The Auschwitz museum has called a new trend, where users of video-sharing app TikTok role-play as victims of the Holocaust, “hurtful and abusive,” but added that it does not want to embarrass the young people involved.
The museum on the site of the former Nazi death camp responded to the vision of videos.
The short clips include young people telling how they died in the Holocaust, and sometimes showing them wearing fake bruises, a striped captive outfit or one of the bracelets marked with the Star of David Jews.
The trend of ‘victims’ on TikTok can be hurtful and misleading. Some videos are dangerously close to or already outside the bounds of trivialization of history.
But we must discuss this so as not to embarrass and attack young people whose motivation seems very different. It is an educational challenge. pic.twitter.com/CB4Ve2uRUK
– Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) August 26, 2020
“The trend of ‘victims’ on TikTok can be hurtful and misleading. “Some videos are dangerously close to being outside the bounds of trivialization of history,” the Auschwitz Memorial said on Twitter.
“Some were made not to think of one, but to be part of an online trend. It is very painful.
“But we need to discuss this, not to embarrass and attack young people whose motivation seems very diverse,” it added.
The Holocaust site has become a symbol of the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews, with about one million people killed in the camp between 1940 and 1945, including more than 100,000 non-Jews, according to the museum.
