Auschwitz, appeal against inappropriate photos. There are other places to learn how to balance on a track

"When you come to the Auschwitz Museum remember that you are in a place where more than a million people were murdered. Respect their memory. To learn how to balance on a rail there are better places than a site that symbolizes the deportation of thousands to their deaths." This is the appeal that the Auschwitz Memorial has made, through a tweet, against the inappropriate photos that too many disrespectful tourists take when they arrive on the tracks where trains passed that led deportees to the infamous Nazi death camp.

Evidently, those in charge of the site believe that there are many visitors responsible for such offensive behavior, who show no respect for the many who lost their lives in the camp: according to official figures provided by the Memorial, 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz (of these, 1.100,000 were Jews, plus between 140 and 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 25,000 common criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, political prisoners, and others), and only two hundred thousand survived.

The request for the memorial got a huge response: fifty-six thousand likes, nearly thirty thousand retweets. And users of the canary social obviously recoil. “I don’t understand how it is possible to take such photos or smiling selfies at a site where thousands of innocents were murdered,” writes user Morgan Blythe. “It is so sad that there is such disrespect,” points out another user, Stephanie Kowalski. The adjectives are then wasted: disgusting, embarrassing, immature, appalling, all the way down to the less elegant epithets.

But there has also been no shortage of opposing voices. There are, for example, those who wrote that it is necessary to educate rather than scold. Others wrote that walking over those tracks means that now the world is a better place and that we need to let people smile. One user, David Berger, wrote: “I visited Auschwitz with my children, my mother is a Holocaust survivor and many of her family died. I think this tweet is undignified and authoritarian. Sometimes you have the need to downplay. Don’t try to fit everyone into your version of respect.” The Memorial responded by saying that while it is true that there is a need to downplay, “there are still more or less appropriate ways to do it in the context of this historic site. And walking on the railroad that led thousands of people to the gas chambers is one of the inappropriate ways.”

Auschwitz, appeal against inappropriate photos. There are other places to learn how to balance on a track

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