Teen Takes Heat for Ill-Conceived Selfie at Concentration Camp

[DreamGypsy]

11. Like it or not, people, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a tourist attraction...

...where people probably think they can act like tourists if they so choose. From the website, Already One Million Visitors (emphasis mine):

A million people have visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum between January and the early days of September 2011. A record number of 1,400,000 people visited the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz during the whole of 2010. There are many indications that the record will be broken this year. The Auschwitz Memorial has the highest visitor numbers of any Museum in Poland.

Visitors are shown the grounds and buildings of the former camp by 270 guides who receive special informational and linguistic training. “We ensure professional service to each and every person who comes here,” said Andrzej Kacorzyk, head of the Visitor Service Section. “We try to reach the visitors in their native languages. Therefore we have a rise in the numbers of guides who speak even the less common languages. At present we offer a choice of twenty languages.”

The steady rise in interest and increase in the number of people who want to learn about the history of the camp is an exceptionally positive development. “The greatest numbers of people visit the Museum during the vacation months. In August there were almost 200,000. They were mainly individual visitors, families, or smaller organized groups. School and youth groups predominate in the other months,” said Kacorzyk.

Just a few years ago, the site of the camp had about half a million visitors per year, a figure that has now nearly tripled. For this reason, the Museum is engaged in an intense effort to create a modern visitor service center. It will be built on a site of more than three hectares adjacent to the Memorial, providing the infrastructure and parking essential to meet the needs of the ever increasing numbers of people who come to the Auschwitz Museum each year.

At the book shop, along various books of various kinds, you can buy postcards, posters, and informative CDs and DVDs.



Here's an article about selfies at the 911 memorial. There's a tumblr called Selfies at Serious Places that pretty much glorifies the behavior.

Is all of this tacky? Yeah. But it's apparently part of the internet culture.