Who has the right to dance at Auschwitz, to make light of the Holocaust, to shoot videos in 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 is an insult to those who perished; to others a defiant celebration of survival.

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 like 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 humour is meant to cheapen, then it's bad," said Raul Teitelbaum (79) who survived the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen. "But if the humour is simply a human reaction to tragedy, it's alright."

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 like Kohn's can reach millions of people worldwide.

By Wednesday, the clip had drawn more than 500,000 hits and numerous comments. On Thursday, YouTube replaced it with a message saying it had been removed due to copyright issues. The clip was also circulating on Facebook and Twitter.

The group is shown at Auschwitz, 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.

Cultural anthropologist Mark Auslander said that while dance might be considered trivial in western societies, throughout history it has been used to ease "human responses to traumatic loss - from initial overpowering grief, towards mourning, towards joy in the regeneration of life".