INTERNATIONAL: American enterprise World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) released their Wrestlemania 39 promo earlier this month for a popular match that took place this past Saturday, 8 April, between father-son act Rey and Dominik Mysterio.

WWE’s programming consists of scripted stories that the fighters/actors play out publicly and in the ring. In his storyline, Dominik was placed in handcuffs by police for shoving his father on Christmas. The incident was then posted on social media and geared up anticipation for the match.

The promo features Dominik saying, “You think this is a game to me? I served hard time.” Then, an Auschwitz guard tower appears, followed by Dominik adding, “And I survived.” Despite the apparently intentional reference to ‘survivors’, WWE claims it had no idea the image was of the Nazi concentration camp and replaced the image with more generic barbed wiring for future airings.

On 5 April, the Auschwitz Memorial released a statement on Twitter writing, “The fact that Auschwitz image was used to promote a WWE match is hard to call ‘an editing mistake.’ Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz.”

The Auschwitz Memorial page posts daily tributes to individuals on their birthdays or deportation days to highlight the human tragedy of the Holocaust. Just three days later, on 8 April, they posted a birthday tribute to Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, a Polish boxer who survived Auschwitz. He was kept alive, they wrote, “because for SS men, prisoner fights were an entertainment.”