Auschwitz museum protests camp photos on skirts and pillows

The items included miniskirts, pillows and tote bags with images of the camp and the railway tracks leading to Birkenau and its gas chambers.

By Associated Press

Museum authorities at the Auschwitz-Birkenau former Nazi German death camp in Poland have protested to an online vendor that was selling miniskirts, pillows and other items bearing photos of the camp, where around 1.1 million people were killed during World War II.

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

Spokesman Lukasz Lipinski told The Associated Press Wednesday that the museum felt obliged to protest.

Australian-based RedBubble, which allows artists to create designs for T-shirts and other fabric items and sell them directly to the public, responded that it was 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 leading prisoners to Birkenau and its gas chambers.

From 1940-45, around 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war and others, were killed in the gas chambers or died of starvation, hard labor and disease at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland.

Last week, around 10,000 Jewish youths from around the world were joined by Holocaust survivors and politicians in the annual March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau in memory of the six million Jews murdered during the war.