Opinion: Dancing at Auschwitz: It's a Me Me Me World

(July 19) -- Since when did the Holocaust get so zany?

For the past couple of years, I've been a bit stick-in-the-muddish with some of my good friends who all think they're the first ones to send me a video of a rabid Adolf Hitler comically ranting about one thing or another. The re-dubbed dialogue changes from parody to parody -- Hitler rants about Barack Obama, the iPhone, Paul the Octopus -- but the clip, a scene from a very serious 2004 German film about Hitler's last days called "Downfall," always remains the same. And with each e-mail comes the familiar subject line: "LOL! Hysterical!!! Hitler Loves Twitter!!!"

For a while, before giving up, I tried to explain to these various friends that no, I didn't see anything particularly hysterical about Adolf Hitler; nothing funny about the millions of Jews he murdered, including six of my family members; nothing funny in the millions of others who perished; and nothing funny in tens of thousands of e-mails racing across the Internet all with a subject line that, with all those LOL's and HYSTERICAL's, could only help turn history's worst mass murderer into a funny guy.

Well, now comes a viral video even more revolting, more preposterous and far more difficult to explain -- a most misguided travelogue from a most misguided family, one who thought it appropriate to film themselves goofily dancing their way through Auschwitz and Dachau, all to the tune of Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem "I Will Survive."

I'd say my murdered relatives were turning in their graves, but the truth is, they never got one, and therein lies the problem.

Since its liberation in 1945, Auschwitz has stood as one of the world's most towering and sobering monuments, an eerily quiet place where one goes to contemplate the evil that man is capable of. Walk along those infamous railroad tracks, tracks that emanate from inside the barbed wire fence, and it is nearly impossible not to be overcome with grief. As in other sacred places around the globe -- the "Killing Fields" memorial at Choeung Ek in Cambodia, for example -- people always speak in hushed tones here out of respect for the dead. And, needless to say, that's the way it should be.

Which makes the motives of 89-year-old Adolek Kohn all the more incomprehensible. For decades, we've come to expect nothing less than dignity from Holocaust survivors, but the sight of Kohn, wearing a garish T-shirt adorned with the words "Survivor," conga line dancing with his grandchildren in a place where more than a million people were murdered is just too much to bear, a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode come to life. At least half a million people have viewed the video now. (YouTube, not exactly known for its standards of decency, thankfully pulled the video, though most likely to protect Gaynor's copyright.)

But let's be real. This isn't about Grandpa. With more and more survivors dying each day, it's clear there's a new generation driving Holocaust remembrance, with different ideas about what is within bounds.

In a BBC interview, Kohn's daughter, Australian artist Jane Korman, explained her brainchild: "It was really important for me to create some sort of work that had a fresh interpretation of the Holocaust. Especially for the younger generation, because I could see that even the word 'Holocaust' and the images that one sees of the Holocaust were numbing, and, in fact, they weren't even interested."

Well, bad disco dancing is always a good way to spice up mass murder.

Imagine a flash dance convening on the American Cemetery in Normandy in a confused attempt to celebrate an anniversary of D-Day. Why not a synchronized swimming tribute to the men of Pearl Harbor in the waters above the USS Arizona? That could be cute. A few years back, an "American Idol" contestant was rightfully excoriated for a wet T-shirt photo shoot in the fountain of the World War II Memorial.

As with Kohn's grandchildren, could it be a younger generation just doesn't understand the obvious issues of decency and restraint when it comes to a place like Auschwitz? That's certainly the conclusion you'd reach if you were to read even a fraction of the comments posted about the dancing videos. They all pretty much say the same thing: Good for him! He survived! Let him dance!

But in their attempt to celebrate the survival of their patriarch, and their own subsequent existence, the Korman family stomps, quite literally, on the memory of millions of others who did not survive, and to whom a place like Auschwitz is the only grave they'll ever know.

"We came from the ashes, now we dance," Korman told The Associated Press. Good for you. Now go dance somewhere else.

Matt Mendelsohn spent several years photographing Holocaust survivors for his brother Daniel's best-selling memoir "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million."