In a recent Tiktok trend, teens are posting disturbing videos of themselves dressed and roleplaying as German Nazi concentration camp victims in heaven, and it’s as horrifying and appalling as it sounds.
In these videos that have been circulating the internet as ‘victim’ trends and have gone viral (and too far), young people seem to dress as Holocaust victims with make-up resembling bruises of real-life victims.
Some others are seen wearing a yellow Star of David, and striped shirts which are meant to mimic the uniforms Jewish people were forced to wear by the Nazis while at WWII concentration camps.
Since then, the public has been vocal about how the trend is extremely insensitive and can be seen as acts of antisemitism, hurting, and triggering for the families of the victims.
A user on Twitter, sharing some of the disturbing created videos in a Twitter thread, said “I’m sad that this has become something people think is okay to practice their makeup and acting abilities with. this is the suffering of millions.”
Some creators have since come forward to state that the intention behind their videos has in fact been to raise awareness and educate others of the terrible events of the Holocaust, but ill-informed creators who post a video just to jump on the bandwagon of what seems to be ‘trendy’ and in favor of the algorithm, are in the end disrespectful to the millions of the Jewish people who fell victim to the painful and tragic events of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz Memorial – the museum at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp – has put out a statement on their twitter, saying how the trend can be ‘hurtful’ and ‘offensive’.
“Some of the examples online are dangerously close or are already beyond the border of trivialization of history and being disrespectful to the victims. Some were not created to commemorate anyone, but to become part of an online trend,” the statement reads.
The statement continues to say while the actions and videos are painful, the intentions of those who posted them may have been to ‘find some way of expressing personal memory.’
The museum suggests that rather than shaming and attacking the young people who have participated in the trend, we should see this as an ‘educational challenge’ to present the facts and teach the young how to commemorate in a meaningful way.
