WARSAW, Poland — Who has the right to dance at Auschwitz, to make light of the Holocaust, to shoot videos set amid cattle cars and gas chambers?
A home video that has gone viral on the Internet showing a Holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz and other Holocaust sites to the disco classic “I Will Survive” with his daughter and grandchildren has brought such questions to the fore.
To some, images of Adolek Kohn and his family shuffling off-beat at such hallowed places are an insult to those who died; others see a defiant celebration of survival. The incongruous juxtapositions have struck many viewers as funny and chilling at the same time.
Whether the comedic effects were intentional or not, they bring a new dimension to questions about how far taboos can be tested in an age when comedians such as Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen find rich fodder for their jokes in the Holocaust.
The fact that the video only gained massive attention when neo-Nazi groups spread it online further complicates the question.
“If the humor is meant to cheapen, then it’s bad,” said Raul Teitelbaum, 79, who survived the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen. “But if the humor is simply a human reaction to tragedy, it’s all right.”
Redefined in new media
Making light of Nazi cruelty goes back at least as far as Charlie Chaplin’s biting 1940 parody of Adolf Hitler and anti-Semitism in “The Great Dictator.”
But it takes on new implications in the age of Facebook and YouTube, when amateur videos such as Kohn’s can quickly reach millions of people worldwide — and when it can be hard to distinguish between sincere acts of remembrance and publicity stunts.
One thing is clear even 65 years after World War II: A playful approach to Holocaust memory is always bound to offend someone, and it is really only acceptable coming from survivors or other Jews intending no offense.
In Israel, Holocaust jokes have long been a staple of the country’s black humor — and the Auschwitz dance video has made little impression there possibly because it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But the video has been big news in Germany, which is still grappling with the nation’s guilt.
Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at Berlin’s Freie University, said joking about the Holocaust is a way for Jews to work through their past, which makes it acceptable for Israelis and other Jews to do so.
“What Israelis or Jews do is something different from what Germans, or others who supported them, do,” Wippermann said. “For Israel, there is also the perspective that they were once victims, but they no longer want to be. Which means they are drawing the lessons from history: ‘We won’t let that happen to us again.’ “
Breaking down the video
That seems to be the spirit of Kohn’s video, which was made by his daughter Jane Korman, an artist based in Melbourne, Australia.
Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Survivor,” the 89-year-old dances at places that might have been his grave, surrounded by offspring who would have never existed if Hitler’s Final Solution had been carried out completely.
The group is shown at Ausch witz, Dachau and Poland’s Lodz ghetto. In one shot, Kohn looks out from a small window in one of the cattle cars that transported so many Jews to their deaths. In another, he raises his arms and leads the troupe in a conga line to the pulsating disco beat of the Gloria Gaynor classic.
