This is a guest post from student Shannon H (blogging as part of ANTH397: The Archaeology of Death). With her permission, I have copied the post from her own blog, which you can see here, but only if you are at UVic. As Shannon notes in her post, some of the images below are graphic and may make people feel uncomfortable. Please be aware of this when choosing to view this post.
News Article Review: Powerful images that show why Holocaust selfies are so disrespectful
Hartley-Parkinson, R. (2017, Jan 19). Powerful images that show why Holocaust selfies are so disrespectful. Metro News UK. Retrieved from http://metro.co.uk/2017/01/19/powerful-images-that-show-why-holocaust-selfies-are-so-disrespectful-6391091/
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In January 2017, Shahak Shapira, an Israeli satirist residing in Berlin, created a selfie-shaming website called “Yolocaust.de”. This website features 12 selfies saved from social media, each taken at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Each original photograph included a variation of a different disrespectful selfie, ranging from grinning smiles, to juggling, to doing yoga and even to jumping on the monuments, meant to represent mass tombs or gravestones. Shapira then photoshopped the people in the selfies into photographs from the Holocaust, featuring piles of corpses; blending them together to create a horrific final image in the scenes of the death camps. For Shapira, who lost half of his family in the Nazi genocide, he regularly saw people disrespecting the memorial by riding bikes, skating, and having picnics. He created this project to fight ignorance, bring awareness to the sensitivity to the site and the meaning of it, especially to the victims families.
‘The exact meaning and role of the Holocaust Memorial are controversial. To many, the grey stelae symbolize gravestones for the 6 Million Jews that were murdered and buried in mass graves, or the grey ash to which they were burned to in the death camps.’ Shapira also included an email address in case anyone featured in the photographs wanted the photo removed – ironically the email address is undouche.me@yolocaust.de. All 12 people have emailed to apologize and have the photos removed, and the project is now on hold. The blended images (as well as the originals) were both equally as shocking to me. 
***WARNING: Explicit content below.
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Selfies have invaded every part of our lives, from the moment we are born, to the moment we die; even after death they are used to memorialize individuals. They are a part of our evolving technological landscape, and one that I imagine will be around for some time. I believe there is a time and a place for selfies, and that it needs to be incorporated as a social norm. We can reduce the occurrence of this behavior by bringing awareness and educating ourselves, our children and the public, on the importance of these sensitive sites. Banning selfie sticks or selfies themselves is not going to change the behavior. Over 10,000 people a day are estimated to visit this monument, and millions more around the world visiting other sites of remembrance; something needs to change.
I would be interested in knowing more about the people behind these particular selfies – what nationalities are they? Before they took these photos, did they comprehend what this place is? Do they know what events took place to lead to the creation of this memorial? Did they understand the moral weight of their actions? Has their perspective changed since they were publicly shamed for their behavior? For me, the first photo of the boys jumping on the monuments are the worst – take a look at the caption again, “Jumping on dead Jews @ Holocaust Memorial”. That makes me sick to my stomach, knowing that kind of ignorance and hatred exists. Of course these are just a few of the many examples – look at the Holocaust Memorial on Instagram and people continue to take similar selfies today.
How the public interacts with memorial monuments and places of remembrance varies from culture to culture. Most cultures have social barriers which prevent us from behaving certain ways, mostly based on what is socially acceptable. Others are more liberal, with less boundaries. Considering how the living interact with the dead is an interesting topic, one that doesn’t come up very often for most people. I’m glad this news story reached so many people (over 2.5 million visited Shapira’s website), this is only the beginning of combating ignorance. I have visited this site myself in 2013, and though I did not take selfies (my moral compass knew better), here are some examples of photos I took while considering more respectful ways to photograph and interact with this haunting memorial site. Interacting with and memorializing the dead, from the perspective of the living, is a very interesting topic, one that has been explored briefly in Katherine Cook’s class presentation, in her article, “A Different Kind of Afterlife: The Cultural Biography of Headstones” (2011) and one I hope to explore further in this class.
