A Jewish Holocaust survivor who danced with his family at the entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp and other Nazi death camp memorials has attracted a growing following on the Internet with a film of their performance.
Adolek Kohn, 89, a former Auschwitz prisoner who is now an Australian citizen, said the video, which shows him, his daughter Jane and her three children bopping to Gloria Gaynor’s hit song I Will Survive, is meant as an affirmation of life and stands as a celebration of his own survival.
However, the so-called Auschwitz Dance film, which has clocked up around 500,000 hits on YouTube, has attracted a whole gamut of responses from viewers, ranging from disgust to admiration.
One viewer called it offensive and “disrespectful to all those who perished,” while another said it was a “life-affirming middle finger to the Nazis.” Another said it had moved him to tears of joy.
The family is shown doing a line dance at the gates of Auschwitz in Poland in front of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign, in Terezin in the Czech Republic, Dachau in Germany, and various synagogues, wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Survivor.”
In some scenes, they are wearing Jewish stars of David sewn into their clothing, the symbol Jews were forced to wear during the Third Reich.
At the end of the video, Kohn is heard saying: “If someone would tell me here, then, that I would come, 60-something-three years later, with my grandchildren, I’d say ‘What you talking about?’ So here you are. This is really a historical moment.”
His daughter, an artist, said she suggested the project to her father, adding it was created in defiance of the adage that there could be “no art after Auschwitz.”
“It was important to create something that gave a fresh interpretation of the Holocaust because for the younger generation the word and images you see of the Holocaust are numbing,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to ask my father, but I had to do it.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS