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Holocaust
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Letter to CafePress.com
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Fred Durham
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
CafePress.com
950 Tower Lane, 6th Floor
Foster City, CA 94404
Dear Mr. Durham,
We are outraged by the t-shirts for sale on your site that read, “My grandparents went to Auschwitz… and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!” and similar products, including a t-shirt that compares the Superdome in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to Auschwitz.
It is incomprehensible to us why anyone would create a t-shirt that makes light of mass murder carried out at a Nazi death camp. Auschwitz was Europe’s largest concentration camp in World War II, a place where the Nazis not only perfected their death machine, but also carried out cruel and inhuman experiments on living prisoners. It is Europe’s largest Jewish graveyard, a place where nearly 1.5 million people died in the gas chambers or from starvation and disease.
The t-shirts accessible at www.cafepress.com/auschwitz, and others like them for sale on the CafePress site have resulted in many complaints to us from survivors, their family members and others who find it deeply offensive and insulting to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. The shirt is offensively emblazoned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Free), the infamous work slogan used by the Nazi tormentors at Auschwitz to taunt and dehumanize prisoners.
While we understand the genre of joke t-shirts, we also believe that retailers bear a responsibility to ensure that their products do not cross the line into causing offense, hurt or pain to others, or trivialize serious and important subjects like the Holocaust. The message on this shirt clearly crosses that line.
Your Shopkeeper Agreement states that CafePress will not host or retail designs that “make inappropriate use of Nazi symbols and glamorize the actions of Hitler” or “material that is generally offensive or in bad taste, as determined by CafePress.com.” That policy would seem to prohibit items such as the “Auschwitz Souvenir T-Shirt.”
We urge you to immediately discontinue sales of this shirt and to reconsider the sale of any merchandise that makes a joke of Nazis or the Holocaust in the future.
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Sincerely,
Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
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