Stamp Collector's Holocaust Memorial
When
Ku Klux Klan violence spiked across the South in the
1970s, and a hitherto unknown group in California began
publicly denying that the Holocaust had ever occurred,
Ken Lawrence decided to fight back — using his skills as
stamp collector.
Painstakingly, over 30 years, he
researched and assembled a depth of horrors of what he
termed “the Nazi scourge.” He gathered items that showed
not just the persecution of Jews and Communists but also
other groups deemed undesirable by the Nazis, like
gypsies and the disabled, not just in Germany but across
Europe.
The
award-winning collection, containing some 250 letters,
postcards, postal documents, leaflets and other
materials, has now been sold to the Spungen Family
Foundation in Illinois. That foundation, in turn, has
sought to expand the collection and continue to use it
for the educational purposes that inspired Mr. Lawrence,
of Spring Mills, Pa.
Daniel
Spungen, a board member and spokesman for the
foundation, said recently that his acquisition of the
collection represented a “life-changing” experience for
him. He is retiring from his job with the family
business, a manufacturer of ball bearings, and devoting
himself to further development of the collection, which
includes rare letters from concentration camp inmates,
postal documents illustrating Nazi activities and a
Hebrew scripture re-used by a German soldier as a parcel
wrapper.
In
addition to being displayed online, the collection will
be shown to the public beginning next year in Skokie,
Ill., at the new headquarters of the Illinois Holocaust
Museum and Education Center, which was set up in part as
a reaction to neo-Nazi activities in that suburb of
Chicago in the 1970s. The center advocated successfully
for an Illinois state law requiring education about the
Holocaust in schools.
The
collection will also travel around the country,
including stops in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Billings,
Mont.
Mr.
Lawrence, a longtime civil rights activist and writer,
began gathering the materials in 1978 “in response to
the sudden appearance of Holocaust deniers.” He recalled
in an interview recently that he used to show his first
acquisition, a 1943 letter from 21-year-old Eduard Pys,
who had arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp on
the very first transport in May 1940, to children in
Mississippi and tell them, “David Duke says this never
happened.”
Having
little money to spend on his collection, Mr. Lawrence
used his contacts with writers and activists in Eastern
Europe to solicit additional material. One item is a
telegram from a member of a wartime Communist resistance
group that was given to him by a friend in East Germany.
“I
wanted to show all the victims and all the resisters,
through their mail,” Mr. Lawrence said. “I tried to
include every sort of anti-Nazi activity, and treat them
all heroically, whether they liked each other or not.”
He
continued to trail the Klan and neo-Nazis around the
United States, offering his collection at community
centers, schools and churches as evidence of what could
happen if white supremacists prevailed.
Eventually, in 1992, Mr. Lawrence started exhibiting his
collection to fellow stamp collectors as well, garnering
awards at philatelic gatherings from Ohio to Washington
to South Korea. His collection includes rarities like an
envelope from a letter sent from Dachau in 1933, shortly
after the concentration camp opened; a certified-mail
receipt for a prayer book sent to a Jew in a French
camp; a postal checking account receipt with a crude
anti-Semitic cartoon indicating payment for a Nazi
propaganda newspaper; the only known letter from Rabbi
Leo Baeck, leader of German Jewry, when he was held in
the Theresienstadt ghetto; cards from two previously
unlisted camps in Romania; and mail sent to a Nazi
doctor on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1945.
Mr.
Lawrence described the biblical scroll used as a parcel
wrapper, which recounts part of the tale of David and
Goliath, as “the most viscerally disturbing item” in the
collection. “Some scholars have told me it is among the
most important surviving evidence of Nazi desecration,”
he said.
The
Philatelic Foundation, a nonprofit organization, has
produced a DVD documentary about the collection, and Mr.
Lawrence, who is being retained by Mr. Spungen to advise
him on further development of the collection, is
planning a book.
Last
year, after a chance encounter with Mr. Spungen at a
collectors’ event, Mr. Lawrence agreed to sell him his
collection. “I felt like I had taken the collection as
far as I could. And I’m 65,” Mr. Lawrence said.
A
well-known stamp auctioneer had advised Mr. Lawrence to
keep the collection intact rather than breaking it up to
sell.
Mr.
Spungen said he had originally planned to use part of
his fortune to buy an “Inverted Jenny,” one of the
rarest of American stamps, which has an airplane
misprinted upside down. But he said he changed his mind
when he saw Mr. Lawrence’s collection.
“I
admit I knew next to nothing about the Holocaust, and
now I’m playing catch-up,” he said in a recent telephone
interview. Among the items he finds most compelling are
a piece of mail documenting sex slavery at the
Buchenwald concentration camp and fake British banknotes
made by Jewish slave laborers during the Nazis’ program
to undermine the British economy.
Mr.
Spungen said that while the collection as a whole was
insured for a million dollars, and the scroll used as a
parcel wrapper could be worth as much as half a million
dollars on its own, “the educational value to future
generations is incalculable.”
--Courtesy of the NY Times (Sept. 27, 2008)
