The Auschwitz Memorial Is Calling Out Instagrammers For Taking This Disrespectful Selfie

Lack of decency or new mode of communication? Some visitors to Auschwitz take selfies and other filtered and stylised photos in the the former concentration camp, and then do not hesitate to post them on social networks. The most popular? That consisting of walking on the rails on which the trains of death passed before.

The Auschwitz memorial, which manages the former concentration camp, relayed several of these photos on their Twitter account on March 20th. In the comment they said ‘When you come to Auschwitz Museum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolises deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths.’

Opinions shared on the internet

The memorial made it clear that it was not against selfies, which ‘are part of today's visual language. (...) But sometimes they can be offensive or hurtful.’

These photos on the rails of the death camp have created indignation among some internet users, although others have been keen to defend these photos. Photos of the same kind were also taken in Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village destroyed in 1944, as reported by French newspaper Le Monde.

The art project Yolocaust, launched in 2017 by the Israeli Shahak Shapira, already denounced this phenomenon, the newspaper said. He had retrieved photos taken by visitors to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, and inserted them into archival footage showing corpses of deportees.