In the age of social media, anyone with a camera phone is the star of their own photo shoot. But there are times and places where the selfie doesn’t fit. Like the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and other concentration camps that have been memorialised, for instance. The “tourist”, when she visits the memorial, must bear witness — to acknowledge both the resilience of those who survived the horror, and the depravity of those who did the killing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the internet was in an uproar this week when a visitor put up a video on social media showing a woman casually posing on the train tracks that brought Jewish people and others to the camp to be tortured and killed.
This incident is hardly an exception. In 2017, actor Priyanka Chopra deleted stylish selfies she had reportedly taken, next to mass graves, at the Berlin Holocaust memorial after a severe backlash. The fact remains that as technology changes and the memory of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and their consequences fades, people are more likely to place themselves at the centre of a frame drained and sanitised of memory.
The tone-deaf tourist at Holocaust sites is also an extreme symptom of the narcissism pandemic. It might seem, today, that if you travel all the way to Europe, visit a museum and don’t have a selfie to prove it, it doesn’t count. Or, more charitably, by interacting with them, people bring historical sites to life. Both arguments miss the point, however: Places of remembrance are not about the visitors’ desires. They are about saying that these are the horrors human beings are capable of perpetrating, and these are the people they were perpetrated on.
