Surprise, we’re going to Auschwitz! What happens when an influencer stumbles upon a Holocaust memorial

The train tracks into Auschwitz. Courtesy of Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

By Mira Fox December 11, 2025

Online lifestyle influencers generally produce relatively interchangeable videos in predictable genres: unboxing clothes, makeup tutorials, relationship content. That’s what Radhica Isac thought she was sharing when she posted a video presenting her boyfriend with a surprise for his 30th birthday. Except that viewers were horrified by the gift.

In the video, which got 7.4 million views on TikTok, Isac gives her boyfriend, Matty Taylor, a fancy birthday cake — the gift is hidden inside. Taylor lifts off a piece of the icing to reveal a slip of paper, which he holds up for the camera, grinning. “We’re going to Auschwitz!” it says.

There’s obviously a lot to feel weird about here. A trip to a concentration camp hidden inside a cake as a romantic surprise is certainly an unusual framing of the violent history of the Holocaust. And Taylor is wearing a Hugo Boss sweater — a German company that was run by an active member of the Nazi party and famously produced SS uniforms using forced labor from the camps — which feels incredibly on the nose.

“I clearly thought it’s a sweet thoughtful video,” Isac, 25, told me over a video call. “I was very much clueless because I myself am not a history fan. And I don’t know much about history, so for me it was pretty much just a thoughtful present for my boyfriend that really wanted to go there. I was completely oblivious.”

When she looked through the comments on her post, where shocked viewers sharply criticized every detail, she ended up seeing photos of the camps, the brutality of which she said shocked both her and her boyfriend. Previously, the only thing she knew about Auschwitz was that “a lot of people have died in the past in there.”

That simple fact does not make Auschwitz so different from the other sites her boyfriend, a history buff with family she said fought for the U.K. in World War II, wants to visit; people died in the Battle of the Bulge, Normandy and in Pompeii too. (That last destination she described as “not very similar but similar in a way” to Auschwitz.) She said she didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.

“Obviously, when I started reading the comments, I started seeing their point of view,” she said. But she also defended the video: “My excitement had nothing to do with the place itself, and the celebration wasn’t about Auschwitz.”

This is an understandable take. It is a nice thing to plan a dream trip for your romantic partner. And there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to go to Auschwitz. Lots of Jews and non-Jews alike pilgrimage to the camp to better understand the history of the atrocities, to feel close to lost family members and to take part in reinforcing the mantra of “never again.” It’s generally considered an important part of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.

It’s just that usually, these trips are a somber occasion, not paired with clapping and a festive sparkler like the one stuck in the birthday cake.

Isac is far from the first to see Auschwitz as a travel destination — people have been taking selfies and doing photo shoots on the train tracks into the camp and at Holocaust memorials for years. It’s something plenty of people find tawdry and upsetting, but others think is fine — after all, they’re going to the camps, presumably learning, and sharing some sort of information. Even amidst the criticism, plenty of commenters who did know about the Holocaust told Isac her gift was a good one, and approved of the video.

But there’s an effect to turning the Holocaust into a bit of social media fodder, regardless of the sincerity of the intention: It normalizes and commodifies the camps and, by extension, the history they commemorate, turning them into just another backdrop, another way to brag or show off a piece of aspirational life. It flattens the uniqueness of the history — the mechanical targeted slaughter becomes one of many historical destinations.

There’s no dearth of Holocaust education; it is part of nearly every curriculum in the U.S. (Isac said she thinks it was also part of her lessons in Moldova, had she been paying attention, but she said she was a bad student. “I was busy hanging out with friends and stuff and talking in lessons,” she told me.) There’s a cottage industry of novels, movies and TV shows, aimed at all ages, delving into the history.

This knowledge is, according to many educators and experts, one of the main ways to fight antisemitism, fascism and hate. When politicians and public figures — Kanye West, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk — are accused of antisemitism, one of the first orders of business as part of their apology tour is to visit a Holocaust museum or take a trip to a concentration camp to publicly repent and better understand the impact of their words. But something isn’t clicking.

Musk and Greene both made visits to Auschwitz and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial respectively. (West turned down an invite.) Nevertheless, Greene voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act because, she said, she wants to be able to continue to say that Jews killed Jesus. And Musk has continued to share antisemitic conspiracy theories on X since his visit to Auschwitz. In retrospect, the visits appear to have been more of an efficient way to launder their reputations than a true act of contrition.

That is, one has to imagine, how we arrive at a moment in which Isac — who told me she wants to be a beauty and fashion influencer — came to assume her video about Auschwitz would land just as well as all her usual videos, with compliments and sweet notes. “Let me know what you think of this surprise idea!” she says cheerfully at the end of the birthday video.

Speaking to the influencer, it seems clear that her video wasn’t malicious. The trip will be educational, and she said she is glad that she has already learned a lot through the comments on her video.

Still, the aesthetics framing Auschwitz as a destination, just one aspirational piece of advertising amidst a stream of posts about the best skincare serum or lip gloss, effectively turns the site of a singular atrocity into an interchangeable bit of aspirational #couplegoals lifestyle content. And when history starts to feel replaceable, that’s when it begins to be forgettable too.

This isn’t Isac’s fault; she’s just part of a trend that’s already underway. After all, a good number of people approved of her gift, and didn’t see anything wrong with the aesthetics of the video. For her part, the influencer said she won’t delete the video — though she also said she wouldn’t have presented the gift the same way if she had known more. But, she said, “what’s done is done” — and, she still thinks the video is sweet.

“I am proud that he does want to remember these things and he wants to know more,” she said. “Not everybody wants expensive things like trips to Bali and the Maldives. Someone might enjoy a historic place to visit.”