“Today was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Unfortunately, not everyone seems to experience it so intensely.” This tweet, posted on April 15 by a British journalist and viewed more than 22 million times, is accompanied by a photo of another young woman, smiling and enjoying the sun.
A cliché that could be described as banal, if it did not take place on the tracks that lead to the entrance of the former Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, built by Nazi Germany during World War II, and today erected as a place of memory.
The tweet prompted the Auschwitz Memorial to take to the social network, reminding visitors to exercise decency when posting images online.
“Respect his memory”
A long-standing phenomenon
It is not the first time that the Memorial intervenes to ask its visitors for decency. In March 2019, the institution had already spoken out about the same phenomenon, by gathering several shots of people playing tightrope walkers on the railings of the camp.
In response to the British journalist’s tweet, many people claim to have witnessed these types of scenes during their visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On social networks, be it Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok, the keyword Auschwitz is attached to a large number of posts, most of which are framed in the context of duty of memory. However, some of them also show visitors, posing on the railings or in front of the entrance gate to the camp where more than a million people were killed in World War II.
If the museum indicated then that it was “aware that everyone reacts differently to the experience”, it also reminded that there are other ways to pay tribute.
Additionally, the Memorial sounded the alarm in August 2020 about a TikTok trend of portraying themselves as Holocaust victims and telling the story of their alleged deaths in the Auschwitz camp. A phenomenon considered “hurtful and offensive” by the museum.
Source: BFM TV
