Transnational conundrums around trips by young people to Holocaust death camps: Ethical potentialities of incongruous memories in Thomas Duranteau’s travelogue Des miettes et des étoiles

Abstract

My article examines a 2012 travelogue by the young French historian Thomas Duranteau, Des miettes et des étoiles, which brings together testimonies by Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors, Duranteau’s notes during his five-day trip to the camp, the drawings he made of these encounters, and three graphic vignettes coupling an extract from the diary of an SS doctor from Auschwitz with two imagined encounters with a faceless child born and killed in Birkenau and a lonely old man from Treblinka. My main aim is to answer two core questions: how can contemporary trips to Holocaust death camps avoid becoming forms of trivialisation or manipulation of the Holocaust? Can Duranteau’s artistic representation that uses and reframes images of the past function as a positive project inscribing these sites in a transnational context which relies on a fundamental questioning of what being human means? In response, I contend that Duranteau’s narrative foregrounds the ethical potentialities of incongruous memory lenses based on an acute awareness of temporal distance, dislocation and the ambiguous positioning of various generations.