TheQuartering [4/19/2023]
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.