Institutions which grapple with the hardest parts of history inevitably have to address the most prosaic of problems. Namely, visitors get hungry.
There are a few main ways in which dark heritage sites deal with food service. One option is to keep offerings modest and position them on the property’s periphery. That’s the arrangement at Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, where there’s a vending machine and snack bar near the parking lot, and Drayton Hall, the South Carolina plantation at which hundreds of people were enslaved. (In the early days of Holocaust tourism, visitors flocked to a “noisy, cheerful cafeteria in the building that once housed Nazi guards, a few hundred feet from the nearest crematory,” according to one contemporary report.)
