Auschwitz Museum To Visitors: Stop Using Train Tracks For Instagram Photo Opps

The train tracks that lead to Auschwitz, now a memorial and museum Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer March 20, 2019

A new niche trend has arisen: pensive photos of teens balancing on the cattle car train tracks that lead into the Auschwitz memorial. Makes you nostalgic for the innocent days of concentration camp selfies and innocent games of Swastika beer pong, doesn’t it?

The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has posted a frustrating plea on social media for young visitors to stop using the rails on the train tracks at Auschwitz as a “balance beam.”

“When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed,” a representative for the museum wrote on the site’s official Twitter page on Wednesday morning. “Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths.”

When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths. pic.twitter.com/TxJk9FgxWl

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019

Accompanying the tweet is a series of pictures of young people tripping coltishly down the thin steel rails just beyond the infamous gates of the death camp.

This is not the first, second, or third time that keepers of a Holocaust memorial have put out a frustrated plea for visitors to use more restraint, especially as it pertains to social media. The trend of concentration camp selfies caused a stir earlier in the decade, concurrent with the even more mystifying trend of gay men taking sexual photos at camps and memorials and posting them to dating profiles.

It’s true that the train tracks are iconic and an exciting opportunity for on-the-go exercise. But hey — if Aly Raisman can do two back flips off an actual balance beam and land on her feet, maybe the rest of us can find a narrow object to balance on that didn’t usher innocent people to their deaths.

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO