ABSTRACT

Visits to the State Museum at 'Auschwitz' were made compulsory for Polish schoolchildren, who were shown the 'Auschwitz' with tourist facilities. With the emergence of the myth of the Holocaust, 'Auschwitz' came into its own as not simply the Warsaw Bloc symbol of fascist aggression, but as the symbol of the 'Holocaust'. 'Auschwitz' came to replace 'Belsen' in Western consciousness, as the 'Holocaust' came to replace more vague notions of Nazi atrocity and the imaginary geography of the 'Holocaust' shifted eastwards. 'Auschwitz' has not merely come to represent the 'Holocaust', but from the 1970s onwards, it has become a site of Catholic pilgrimage. 'Auschwitz' has become the sacred space of a secular religion, and pilgrimage there has become 'a secular ritual, one that confirms who they are as Jews, and perhaps, even more so, as North American Jews'. For a number of survivors, 'Auschwitz' is seen as a potential burial site.