Some Idiot Made an Auschwitz Escape Room

(iStockPhoto/Ricardo_ha77)

It’s impossible to escape the trendiness of escape rooms right now. People love being locked into rooms and challenged to escape through outlandish or creative means, almost as much as TV writers love writing escape room episodes. Escape rooms are hugely popular and certainly sound like cool fun, but one thing that should never be associated with cool fun is the Holocaust, and yet some jackass thought it would be a good idea to make an Auschwitz escape room series that casts participants as prisoners at Auschwitz and charge them $15 to try to escape.

According to CNN,  the Escape from Auschwitz game’s website told customers to come “play an interesting escape game with your friends and put yourself in the shoes of the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp. ‘Last shower’ will await you. But there’s a difference: you can get out of this room alive.”

They literally made an “escape from the Auschwitz gas chamber” game, as though it were actually possible to escape from the gas chambers by solving a series of puzzles.

The Czech company behind the game said that they were trying to do it to “raise awareness of the Holocaust,” but that sounds ridiculous. How do you raise awareness of the Holocaust and honor its victims by pretending that it was possible to escape by doing something like forming a human pyramid and solving a light code in the ceiling?

At least 1.1 million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz. This is unconscionably gross.

The company was charging $15 per person to “Escape from Auschwitz,” and offered a special discounted rate for Friday, January 27, because that’s the International Holocaust Memorial Day.

The company has stopped selling tickets to its fucking Auschwitz escape room in the face of public outcry–which included the Auschwitz museum calling the game shocking, sad, and disrespectful–and they insist that they had not meant the escape room as a joke and that it had been created “with the utmost respect.”

Making the Auschwitz gas chambers a literal game and misrepresenting historical facts for fun, money, and entertainment is not respectful.

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