Auschwitz: Don’t Play Pokémon GO Here

Auschwitz: Don’t Play Pokémon GO Here

This has to be said? The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has pleaded with people to stop playing Pokémon GO while visiting the solemn holocaust site. Auschwitz and several other museums, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., have had to begin banning the game on-site after users were collecting virtual animated creatures on their phones while visiting the memorials. “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.”