Beyond Victimhood
by Sara Herschander, 2024 Journalism Fellow
“In the eyes of many, Auschwitz is a point of origin for survivors,”1 wrote Ruth Klüger, an Austrian-Jewish memoirist and literature professor, who, after her liberation from Auschwitz, refused to legally register herself as a survivor and removed the tattoo that marked her captivity.
“People who want to say something important about me announce that I have been in Auschwitz,”2 said Klüger in her memoir Still Alive, which she wrote decades after being hit by a bicycle and awakening from a coma with a sudden urge to finally tell her children about her painful past.
“Whatever you may think, I don’t hail from Auschwitz,” she said: “I come from Vienna.”3
Amidst the bitter critiques of Holocaust memorial culture that permeate her memoir, Klüger points to an age-old ethical dilemma at the heart of depicting tragedies. When a journalist, historian, museum, or memorial attempts to capture such a moment, they do so to heighten our awareness. To force us not to look away. Yet, no matter how noble their intentions, there remains a question: how do you balance the need to learn from a tragedy with the risk of further compromising the dignity and agency of the very people you aim to protect?
In other words, who took those photographs? Who spun those narratives? And how might they flatten victims and survivors by freezing their trauma in time and coloring our perspectives as consumers of such tragedy?
“There’s this kind of tacit assumption that of course, people want the visual evidence of their trauma to be used as testimony,” said Susan A. Crane, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies collective memory and photography and notes that many argue that “it’s not only appropriate that we look, but it’s important—it’s vital—we look at these atrocity images.”
It’s a notion that Crane resists in order to protect the dignity and agency of those pictured. After all, she says: “do you want to be remembered as the most abject image ever made of you?”
For centuries, survivors, descendants, philosophers, and journalists have debated the use of tragic imagery and narratives to inform, warn, or spur action in honor of the victims of injustice. A charity, for example, may advertise using a photo of a starving child to raise donations, while an activist may share a graphic video on social media in the hope of launching a protest.
Indeed, at times, tragic imagery has led to concrete action in support of those harmed. When Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley decided to allow an open-casket funeral, one that would force the world to “see what they did to my baby,” she helped kindle the Civil Rights movement. Over a half-century later, footage of the brutal police killings of Black men like Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald, and George Floyd went viral, sparking Black Lives Matter protests across the country.
It’s easy to draw attention to an atrocity through shocking imagery and appeals to morbid curiosity. It is harder to do so in ways that truly honor the cultural practices, agency, and individuality of victims. At its best, some have toed the line successfully, says Crane, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites in Birmingham, Alabama, which honor and educate Americans about the victims of racial terror and enslavement.
But, at its absolute worst, we twist our atrocities into tourist attractions, the kind that Klüger often criticized: “I never went back to Auschwitz as a tourist and never will,”4 she said. Or in contemporary parlance, into content to consume.
The internet has broadly expanded possibilities for more intentional and survivor-led depictions of atrocity and has connected people across the world more intimately and directly than ever before, allowing for global crowdfunding campaigns, online protests, virtual memorials, and at times a platform for those directly affected as a tragedy unfolds. Yet it has also expanded the number of ways and the scale at which atrocity images can be exploited or gawked at, as Motaz Azaiza, a Palestinian journalist who graphically documented Israel’s deadly assault in Gaza in the months after October 7, hinted at in an interview this year with TNT News.
“I need the world to understand that we are the same. We are humans. I’m not content. What is happening in Gaza is not content for you,” said Azaiza. “We are not telling you what is happening waiting for your likes or views or shares. No, we are waiting for you to act.”
Perhaps, action itself can be its own kind of living memorial. In her later years, Klüger, who died days short of her 89th birthday in 2020, was an advocate, attending protests against the U.S.-Mexico border wall and dedicating parts of a speech to the German parliament on International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2016 to the rights of global refugees.
Such activism embodied the moral education that Klüger would surely say she learned not in Auschwitz but in the life that came before and after. “Vienna is a part of me—that’s where I acquired consciousness and acquired language—but Auschwitz was as foreign to me as the moon. Vienna is part of my mind-set, while Auschwitz was a lunatic terra incognita, the memory of which is like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it,” she wrote. “Auschwitz was merely a gruesome accident.”5
Sara Herschander was a 2024 FASPE Journalism Fellow. She is a staff reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She covers the nooks and crannies of nonprofits, philanthropy, labor, and social movements.
Notes
- Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, The Feminist Press, 2001:112
- Klüger 2001:112
- Klüger 2001:112
- Klüger 2001:111
- Klüger 2001:112