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Travel blogger ripped for posting rubber duck outside Auschwitz
A travel blogger decided it was a good idea to post a photo of yellow rubber duck on the railroad tracks leading into Auschwitz.
The tasteless Instagram post by the Spanish-language account — named @Atuk.apil, which has the tagline “life should be yellow – contained a caption that suggested the user was well aware of where he was.
“It was the largest extermination centre in the history of Nazism, where it is estimated that about 1,300,000 people were sent, of which 1,100,000 died, the vast majority of them Jewish,” he wrote next to the smiling toy, with the “Gate of Death” looming in the background.
“Auschwitz II (Birkenau), extermination camp, where most of the more than one million victims of the camp died. In this section were women,” he added.
“Trains full of people arrived daily and were immediately separated between ‘fit and unfit’. The fit had a life expectancy of months, while the unfit were sent directly to the gas chambers.”
The bumbling blogger has amassed more than 1,000 followers by posing the toy outside famous landmarks, including Buckingham Palace and Mount Vesuvius, according to the UK’s Mirror.
But using the notorious concentration camp as a backdrop sparked outrage and was denounced as “distasteful” and “shameful,” prompting the Instagrammer to delete the post.
“What if someone who travels with a rubber duck & uses it as an artistic Instagram convention arrives at @AuschwitzMuseum?” the Auschwitz Museum said in a tweet.
“Is the rubber duck in front of the Gate of Death disrespectful – even unintentionally? Or is it a side effect of the visual world we should accept/ignore?”
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An account called Common Sense wrote: “@AuschwitzMuseum is not a fun tourist destination or cool looking building. It is a memorial site.
“It is a place to soberly reflect on the millions of human beings who suffered and died at the hands of others. He is treating it as just another photo opp. Callous and shameful,” it said.
The blogger, who is not fluent in English, said: “I do not think that you can not take photos in that place, or that you can not write books or songs, and in the end the post what it has is historical information, it does not make apologies or jokes or anything.
“I think that the point is in the context, that it is banalized instead because first, it is a duck and that unquestionably takes away seriousness, second the objective of the account is to present tourist sites and not give information about history or about things related to the Holocaust and certainly things that have to be in different places are mixed.
“But anyway, the context, because even if it was another fictional character, we are going to put a monkey who has an Instagram account to promote the historical memory of different events, I would not see that a photo is taken in Auschwitz and put exactly the same message. The problem is that the photo was taken in a place where it does not belong and is being denatured.”
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