When Auschwitz Becomes a Theme Park

Holocaust and tourism are a strange pairing: a road trip to hell. At Auschwitz, I saw a man check his Tinder, and I watched a tour descend into a gas chamber with obvious excitement. But as survivors die—we’re coming up, this month, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—and as antisemitic theories doubting the Holocaust spread again, these places survive as the last connection to the truth.

Why we tour these sites of human depravity is a subject I’ve written about before, and it’s the theme of the new movie A Real Pain. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the film is about Jewish American cousins Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, and David, played by Eisenberg, visiting Poland on a guided trip alongside a lonely divorcée, a married couple, and a Rwandan genocide survivor who has converted to Judaism. Benji and David see the sites and visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. She escaped the Holocaust, and bequeathed them the money for the trip because she wanted them to understand themselves better. It’s a tender, touching film about how trauma cascades down generations, and it’s interesting to see what is, essentially, a Holocaust film set many years after the fact.

Benji is warm and wild, while David is conventional and shy. Both are flailing. In Lublin’s Old Jewish Cemetery, Benji scolds the tour guide for using too many facts when discussing the Jews who died there. “These are real people,” he rants. “This is making the whole thing feel really cold.”

But that’s Poland. When I went in 2021, and again in 2023, I found there was an ambivalence toward Jews and, as Benji also notices in the film, an awful emotional deadness.