Documentary - Research, are we numb?

Because we are doing a project on whether or not our generation's is numb to the Holocaust where we're looking at the selfie culture we decided to do some research to see if there is enough material out there for us to be able to make the documentary and look up some stories of disrespectful acts that has been done.

I had was pretty sure when talking about the idea in the beginning that we would have enough material and that it was something we could tell a story about, but the amount we found after a quick search was shocking. After a quick search on "selfies in Auschwitz" we found the images below. The search took less than 5 seconds. The amount of selfies we found on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter taken at the Holocaust memorial with hashtags such as "searching for Jews", "Mind the gap" etc was more or less endless.

We also did a quick search on "disrespectful selfies" on twitter where we found selfies showing other people's car accident, selfies at different memorials, mocking homeless people etc. We also found articles where people had landed in trouble after taking selfie with dead people or where themselves had died as a result of not being careful when taking selfie at a dangerous place.

We also read up on articles on the selfie culture to get a better understanding of it as a whole. The statistics we found on the number of selfies being taken and uploaded were very interesting. According to an article called "I, narcissist - vanity, social media, and the human condition" more than 80 million photographs uploaded to Instagram every day, more than 3,5 billion "likes", and 1.4 billion people (20% of the world's population) publishing details of their lives on Facebook. The article also asks the question whether social media is turning people into publicity-hungry narcissists.

Another thing we looked at was disrespect towards the second world war, focusing on the Holocaust and the concentration camps. This time we weren't focusing so much on the selfies, but more on disrespectful acts. What we found was stories of people steeling the Auschwitz sign, shoes being stolen from another camp and of course the "Yolocaust" project.

The Auschwitz sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" was stolen in 2009. 5 men had gone to the camp and cut the sign into 3 pieces. After a long search the Polish police found the sign in the back garden outside one of the thieves' house.
Another case of stealing from Auschwitz happened in 2015 where 2 British Secondary School students decided to steal some artefacts from the camp as "souvenirs" during a school trip to the camp. They managed to take some pieces of a broken glass, spoons and buttons from clothes. The museum discovered this and the boys were arrested until they apologised and gave back the items.

In 2014 shoes were stolen from another death camp called "Majdanek". The culprit behind the stealing cut into the metal display case at the camp, displaying 56 000 shoes, and stole 6 pairs of adult shoes and 2 pairs of children's shoes. An article by BBC also showed a story about victim's ashes and cap being stolen.

The final story we found was the "Yolocaust" project, done by Shahak Shapira, which was the main motivation and inspiration for our whole documentary.

After looking at all these we were certain that there is a story to make and we were also happy to see that no matter where we looked we couldn't seem to find anyone that had covered this before us, which only made us more set on making this documentary.