ABSTRACT

In her ground-breaking book, Return to Auschwitz ([1981] 1997), Kitty Hart-Moxon wrote of her return to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she spent a number of years as a prisoner during the Holocaust, as a visit to a place she belonged, almost a ‘homecoming’. In the act of opening and closing her eyes she moves between past and present, the past laden with fear, death, mud and noise more ‘real’ for her than the benign present of grass and tourists. The description of her return and its emotional impact illustrates the complex relationships between imagination, memory, place and performance, all key themes of recent conceptualizations of identity and travel.