Holocaust Tourism

Holocaust tourism is round-trip travel to destinations connected with the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust in World War II, including visits to sites of Jewish martyrology such as former Nazi death camps and concentration camps turned into state museums. It belongs to a category of the so-called 'roots tourism' usually across parts of Central Europe, or more generally, the Western-style dark tourism to sites of death and disaster.

The term Holocaust, first used in the late 1950s, was derived from the Greek word holokauston meaning a completely burnt offering to God. It has come to symbolize the systematic extermination of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany in occupied territories from 1933 to 1945. The term can also be applied to mean the estimated five to seven million non-Jewish victims who were murdered by the Nazis in the same time period.

Quest tourism alternative

Quest tourism, or the 'roots tourism', is a type of cultural and ethnographic tourism focused on Jewish heritage and their extermination as a historical tragedy. This term was first used by E. Lehrer. It is different from Holocaust tourism because of its orientation to the tragic aspect of Jewish Heritage. Quest tourists have specific motivations and may be characterized by the following features:

• they are, as a rule, descendants of Holocaust survivors;

• they travel individually or with close friends and family;

• they are highly interested in travel;

• they possess strong postmemory;

• their goal is to reveal the story and overcome the communal ideology.