Not for tourist pics

[teagivesmejoy]

AIBU to think that Auschwitz should not be viewed as a typical tourist destination?
2 of my friends have separately in the last week visited and posted photos on SM.
I have never visited myself, and know it must be incredibly harrowing.
Can't see why people feel the need to post pics like they're enjoying an actual holiday?
Of course each to their own etc, surely it's not just me who finds it disrespectful?

I totally agree, I understand wanting to go and pay respects and deepen understanding of what can happen when hatred is left unchecked.... But SM "holiday" pics seem uncalled for.

I agree , it should be visited but you don’t need photos .
I’ve visited dachau and wtc site and saw lots of people posing for selfies as well as normal photos .
So disrespectful

Ive been, I took photos and I posted them on social media. They are not pictures of myself or my partner. They are memories of our trip and we will look at them for years to come and remember how we felt when we were there.
My daughter has also used them for a history trip.

Project not trip.

A colleague of DH's visited Auschwitz. He came back and described his dilemma of not knowing which was more inappropriate; taking a selfie or asking a stranger to take his photo.

Apparently the concept of not being in the photo, let alone, not taking any at all, never entered his head.

I agree, I find it so disrespectful, especially to post them on sm.

Completely agree, it is not a place for crass selfies.

I totally agree.

I've visited twice, it felt VERY disrespectful to take photos. It's a sombe place. But I was in the minority; someone even took selfies with the stolen items from the victims in the background and gave the camera a thumbs up.

What the actual fuck.

Yes. But taking a selfie is the current “I’ve been there” so I understand that for some it’s difficult to imagine not doing it / not thinking through that it is disrespectful.

No, I'm with you OP. I don't think I'd even want to take photos, never mind post them on social media. Crass. I have no understanding of why people would share them, its not as if awareness needs raising.

There's a village in France where the Nazis massacred over 600 people. It's been left exactly as it was that day. It didn't enter my head to take photos when we visited.

Thanks for replies. I get that it's a memory, from a trip, but the taking of photos just doesn't sit right with me one bit.
Uploading to SM shows a complete non understanding of such a poignant place in my opinion.
I visited the WTC memorial whilst in New York, but didn't take a single picture, took hundreds in other spots around the city.
Just seems disrespectful to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

We went to zeppelinplatz near Nuremberg and stood in the exact spot where Hitler spoke at the Nuremberg rallies. DH and the DC have dual British/German nationality so we feel it’s important for them to understand how Hitler came to power in order to counteract the All Germans are evil narrative they hear all too often.
Didn’t take any photos

I’ve been to Auschwitz as a teacher on the Lessons from Auschwitz projects. I was amazed by how disrespectful some people were. There are 1000 of modern days photos at Auschwitz available on the internet so there is no need to take your own.

I dunno. I think a photo of ( not a selfie ) a historical site such a concentration camp is definitely social media worthy , in a “ lest we forget “ and “ it is real “ way.

The voices of the Holocaust are pretty much all gone. It’s our job to pay witness to it for the future.

The room of names at the Berlin memorial will live with me forever.

Selfsettling3 actually I think the “ stock images “ are more of a reason to take your own. It’s easy to paint a picture that says the stock images are of things that weren’t as they truly were, personal witness stands against holocaust denial.

I’ve been and I took a few photos of the area, but not selfies or holiday snap type photos. In Auschwitz II there were teenagers taking selfies and I got really angry about it. It’s so disrespectful. On the flip side, I guess you could say that so many died in the war fighting for others to live, so why shouldn’t those who are alive enjoy life? They don’t understand. In many ways that naivety is indicative of being young, and people should not be so quick to grow up.

I took photos at Bergen Belsen in the late 80s.

It didn't occur to me as a teen that it was disrespectful (obviously before selfies and social media). Our teachers didn't tell us not to.

But a year or so later I went to Norway and visited a war memorial and was told off by my hostess for wanting to take a photo.

I just don't think people think. Unless you are told, how do you know.

Auschwitz is in a different league though.

(to be honest I've since taken photos of the Russian war memorial in Berlin and probably others too)

I have been, I took photos, but not with people in. I didn’t post on social media, I just wanted to have something to mark that I had been there. I only took a couple though, I didn’t go round snapping all day.

My Dad took me on a tour when I was a teen of Ypres (where my Grandfather was one of the few men in his battalion who returned - he watched countless friends lose their lives), the Caen War Memorial and beaches around Normandy. Obviously there weren't phones for taking photos back then but neither of us took a single one despite taking hundreds of every cat, building, beach and shop we came across.

Those kinds of locations should be treated respectfully and with dignity.

I think it depends on the type of photo, posing selfies no but there is no reason that a photo can’t be respectful and I don’t think sharing one is necessarily disrespectful either.

I recall being speechless at seeing one of the standard brown tourist information boards on the autobahn north of Hannover for Bergen-Belsen. We did go, it was very quiet and eerie, we talked a bit about what it represented to our children but it was difficult as living in Germany they only had positive experiences and were too young to judge it as past events.
At the Moehnesee dam you could buy postcards of the Dam Buster raids showing the burst dam.

The disrespect of monuments seems to widespread. We were in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania looking at the huge battlefield monuments erected by the states involved in that awful war. There was a party of what looked to be very well-to-do American students going round on coaches and at each monument they were climbing all over them. leaping around them, their teachers, supervisers or whoever not stopping them.

'Lest we forget' was around decades before social media, and somehow the memory of Auschwitz managed not to fade. Quite the opposite in fact

I went because I have family who died there. I only took one photo - of a rose someone had placed on the railway track.

To see Auschwitz tours advertised alongside trips to the salt mines in Krakow seemed so wrong.