How Your Selfies At Concentration Camps Effect The Future
My great, grandfather dug his own grave. It was during WWII under Nazi pointed guns and his daughter, my grandmother, watching. They were in a concentration camp, the same one I see people shamelessly post smiling selfies on social media. My grandmother and the other women weren’t smiling that day and neither were any of the men who knowingly dug their own massive grave.
The Nazis lined everyone up and shot. My great, grandfather died a hero’s death. He reacted quickly, shoved my grandmother into the grave as he stepped in front of her shielding her from the bullets. His body fell on top of hers keeping her hidden from view. A heavy rain that night loosened the soil enough for my grandmother to claw her way above ground.
She did the impossible. She survived and escaped that night but she was in occupied Poland where there was no escape. After a few days’ freedom and miles of drudging through snow she was captured and taken to a camp. I don’t know if it was the same camp that she escaped or one of the many others. My grandmother never spoke of her experience at least not to me. I know the story because my father and his brother told it to me a few times when my grandmother wasn’t in the room. She was a strong woman and didn’t pass until eighty-seven. Her will to survive and my great, grandfather’s heroism is the reason my family exists today.
In 2005 I went on a Contiki tour of Europe and ended up at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial in Austria. I don’t think it was one of the camps my grandmother was taken to and I never had the courage to ask my grandfather. This camp and others like it remain as a memorial and a reminder of the ugly, dark side of human nature. It saddens me rather than angers me that there are people out there who take smiling selfies in a place such as this.
Every little hair on my arm stiffened the moment I walked off the tour bus and up to the camp. A feeling of a thick, heavy energy loomed over the area. Perhaps it’s a feeling of death. People who can’t feel this dark energy I fear are people who will likely let something as evil as this happen again in the future.
Stop taking selfies at concentration camps and show respect for the dead. Show respect for those who survived these death camps. Help pass along the ugliness of what these places were and the scary things people are capable of doing. A photo of someone standing and smiling at a concentration camp can alter the perspective of the person viewing the photo. Don’t create doubt in what had occurred during WWII.
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