An Israeli journalist discovered over the weekend that Amazon UK was selling shirts bearing an iconic Holocaust photo of a man kneeling over a mass grave in Ukraine as a Nazi points a gun at his head. The seller’s description for the shirts promised buyers “to stand out from the crowd.”
Israel’s Channel 12 News contacted Amazon UK, which quickly removed the listing, claiming that it was unaware the item was being sold.
The photograph, known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” was taken in the period between 1941 to 1943, when the Germans occupied the Ukraine region and carried out numerous mass massacres of Jews.
During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the photograph was published by United Press (UPI), which had acquired it from Al Moss, a Polish Holocaust survivor living in Chicago. Moss obtained the photo in May 1945 following his liberation from the Allach concentration camp. At the time, the Yiddish daily newspaper The Forward published the photograph over a full page.
The photograph, which became emblematic of the Holocaust, stood out from other Holocaust photographs for several reasons. It was taken during the Holocaust amidst the horrors of the mass massacres rather than after the Holocaust; it was taken by a perpetrator of the evil portrayed in it rather than bystanders or liberators, and it is a shocking view of one victim’s personal distress rather than a portrayal of multiple victims.
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2 Responses
To someone who believes in “Holocaust denial” the shirt is indeed despicable.
The article is (purposely?) misleading. The short was not being sold BY Amazon. Rather it was being sold ON Amazon – by a third-party seller. Amazon was indeed very likely to be unaware that it was being sold, since the third-party sellers create their own item descriptions and listings.
That does not mean that Amazon did not accept responsibility and shut down the listing. But they might not even have censured the seller and he might sell something else evil next week.