ABSTRACT
This chapter examines these issues through the videotestimony of eight Holocaust survivors: all of them Jewish, all connected with Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau. It examines the issues of performance, identity and place in a number of ways by an opportunity videotestimony provides. The chapter explorers their return visit as a performative act the motivations, experiences and emotional responses to an embodied encounter with traumatic sites and the remembering of events. More recent research in tourism has focused on mobilities, foregrounding the relationship between place, emotion and identity. Such research sees tourism as a multi-sensory, embodied and affective encounter, which traces an anatomy of power' that is not just about the visual. By their very construction, the videotestimonies demonstrate simultaneously categories of identity: host/guest, place/voids and complex notions of home. Returning to Auschwitz', the place where either the survivors were incarcerated or their immediate family members were murdered, conjures up these complex notions of identity.
