The Birkenau Rails of deathA 37-year-old man faces up to 10 years in prison.
An American tourist who was caught trying to steal part of the rail tracks from Auschwitz death camp in Poland, faces up to 10 years in prison according to Polish officials.
The 37-year-old man has been charged with the attempted theft of an item of cultural importance from the Holocaust memorial site.
He is said to have tried to take a metal part of the tracks where prisoners were unloaded during World War Two.
The man admitted to his crime and has been released as he awaits the next steps, a police spokeswoman in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim told the Associated Press.
The memorial museum’s security discovered the man was trying to remove the metal piece from the railways tracks and called police, museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki said.
More than 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz during the global conflict, including about a million Jewish people.
Respect their memory.
The tourist was charged just weeks after the Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves the site, told visitors to stop posing for photos on the railway tracks.
“When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed,” the memorial’s official Twitter account said, showing photos of tourists balancing on the railway beams.
“There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths”.
When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths. pic.twitter.com/TxJk9FgxWl
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019
The post was well received by other twitter users:
“This is a very necessary post, our picture taking habits are completely out of control,” one Twitter user named Fransesca said in response.
Another person, Moran Blythe, tweeted: “I don’t understand why people use Auschwitz as a photo op or how they take cheerful selfies at a site that saw the murder of thousands of innocent people.”
