Auschwitz Isn’t Your Backdrop: Viral Photo Shoot on the Camp’s Train Tracks Sparks Outrage

I find it a little irritating that so many people view historic monuments as merely a stage for them to pose. And recently, once again, this “stage” was no other than Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the former German Nazi concentration camps. A video of a group of tourists doing a photo shoot at the camp’s entrance went viral, and not surprisingly, caused quite a stir.

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TikTok user Alojzy Nowak shared the video to the platform on Sunday, showing “three stars” doing a photo shoot on the train tracks in front of Auschwitz’s main gate. You can see a young woman posing on the tracks in front of the camp’s main gate, adjusting her hair and shifting poses as two others photograph her.

@alojzy.nowak1 3 gwiazdy postanowiły zrobić sobie sesję zdjęciową w obozie Auschwitz #auschwitz #historia #pamięć #szacunek #polska ♬ suara asli – JamesSantigo – CAPCUT TEMPLATE

The comments under the video are mainly in Polish. I decided to Google-translate a few, and they mostly agree on one thing – this is disrespectful to the people who died in that horrible place. Auschwitz is infamous as the most notorious of Nazi Germany’s concentration and extermination camps. It’s a place where more than 1.1 million men, women, and children were murdered. Today, it’s one of the most significant Holocaust memorial sites in the world.

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As for the train tracks leading into the camp, they mark where countless victims arrived aboard deportation trains. It’s the final part of a journey that ended in torture and death for so many innocent people. And yet, to some, Auschwitz is just a backdrop. The Holocaust is just a TikTok trend. So much so that the memorial had to publicly warn people not to pose there or use the historic event for their silly TikTok dance.

Personally, I have no idea how or why people get so disrespectful toward a place like this. I understand if someone wants to take photos to preserve the memory of visiting, or perhaps tell a story through their images. But posing at a freaking concentration camp as if you’re a diva filming a music video or something… I don’t know, man. Maybe I’m too old, too sensitive, or both – but I can’t understand that.

I don’t know who these girls are, and I want to believe they don’t have bad intentions. They’re probably just uninformed and not educated enough about World War II and the Holocaust. In which case, I sure have books to recommend (this one and this one are my favorites). I may be naïve, but I still believe we can resolve lots of social issues with proper education.

But tell me, what’s your take? Does the “main character syndrome” have its place even in locations like this, because we live in the social media era after all? Or are you, like me, baffled by behavior like this? Do you think we can fix it with education or has that ship sailed?

[via PetaPixel: Lead image credits: Piotr Zakrzewski from Pixabay]

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