ABSTRACT
Today, there is a widespread consensus that the world has an obligation to remember the Holocaust. This sense of obligation is apparent in the proliferation of Holocaust texts, witness accounts, films, museums and memorials. Yet, alongside this widespread commitment to remember, there have been a series of bitter controversies over questions of history, memory, remembrance and representation. Why, if the need to remember the Holocaust is so self-evident, does remembrance prove to be so problematic in practice? The answer might lie in the necessarily 'constructed' nature of identity and memory whereby various communities inevitably construct different versions of memory to reflect and support their contemporary identities and ideological agendas. Thus, the debates around 'authentic' accounts and representations of the Holocaust have proved highly emotional and politicised because different communities of memory have been committed to remembering often contradictory things. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the controversies surrounding the metonymical representation of the Holocaust at Auschwitz State Museum, Poland.
