Holocaust-Themed Skating Number Doesn't Go Over Well

Using the theme song from the 1997 Holocaust film Life Is Beautiful wasn't what raised eyebrows Saturday during an ice-skating performance for a Russian reality show. It was the overall Holocaust theme that produced what the Jerusalem Post calls a "largely cold reception" to Olympic champion Tatiana Navka and partner Andrey Burkovskiy's number on Ice Age, which included the duo decked out in WWII Jewish prisoner uniforms with bright-yellow Stars of David. Although most of the comments on the YouTube video showing the performance are in Cyrillic, Navka—who also happens to be the wife of Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin's spokesman—posted pics of the skating routine on Instagram, and enough of those reactions are readable.

"Disgusting ignorance!" reads one comment, with another poster proclaiming, "6 million are dead. Its not art its very sick." CBS News translates Navka's original Instagram statement, in which she asserts Life Is Beautiful is one of her favorite films and that she simply doesn't want today's younger generations to forget about the Holocaust. "Show this movie to your children," she writes, per the Independent. "Our children need to know and remember that terrible time, which I hope, God willing, they will never know [again]." The Post reports that Russian reality-TV stars have tapped into Holocaust themes before, including an April performance on that country's Dancing With the Stars, in which contenders portraying a Nazi officer and a young Jewish girl whirled around the dance floor to Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon." (A movement to save the textiles factory where Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews.)