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The British tourist who complained about prices at the Auschwitz cafe has pushed back at criticism after her TikTok review faced widespread backlash.
Lyn, 70, took issue with the cost and quality of drinks at the eatery near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum entrance in Poland, in a video viewed more than four million times.
Social media users said the comments were hugely inappropriate given the horrors that unfolded at the former Nazi extermination camp.
Lyn, who posted widely on topics from fundraising to the late Dolly Parton before the account was made private, defended her remarks in a later video, attempting to distinguish between the cafe and the museum itself.
“No-one died in the cafe. No-one died there. No-one was gassed there. I just had a drink there which is nowhere near the park… the camp entrance,” she said.
In another video she asked: “Is it right that Auschwitz … is making money from a death camp? It’s all a money making scheme. It is a memorial, not an attraction … People are saying I shouldn’t moan about the price of the food and drink but why are they selling it?”
Addressing the “shocking” response to her original clip, the pensioner told Kent Online she had not meant to offend anybody, insisting her “innocent video” had been misunderstood.
“I wasn’t disrespecting the Jews or Poland – I think Poland is a lovely country,” she said. “But if you pay for food or drinks anywhere, you expect what you pay for; just because it’s a concentration camp doesn’t make any difference.
“I visited Auschwitz to pay my respects and because it’s historical and I find historical things interesting.”
The content creator added that she had reported inappropriate comments about the Holocaust that had been left under her video.
The camp at Auschwitz was set up in occupied Poland during the Second World War, with more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, dying in gas chambers or from starvation, cold or disease.
“It is a site where you go to remember the victims, preserve their stories and educate people about one of the darkest moments in history,” one commenter wrote in response to the cafe review.
“This focus should be on respecting their memory, not turning the experience into a personal review.”
Chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust Karen Pollock told The Times: “My advice to anyone planning to visit is to spend time reading and listening to the testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors, such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and learning about the horrors inflicted on those sent to this infamous site
“It is through these personal stories that the true scale of the destruction becomes clear.”
A spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum said the cafe was operated by an external provider and that prices were clearly displayed.
“For us, the essential point remains that people come to the Auschwitz Memorial to learn about the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, to confront the fate of its victims and to commemorate them,” they told The Times.
