the landscape of mud that covered the vast majority of the outdoor landscapes of the camp in 1943/44 could not be re-created" while "the grassland and meadowland areas that had developed since 1944 were declared inauthentic" (Charlesworth and Addis 2002:240). Therefore, Hart-Moxon's explanations are a crucial component of communicating what the Auschwitz landscape itself cannot convey, proving the problems of ascribing witness status to place.

A trope which indicates this difference in both Return to Auschwitz and Seed of Sarah is the narrator's description of closing their eyes. This signifies an imagining of the past, emphasising the magnitude of the difference between what the survivor sees and what is evident in the site. In the description of revisiting Furstenhagen women's camp with her husband Ike, Isaacson writes: "I spotted the intricate little railroad station from a distance, looking like an illustration for a Grimm Brothers' fairytale. 'This station hasn't changed at all,' I told Ike, 'it gives me the creeps.' Closing my eyes, I could see our trainload of decrepit women swarming by the half-timbered building, bent and skeletal" (Isaacson 1991:146). By depicting such a contrast between the fairytale appearance of the station with her memories of it using the closing of her eyes to differentiate the two, Isaacson demonstrates that the war-time vision is something that only a survivor could see. In doing so, the failure of place when used as a witness is emphasised: the site is unrecognisable from its time during the Holocaust and hence communicates limited information about the Holocaust.

Hart-Moxon also employs this technique, resulting in a similar effect: "Down here is the Kanada (5) enclosure. Pretending to be a factory with a nice lawn outside. I close my eyes and at once the air is filled with screams; and when I open them I think that this is the dream, for the building isn't there, and there are no longer any chimneys for the smoke to pour out of" (Hart-Moxon 1997:203). Once again, the trope of closing one's eyes indicates the vast gulf between the survivor's memories and the place's appearance. Referring to the present as a dream intensifies this sentiment. A further example from Return to Auschwitz is: "I open my eyes, and there's nobody. Open my eyes and see grass. Close my eyes and see mud" (Hart-Moxon 1997:199). This description suggests a distinction akin to polar opposites, and hence effectively draws attention to this difference. All these examples show closing one's eyes to compensate for the lack of physical evidence, thus confirming the role of the survivor in communicating the meaning of Holocaust sites, and diminishing the notion of place as a witness.

Thus, the representation of Holocaust sites in survivor memoirs as vastly different during the Holocaust as opposed to post-war visits illustrates that place is problematic when deployed to bear witness to the Holocaust. Both Return to Auschwitz and Seed of Sarah employ various narrative techniques to bridge the gap between what is evident there, and the survivors' memories. This strongly suggests that place is an unreliable witness because it shows survivor memories to be far more nuanced and complicated than a site of memory. Survivor memoirs of return also highlight the potential for erroneous information at sites of Holocaust memory. By illustrating the gap between their memories and the physical evidence at the site, these texts draw attention to the limitations of place as a witness potentially overlooked by non-survivors. These testimonies demonstrate that the link between Holocaust sites and events is tenuous, and therefore suggest that visiting Holocaust sites as a means of access to the Holocaust itself remains highly problematic. Yet as Holocaust survivors number fewer and fewer, their perspective risks being obscured by that of nonsurvivors, who use Holocaust sites to create a link to the Holocaust.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the analysis of survivor memoirs of return has shown that place is not a reliable witness to the Holocaust. Yet the prevalence of visiting sites of Holocaust memory--exemplified by the myriad second generation memoirs describing such journeys--confirms Young's claim that "In the rhetoric of their ruins, these memorial sites seem not merely to gesture toward past events but to suggest themselves as fragments of events, inviting us to mistake the debris of history for history itself" (Young 1993:120-121). As illustrated by this article's analysis of second generation Holocaust memoirs, place cannot be a witness to the Holocaust, but is often regarded as such. This has significant implications for the future of Holocaust memory. When survivors are no longer able to advocate their perspective of these sites, such places risk, as Young suggests, being mistaken for the Holocaust itself. Thus, the paradox of place as witness to the Holocaust means that despite the limitations, place seems likely to continue to play a significant role in the creation of non-survivor Holocaust memory.

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Endnotes

(1) This article deploys "non-survivors" to describe those who did not experience the Holocaust, after Gary Weissman's interchangeable terms "nonsurvivors" and "nonwitnesses," which he defines as "most of the individuals who produce educational, scholarly, literary, and artistic work related to the Holocaust today." "Nonwitnesses" was not selected because it does not allow witnessing by those who did not live through the Holocaust. See: Weissman 2004:5.

(2) For an explanation of the history of the term Holocaust, see Garber and Zuckerman 1989.

(3) For an analysis of visits to Holocaust sites in second generation memoirs, see Jilovsky 2008.

(4) The awards bestowed on Jewels and Ashes include Australian Book Council Lysbeth Cohen Award 1991; Federation of Australian Writers ANA literature award 1992; Braille book of the year 1992; Audio book of the year 1992; NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission Award 1992; Shortlisted NSW Premier's Literary Awards; according to Dorothy Johnston (Johnston 2008:27). The War After marked the start of a conversation about the second generation in the United Kingdom. Introducing the subject in a 1996 article in The Guardian, Karpf wrote that "Britain's wartime role--the plucky loner who stood up to bully-boy Hitler--has been so consistently idealised and mythologised down the years that the actual, much less balmy, experiences of refugees and survivors in Britain has been obscured" (Karpf 1996). The resulting change in public perception is noted by Karpf in a 2009 article; she writes that "The subsequent, belated public debate has meant that families such as mine no longer feel the burden of historical memory as ours alone" (Karpf, 2009).

(5) Kanada was the area of Auschwitz where prisoners were forced to sort through confiscated belongings of prisoners, including those murdered in the gas chambers.