Rebecca Phillips:

This week, amid reading about the commemorative events surrounding the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and watching webcasts of the historic special commemorative session of the UN General Assembly,, I cannot stop thinking about those kids. Now that the eyes of the world again turn to the horrors that took place at Auschwitz, do they regret taking that photograph? Or do they still laugh about the fun they had at the concentration camp? The clowning kids might seem like they’d be an anomaly in a place so redolent of death, but their behaviour was not the only example of blatant disrespect I saw during my three-hour visit. A father and son similarly posed for a photograph, with the son pretending to be electrocuted on the barbed-wire fence. I am sure things like this happen every day. As the world saw last week with the controversy over Britain’s Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, this kind of insensitivity isn’t limited to

the grounds of Auschwitz, or to ordinary people in their unguarded moments. All these examples remind us of the inevitable distortions and sanitising brought by historical distance. Sixty years have passed, and a death camp has become a tourist attraction. A Nazi uniform, a costume. Barbed wire, a vacation snapshot.

I didn’t take any photographs at Auschwitz because I didn’t need to: horror, even seen 60 years after it ended, isn’t easily erased from memory. Speechlessness cannot be captured on film. Sheer incomprehension at the senselessness of what happened there does not translate digitally. — http://beliefnet.com