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What’s Next, Auschwitz Ashtrays?

The crap on sale at the 9/11 Museum Store is unspeakably tawdry. According to the New York Post (for whom I was working on 9/11/2001): The museum at Ground Zero tells the dark story of the 9/11 terror attacks with spectacular artifacts and exhibits. It pays heart-wrenching tribute to the innocents and heroes killed that […]

The crap on sale at the 9/11 Museum Store is unspeakably tawdry. According to the New York Post (for whom I was working on 9/11/2001):

The museum at Ground Zero tells the dark story of the 9/11 terror attacks with spectacular artifacts and exhibits. It pays heart-wrenching tribute to the innocents and heroes killed that day.

It also has a gift shop.

The 9/11 museum’s cavernous boutique offers a vast array of souvenir goods. For example: FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police T-shirts ($22) and caps ($19.95); earrings molded from leaves and blossoms of downtown trees ($20 to $68); cop and firefighter charms by Pandora and other jewelers ($65); “United We Stand” blankets.

There are bracelets, bowls, buttons, mugs, mousepads, magnets, key chains, flags, pins, stuffed animals, toy firetrucks, cellphone cases, tote bags, books and DVDs.

Even FDNY vests for dogs come in all sizes.

Diane Horning, whose son died in the towers, is not pleased.

About 8,000 unidentified body parts are now stored out of sight in a “remains repository” at the museum’s underground home.

“Here is essentially our tomb of the unknown. To sell baubles I find quite shocking and repugnant,” said Horning, who also objects to the museum cafe.

Take a look at the entire museum store catalog. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to be able to buy some kind of remembrance of their visit, but jeez, there’s a lot of tasteless junk there.

You can’t find it on the Museum Store website, but I hope — I really, really hope — that the 9/11 Commemorative Cheese Plate a reporter photographed in the store is a case of mistaken identity. It cannot possibly be a 9/11 Cheese Plate. Nobody would make such a thing. Right? Right?

I cannot imagine why they have a gift shop anyway. This is a site of mass murder, and indeed is itself a mass grave. A mass grave! What’s next? Auschwitz ashtrays? What is wrong with these people? You don’t commercialize this. You just don’t. Well, maybe we Americans do. Sigh…

UPDATE: A reader points out that the Germans do too. Jeffrey Goldberg recently visited the gift shop at Dachau. Excerpt:

I admire the country’s willingness to memorialize its atrocious past and to make sites like Dachau accessible to tourists, especially when compared with Austria’s unwillingness to do the same. But I’m not sure I’ll ever warm up to the idea of concentration camp gift shops, particularly those that sell Woody Allen biographies. (The last time I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, the gift shop was selling key chains, so this isn’t just about Germany.) In the absence of dispositive answers but knowing a bit about how modern-day German culture objectifies Jews in odd and somewhat disconcerting ways, my best guess is that these biographies are meant to suggest to visitors, especially German ones, that Jews are, in fact, really quite excellent — for one thing, they’re funny! — and therefore the Nazis were idiots for trying to annihilate them.

Woody Allen biographies at Dachau? Souvenir keychains at Yad Vashem? People are crazy.

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