Auschwitz-Patterned Skirts Removed From Online Store After Complaints
‘Work Sets You Free’: The gates of the Auschwitz death camp today. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Auschwitz photo printed on skirt Image by twitter
An e-commerce site was forced to stop selling miniskirts, tote bags and other merchandise printed with photos of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Associated Press reported.
Australian online shop Redbubble carried items with black-and-white images of the Nazi death camp, its gas chambers and the railway tracks leading into it. A skirt in the collection went for $40 and a pillow for $45, according to The Washington Post. There was also a tote bag featuring a German-language warning sign at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews and minorities were sent to their death during the Holocaust.
The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in Poland recently condemned the site and its products. Employees were “shocked and outraged” for the lack of respect for Holocaust victims, museum spokesman Bartosz Bartyzel said Wednesday.
The museum reached out to Redbubble’s customer service department on Twitter.
.@redbubble Do you really think that selling such products as pillows, mini skirts or tote bags with the images of Auschwitz – a place of enormous human tragedy where over 1,1 million people were murdered – is acceptable? This is rather disturbing and disrespectful. pic.twitter.com/cdPvZGMXC6
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 7, 2019
“Do you really think that selling such products as pillows, miniskirts or tote bags with the images of Auschwitz — a place of enormous human tragedy where over 1.1 million people were murdered — is acceptable?” read the tweet. “This is rather disturbing and disrespectful.”
The company, in which artists can create a design and sell to consumers directly, admitted in a response tweet that “the nature of this content is not acceptable” and that it was taking “immediate action to remove these and similar works available on these product types.”
In a separate statement, it said: “Redbubble takes a strong stance against racism and violence, including the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps.”
Alyssa Fisher is a writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
