Ice cream van sparks outrage after setting up outside Auschwitz

An ice cream van has been slammed as “tasteless” for setting up outside the Auschwitz memorial site where more than one million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site Foundation in Oświęcim, near Krakow, Poland, have called on local authorities to stop the ice cream from trading outside the former Nazi concentration camp because they have no authority over it.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was set up by Adolf Hitler’s SS shortly after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 as World War 2 broke out. It was the largest death camp set up by Hitler and Jewish people were transported there from countries across Nazi-occupied Europe.

An ice cream van displaying the logo “Ice Love” and a portable toilet was set up near the entrance to one of the camp’s entrances, known as the “Death Gate”.

“This is an example not only of aesthetic tastelessness, but also of disrespect for a nearby special historical site,”  Paweł Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum said. ”However, it is located outside the protection zone of the Monument to the Holocaust, so unfortunately we have no influence on it.

“We trust that the competent local government authorities will solve this embarrassing problem.”

Some 1.1 million men, women and children were systematically starved, tortured and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was not liberated until  January 1945, when soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates and freed those imprisoned inside.

The concentration camp has operated as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum since 1947 and was designated a Unesco World Heritage site in 1979.

“’Here we care about history and education, about the memorial…the residents are upset because it looks awful,” Dagmar Kopijasz, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site Foundation, said.

Supporters of the museum also criticised the decision of the ice cream van to set up outside.

Ian Bremmer said: “Maybe Auschwitz isn’t the best spot for an ice cream stand.”

Another fumed: “The last thing I’d want after visiting Auschwitz is to be marketed to with an ice cream.”

Last month a photo taken of an Auschwitz tourist posing for a “disrespectful” photo went viral, with the museum subsequently issuing a warning that visitors should “respect” the site.

Maria Murphy, producer at GB News, shared a photograph she’d taken of a tourist posing with a smile on her face on the tracks into Auschwitz.

“Today I had one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. Regrettably it didn’t seem everyone there found it quite so poignant”, Ms Murphy wrote in disgust, adding that as visitors they were asked “repeatedly to be mindful and respectful.”

“The first time I was there I had to step in and ask a group to stop taking smiling selfies in the gas chamber at Auschwitz”, another wrote. “Ran into a similar issue at Dachau as well.”

The tweet received over 57K likes and was viewed 30.9M times, prompting a response from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. They issued a firm reminder to visitors to “respect” the “memory” of the victims.

“Pictures can hold immense emotional & documentation value for visitors. Images can help us remember”, the tweet read. “Visitors should bear in mind that they enter the authentic site of the former camp where over 1 million people were murdered. Respect their memory.”