This book was one of my best literary surprises of 2017.
Everyone knows the horror stories that came out of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The mass executions, forced labor, illness, starvation and almost any other torture that can be imagined probably has a home in a Nazi death camp. My own grandfather was in the United States Army and had pictures of liberated prisoners. From what I understand, his unit helped liberate the camps. When he died, my mom told me my grandmother didn’t know what to do with them. She didn’t want to keep them because they were so horrifying, but didn’t have the heart to just get rid of them either. I’ll have to ask my mom what happened with that. I don’t remember.
This story, however, was kind of new to me. As we’ve put World War II further and further behind us, some of the stories have started to fade, and aren’t as well known. I remember vaguely hearing once that the Nazis made things from the human skin of the people they murdered, but it never really stuck in my mind. Maybe I dismissed it as too horrible to be real, or whatever, but The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans dives right in to that particular rumor and turns it inside out.
The book was written by Mark Jacobson, a journalist, who ends up with a lampshade purchased by Skip Henderson for $35. Henderson bought the lampshade in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a sidewalk rummage sale in New Orleans. I can’t remember if he actually bought it from self-described neo-nazis, but the lampshade was advertised by the seller as made from victims of the Holocaust.
Henderson, who couldn’t figure out what to do with the lampshade and the idea of having a murdered somebody’s skin in his home made him restless and uneasy, sent the lampshade to Jacobson and basically said, “You’re the investigative journalist, investigate!”
And Jacobson sets out to investigate the lampshade. Genetic testing initially confirmed that the lampshade was made from human skin. Jacobson went on to visit Buchenwald, where such items were supposedly made, Holocaust museums in Jerusalem and Washington DC (which both refused the lampshade and maintained that items made of human skin were a myth), Holocaust deniers/neo-Nazis, a psychic, the mythology surrounding items supposedly made of human skin, the mythology surrounding the Holocaust, and the black market in which these kinds of taboo items are allegedly bought and sold.
I say allegedly, because in spite of the fact that human skin artifacts were widely reported by prisoners in the death camps, this lampshade is the first grisly artifact of this type to be discovered and subsequently investigated. Most Holocaust museums maintain that objects made of human skin were a legend, some kind of mass hallucination in the mind of desperate prisoners who, with good reason, saw even more exaggerated evil than was really there. Still though, most (contemporary) legends have some roots in historical truths.
I loved this book. First of all, I listened to it, and the narrator, Johnny Heller, really did a great job. I liked his voice, and he did a wonderful job balancing the seriousness of the subject matter with the dark humor Jacobson employs all through his investigations in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. It’s clear Jacobson doesn’t take neo-Nazis seriously, but he does try to get to the bottom of their insanity. And some of the stuff these people say is darkly hilarious except for the fact that they’re serious.
I don’t remember exactly what happened to the lampshade but IIRC, at the time of publication, Jacobson still had it and could sleep at night having done the best he could to get to the truth. Or something of that nature.
So The Lampshade comes highly recommended by me. It was a well researched report on a grisly topic that is significant in not just remembering the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the Third Reich, but that there is a continued ongoing effort made by good people to put things right in small ways after an unimaginable horror. For all the research about the Holocaust, this book happened because neither Skip Henderson nor Mark Jacobson could live with the idea that a lampshade allegedly made of a Holocaust victim’s skin was in their possession and they made no attempt to do justice by the victim – in this case, the only justice available being to discover the truth and tell the story.
words in scarlet ink 