Seeing and Being Seen

In my autobiography writing class at the Elmwood Jail this morning, I showed my students online pictures of the room where Anne Frank had slept during her nearly two years of hiding from the Nazis. A middle-aged dentist was her roommate, their narrow twin beds so close as to be almost imposing on each other. During class my head was full of pictures I had seen the night before when I went online to the Anne Frank House, a popular museum in the heart of Amsterdam. I did not know what I was going to say before I said it, which is sometimes how I do my best teaching, and sometimes not. I told my incarcerated students, none of whom had ever been to the Anne Frank House, that it was better to read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl than to visit the house. If you go to the house, I continued, tourists are ushered single file through the rooms. Everyone is wearing headphones, which stream pre-programmed audio files, and no one is seeing anything. “We don’t know how to look anymore,” I asserted.

As is my habit, I overstated things. I did not mean to disparage the museum, which I visited myself over 20 years ago, or even the audio experience, which is surely meant to educate and honor. But something did feel sad to me about tourists streaming through that space wearing headphones that played snippets of Anne’s writing or using VR goggles to get a “real” view of how things were. These things felt to me like a way to check Holocaust education off a giant list that we call Learning.

Read the rest of this essay in my new space on Substack.