Auschwitz museum protests camp photos on skirts and pillows

Museum authorities at the Auschwitz-Birkenau former Nazi German death camp in Poland are protesting an online vendor selling miniskirts, pillows and other items bearing photos of the camp, where around 1.1 million people were killed during the Holocaust.

On Twitter, the museum addressed the vending site, redbubble, to say that offering such products with images of Auschwitz is “rather disturbing and disrespectful.”

.@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

Australian-based redbubble, which allows artists to create designs for T-shirts and other fabric items and sell them directly to the public, says it is taking “immediate action to remove” the items, which it said are not in line with its guidelines.

Items offered by various makers included miniskirts, pillows and tote bags with bleak black-and-white post-war images of the camp and the railway tracks on which trains brought people to Birkenau and its gas chambers.

— with AP