In some places, photos just shouldn’t be taken.
An image of a woman posing on the train tracks in front of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland has gone viral, with many lambasting the tourists as insolent and tone-deaf.
Maria Murphy, a producer with GB News in the U.K., tweeted the photo of the tourists on Saturday. In the image, a man is crouched on the train tracks, holding a cellphone to take a photo of a woman wearing red flannel and sunglasses. The woman is leaning back against the tracks, smiling with her face in the direction of the sun. Behind her, the entrance to Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration camp where more than one million people were murdered, looms.
“Today I had one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. Regrettably it didn’t seem everyone there found it quite so poignant,” Murphy wrote.
The tourists in the photo have not been publicly identified.
In a separate tweet, Murphy said the tour at Auschwitz had been going for one to two hours, so there was “no possible way of claiming ignorance.”
Almost instantly, Murphy’s original tweet — which has been viewed 24.1 million times — went viral. Hundreds of social media users chimed in to comment on the rude behaviour.
Nili Kaplan, a family doctor from Ottawa, mentioned April 17 being Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Anyone who takes a light-hearted photograph outside of Auschwitz should be required to watch the recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors, sit with their children and grandchildren as we flip through photographs of our murdered family members,” Kaplan wrote.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Memorial replied to Murphy’s tweet and reminded visitors not to take these sorts of pictures.
“Pictures can hold immense emotional & documentation value for visitors. Images help us remember. When coming to @AuschwitzMuseum visitors should bear in mind that they enter the authentic site of the former camp where over 1 million people were murdered. Respect their memory,” the memorial wrote.
This was not the first time the Auschwitz Memorial has asked tourists not to pose for insensitive photos on the train tracks. In 2019 the museum reminded visitors there are “better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination camp during the Second World War. Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed there between 1940 and 1945, 90 per cent of whom were Jewish.
When the Soviet army approached the camp in 1945, Nazi officials abandoned Auschwitz and sent an estimated 60,000 prisoners on a forced march to other locations, leaving behind thousands of wounded and emaciated people, and countless piles of corpses.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum opened on June 14, 1947, to serve as a remembrance of the atrocities committed there.