A SHOCKED tourist whose picture of a mystery woman posing for a selfie while visiting Auschwitz says she was “stunned” by what she saw.
Maria Murphy’s photo of a lady posing on the rail track leading into the death camp has gone viral on Twitter and has been shared and viewed around the world 30 million times
Maria, a producer for GB News, told Mark Dolan it was just one of a number of people she saw posing for inappropriate pictures.
She told GB News: “I went on a tour around the camp like thousands of people do every year to see the horrors and try to understand the truth of what happened in that place.
I was visiting the camp with a very good friend who is descended from victims and survivors of Auschwitz, and other Holocaust atrocities.
“During a short break between Auschwitz and Birkenau, the two sides of the camp, having just come out of the arguably the worst part, the gas chambers, I saw not just one lady but multiple people going to real efforts to get the most flattering pose in front of this horrible place. I was utterly bewildered. I just didn’t know what to do and after thinking about it for a few hours and after I’d left Auschwitz, I shared the picture because this needs to stop.
I thought it showed a staggering lack of consideration for what the people around them may be experiencing. My friend effectively saw the site of her family’s murder being used as a photo opportunity.”
Commenting on the way the picture has been received she continued: “Obviously I didn’t expect tens of millions of people to see it. But I am not surprised at how many people have been appalled by it. But what stunned me the most was that there were just thousands and thousands of replies from people saying, ‘This also happened when I went to Auschwitz, this happened when I went to Buchenwald, this happened when I went to Dachau, or it happened when I went to the 9/11 Museum’.
“It seems to be an endemic problem at every site of an international tragedy these days – people caring more about how they look on social media than actually taking in what happened in these places and learning from it.
“It’s sad that we live in an age where people seemingly get their value from doing things like this.”
