Commemoration, curiosity, and cultural change: the moral work of memory in Holocaust tourism

Holocaust memorial sites occupy a central position within global tourism and transnational cultures of remembrance. Although dark tourism scholarship frequently frames visitation as a form of moral pedagogy – progressing from historical learning to ethical reflection and emotional transformation – empirical evidence regarding the structural organization of visitor motivations remains limited. This study examines the configurational architecture of engagement at major Holocaust-related sites in present-day Poland. Drawing on survey data from 1,071 international visitors and applying exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses alongside comparative structural modeling, the research evaluates whether motivations are best represented as a unified construct, a hierarchical structure, or differentiated domains. The findings identify a five-factor structure – Morbid Curiosity, Exploration-Adventure Motivation, Reflective-Emotional Engagement, Moral-Commemorative Responsibility, and Historical-Educational Motivation – with satisfactory model fit and low inter-factor correlations. Alternative unidimensional and higher-order specifications do not provide superior explanatory value. Structural path analysis further indicates weak and statistically non-significant cross-domain effects. Overall, the results do not support a hierarchical or progressive ordering of engagement. Instead, Holocaust visitation is more adequately characterized as a differentiated configuration of coexisting motivational orientations, contributing a configurational perspective to scholarship on memory, cultural change, and ethically charged tourism.