Selfies

There isn’t a place that I haven’t visited where the experience hasn’t been been at least slightly marred by some idiot taking a selfie. In days gone by I used to take groups around Auschwitz/Birkenau; the day I realised that it might be time to slow up was the day that I watched a man make a mobile phone call from inside the last remaining intact gas chamber. Today, for some people, no view, sight or experience is complete unless they can take a photo of themselves posed in front of it and if doing so gets in the way of others then that’s just tough luck.

A small sign of a fightback can be seen at the YOLOCAUST web site. Israeli/Berliner satirist and author Shahak Shapira has created the site to draw attention to those who choose to treat the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as being merely a diverting backdrop to the wonders of their own faces. The point is eloquently made (perhaps more effectively than I’m doing here) and the site is worth a visit. Depressingly, the number of Selfies may be reduced through a sort of Darwinian process of natural selection – Just sometimes I feel that we may not deserve our own existence on the planet!