This has to be said? The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has pleaded with people to stop playing Pokémon GO while visiting the Holocaust site, reports Asawin Suebsaeng for The Daily Beast.
Auschwitz has had to ban the game on-site after users were collecting virtual animated creatures on their phones while visiting various memorials across the world.
“So far we have not experienced problems with the players on the site of the Auschwitz Memorial,” Pawel Sawicki, memorial spokesman, emailed The Daily Beast. “We think that allowing such games to be active on the site of Auschwitz Memorial is disrespectful to the memory of the victims of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp on many levels and is absolutely inappropriate. It should not be active at our Memorial but also at other memorials and Holocaust museums. The authentic grounds of the former camp is a place of commemoration of all the people who suffered, were dehumanized and murdered here—Jews, Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and others… We have already written to the producers and asked them to exclude the site of Auschwitz Memorial and other similar sites from the game.”
{Matzav.com}
I dont chap this whole pokemon mishegas.
It is nice that they banned the game. However, I was at Auschwitz 1 a few months ago, and I was shocked to see foreign tourists and Poles walking around–laughing, and taking selfies. Gentile children were even running in and out of all the various tour groups. While it is a beis hakevoros for us, it is merely a tourist attraction for the rest of the world. They even sold new Auschwitz themed comic books in the “gift shop.”
Anyone who has also been there when there were non-Jewish groups has seen the disrespect which is already shown to the place of our greatest suffering.