British tourists anger families of Holocaust victims by taking ‘offensive’ selfies at Auschwitz
One man gives a thumbs up next to sleeping quarters where starving prisoners were crammed into single bunks
BRITISH tourists are being accused of disrespecting the families of Holocaust victims by posing for inappropriate selfies at Auschwitz.
They are sharing images of themselves smiling and goofing around at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, built to remember more than one million who died there during the Second World War.
One young man in a baseball cap poses with this thumbs up next to the sleeping quarters where starving prisoners were crammed into single bunks.
The caption read: "When you’re going Auschwitz at 7 but you’ve got Warehouse Project at 9."
Another girl was photographed crouching down to take a selfie on the train tracks that were used to ship hundreds of thousands to their deaths on the site in Oswiecim, Poland.
A stunned Londoner who took a picture of the girl said: “Still can’t believe I saw someone taking a selfie at Auschwitz today #InappropriateSelfie".
Another man, pictured on the unloading ramp where hundreds of thousands were sentenced to death, said he was "getting a bit of culture" before heading out on a stag do, using the hashtags #Auschwitz and #WorldWar2.
Jewish groups and charities have reacted to the photos with horror. One Holocaust campaigner whose father was imprisoned in Auschwitz said she was “deeply wounded” by the offensive photos.
Visitors are encouraged not to take photos out of respect but critics are now calling for a total ban on selfies at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is visited by two million people last year.
A woman from London described Auschwitz as “a place full of history, pain, death and sadness” on Instagram - but it didn’t stop her posing outside in a mini-skirt and knee-high boots.
Another wrote said: “Absolutely worn out after walking a 1,000 miles but today was totally worth it. Another one ticked off our bucket list!”
Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest of the Nazi concentration camps and 1.1m prisoners, mostly Jews, died there.
It was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940.
But Adolf Hitler then presided over the extermination of those arriving, with the first inmates executed in September 1941.
From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed en masse with the pesticide Zyklon B.
It was finally liberated in January 1945, with one in six of the Jews exterminated during the Holocaust dying there.
Lilian Black is chair of the Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association (HSFA) and her father Eugene Black was sent to Auschwitz before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen, the same camp in which Anne Frank died aged 15.
He was liberated aged 17, but had lost his entire family. Lilian described the selfies as “deeply hurtful” and “very wounding”, adding: "People need to think about where they are and take themselves back to that point in time when these camps were the sites of murder and genocide.
"Think of the thousands of dead emaciated bodies that lay where you are stood. It is offensive to people such as myself, whose grandparents and aunties actually perished in these horrible places. There is no sense of dignity about a selfie.
"My father and his family went through those gates in cattle trucks. He was fortunate to survive, but his family didn’t."
“There is no understanding of just how terrible these places were. I think the people taking these pictures should stop and reflect on where they are and what happened in these camps. I find it unbelievable.”
Marie van der Zyl, Vice President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the national representative organisation of the UK Jewish community, said: “The selfies are unbelievably crass.
“If these people had taken some time out first to absorb the absolute horror of Auschwitz, they may have thought twice before posting.”
In 2014 Alabama teen Breanna Mitchell was slammed around the world for taking a smiling selfie with her headphones in at the concentration camp.
She later said she didn’t regret the snap as she took it in memory of her father, who taught her about the extermination of the Jews.
She said: “Honestly, I don’t think I would do anything differently, because I didn’t mean any harm.”
Others have been blasted for taking smiling selfies at Ground Zero in New York and taking pictures of themselves doing yoga at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Germany’s capital Berlin."