I saw groups of highschool kids laughing and joking around at Dachau and lots of amateur insta models doing their little photoshoots. On a tour of Auschwitz, we got to the oven room and some older dudes immediately started snapping pictures of the ovens and were told to stop. Cameras on phones and constant access to social media have broken people’s brains
TBF I saw the same sort of thing at Terezin twenty five years ago. There was a big group of Czech high schoolers there on a field trip, laughing and joking and being teenagers and paying no attention to the exhibits at all. A lot of brains were broken even before social media.
Because it’s a pretty solemn place… the guide was explaining how men, women, kids were burned - some alive - in these ovens because the Nazis didn’t want to waste bullets or spend extra time on corpse disposal, and these middle aged dudes bust out their phones while the guy is talking and start taking pictures of the inside of the ovens with flash.
Maybe you have to have been there. The atmosphere at Auschwitz is incredibly heavy given all the terrible things that happened there. Everyone seemed pretty appalled at these guys’ behavior. I was just a teenager, but I was pretty shocked.
Damn. I thought the ovens were to burn corpses only. Shit. That changes everything. And yes, I would treat such place with utmost respect.