“Estonian newspaper publishes mock ad for weight-loss pills depicting emaciated prisoners”

A mock ad?  Mock or not, how is this acceptable on any level? Where is the “funny” in disrespecting, belittling, caricaturizing a moment in history where real people were horrifically persecuted and killed under a genocidal regime? These examples of poor marketing choices and “humor” are heartbreaking and disappointing.

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Taken from: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/estonian-newspaper-publishes-mock-ad-weight-loss-pills-depicting-emaciated-prisoners-nazi-concentration-camp-article-1.1155703

September 9, 2012

The ad reads ‘One, Two, Three… Dr Mengele slimming pills work wonders for you!  There were no thickset people in Buchenwald!” according to RT.com, a Russian 24/7 English-language website.

Jewish organizations have denounced an Estonian newspaper for publishing a mock ad for weight-loss pills depicting emaciated prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem on Sunday called the mock ad in the Eesti Ekspress weekly a “perverted attempt at humor at the expense of the Nazis’ millions of victims.”

Alla Jakobson, spokeswoman for Estonia’s Jewish community, said in newspaper Postimees that the incident shows Estonian society is experiencing “major problems with moral and ethical values.”Sulev Vedler, deputy editor of Eesti Ekspress, says the mock ad, which ran in the paper’s humor section, was poking fun at an Estonian gas company that recently used an image of Auschwitz to promote its services.
Vedler says the ad “was not targeted against Jewish people.”***

“Aushwitz Photo Removed from Dubal Gym Ad”

Taken from: http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/01/08/3091074/aushwitz-photo-removed-from-dubai-gym-ad

January 8, 2012

A photo of a Nazi concentration camp was removed from an advertising campaign for a Dubai gym.

The photo of the railroad leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the campaign for The Circuit Factory gym in Dubai was removed last week from the gym’s Facebook page following complaints on Facebook and Twitter, according to reports.

Printed underneath the photo of the railroad was the phrase “Kiss your calories goodbye.”

Phil Parkinson, the gym’s owner, apologized for using the photo.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, welcomed the apology, calling it “appropriate and welcome.” ”However,” he said, “we are increasingly troubled by both the ignorance and mind-set of a generation that appears to be so distant from a basic understanding of the Holocaust that it seems acceptable to use this horrific tragedy as a gimmick to bring attention to promoting losing weight. The lessons of the Holocaust are profound and timeless.”

Meanwhile, the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial said Jan. 6 that it had a record of more than 1.4 million visitors in 2011. Most of the visitors reportedly were from Poland.

“Auschwitz survivor dies on 67th anniversary of camp’s liberation”

Taken from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/auschwitz-survivor-dies-in-same-town-on-67th-anniversary-of-camps-liberaton/2012/01/27/gIQAtr1LVQ_story.html

January 27, 2012

Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of the memorial site, died Friday on the 67th anniversary of its liberation.

Smolen died in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Friday is the anniversary of the camp’s 1945 liberation by Soviet troops. Jan. 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005, and was marked with ceremonies across Europe.

Two years after the war ended, Auschwitz-Birkenau became a museum — and Smolen himself served as its director from 1955-1990. He continued to live in the town after his retirement, often attending the memorial ceremonies marking the camp’s liberation.

Sawicki said soon after Smolen’s death the news was announced to Holocaust survivors who had gathered at the vast site of dilapidated barracks still enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. They fell silent for a minute in his honor.

Smolen was born on April 19, 1920, in the southern Polish town of Chorzow Stary. He was a Pole involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was arrested by the Germans in April 1941 and taken to Auschwitz in one of the early mass shipments of prisoners there. He left the camp on the last transport of prisoners evacuated by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945, nine days before its liberation. He later attributed his survival to good health and extreme luck.

He once explained his decision to return to the camp to manage it as a way of honoring those who were killed there. “Sometimes when I think about it, I feel it may be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of obligation I have for having survived,” he said.

In other gestures of remembrance, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg apologized for his nation’s role in arresting and deporting Jews after it was invaded by Nazi Germany. During the war, 772 Norwegian Jews and Jewish refugees were deported to Germany. Only 34 survived. He said it’s time the nation acknowledges that politicians and other Norwegians took part and expressed “our deep regrets that this could have happened on Norwegian soil.” He spoke at a ceremony in Oslo attended by the last surviving Jew in a group of 532 deported from Norway in 1942.

In Turkey, state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary “Shoah,” about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country. “It is a historical event,” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in Paris. “It is extremely important that it is being shown in a Muslim country.”

Germany’s Parliament also gathered Friday for a special sitting to remember the Holocaust. Prominent survivor and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki recalled how the Nazi SS informed members of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish council in July 1942 of plans for the inhabitants’ ”resettlement” to the east. Reich-Ranicki, 91, recounted how a “deathly silence” was followed by uproar. He said those present “seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence.”

The Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into inhuman conditions. Most who survived disease and starvation in the ghetto were transported to death camps.