An American reality TV star says she has received death threats after offending Instagram users by posting her outfit choice for an upcoming visit to Auschwitz.
In an interview with TMZ, former Bachelor contestant Anna Redman said that she had received death threats on Instagram, including one user telling her “I hope they kill you when you’re there.”
Redman had posted a list of clothes that she was going to wear on a vacation to Poland. Included on the list was an outfit for her visit to the concentration camp, where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered during the Holocaust. The post included the caption “Test packing hack… Is somebody going to match my freak?”
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Other Instagram users accused Redman, who has 114,000 Instagram followers, of being “tone deaf”. One person wrote that the post “implies she’s going to be taking ‘aesthetic’ photos at a death camp where over 1 million people were murdered.” Redman later apologized and took down the post.
The issue of visitors taking selfies at Auschwitz has caused controversy in the past. Last year, the Auschwitz Museum warned visitors to respect the site after a photo taken by a British producer, Maria Murphy, of two smiling visitors went viral. Murphy described seeing the two smiling for a photograph at the camp as “one the most harrowing moments of my life.”
Other celebrities have been accused of trivializing the memory of the Holocaust when visiting historical sites. Justin Bieber in 2013 wrote in a guest book at the Anne Frank Museum that he hoped Frank, who died in a concentration camp, “would have been a belieber”, a term used to describe fans of the Canadian superstar.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2022 wrote in the Auschwitz guest book “I will be back”, thought by some to be a reference to his famous line in the Terminator movies. The museum, which had posted the guest book message on X, formerly Twitter, was quick to defend the former governor of California by stating, “The inscription was meant to be a promise to return for another and more in-depth visit.”
