Auschwitz visitor faces backlash for posing for tasteless photo on train tracks

News

By Yaron Steinbuch

April 18, 2023 | 12:04pm

A visitor to Auschwitz is facing backlash after she smiled and struck a modeling pose for a photo while sitting on the railroad tracks leading into the former concentration camp.

The visitor appeared to be unmoved by the solemn site in Poland as a photographer crouched to snap the shot on the tracks where trains carried hundreds of thousands of Jews and others to their deaths.

Maria Murphy, a producer with GB News, captured the tone-deaf duo in the tasteless act on Saturday.

“Today I had one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. Regrettably it didn’t seem everyone there found it quite so poignant,” she said in a tweet.

The woman, wearing a red flannel shirt, black top and black pants, is smiling as she gazes skyward while visitors walk toward the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

The former Nazi complex now serves as a research center and memorial to the roughly 1.1 million who were slaughtered during the Holocaust in World War II.

Murphy’s tweet, which has been viewed more than 30 million times, sparked a backlash against the unidentified pair.

“Shocking. Do they actually know where they are!” one user said on Twitter.

“Every adult in the world knows exactly what that track and those gates are. Especially one that pays to visit,” another wrote.

“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,” Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, a family doctor and activist, said in a tweet.

Murphy wrote: “Total detachment from reality. That’s the only explanation,” adding, “The tour had already been going for 1-2 hours. There was no possible way of claiming ignorance.”

She said visitors had been asked to be respectful.

“You would think this sort of thing wouldn’t need to be specified as a no-go for that criteria,” the journalist wrote.

The museum said in a tweet: “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,” it added.

On Tuesday, thousands gathered at the site for the March of the Living, a yearly Holocaust remembrance march that falls this year on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The event takes place each year on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

With Post Wires