The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans

ONE

In the fall of 1827, as he was completing his masterwork Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, greatest of all German writers, took a walk through the Ettersberg forest near his home in Weimar. “This is a good place to be,” the seventy-eight-year-old Goethe told his secretary and biographer, Johann Peter Eckermann, as the two men paused to admire the view. “Of late I have thought it would be the last time I should look down from here on the kingdoms of the world, and their splendor. We tend to shrink in domestic confinement. Yet, here we feel great and free… as we always ought to be.”[1]

One hundred and ten years later, in the spring of 1937, Theodor Eicke, the Obergruppenführer of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf Death’s Head division, and Fritz Sauckel, soon to be in charge of the largest contingent of forced workers since the African slave trade, sought to pay tribute to Goethe. As they cleared the Ettersberg forest for the construction of the Buchenwald camp, where fifty-six thousand people would die before April 1945, they ordered that one large oak be left standing. This was said to be Goethe’s Eiche, or Goethe’s Oak, the very tree under which the great poet had written his great work. The camp, at the time the largest in the Reich, was built around the tree. It was an arbitrary decision on Eicke’s part. After all, there was no way of knowing which oak Goethe had actually sat under; the Ettersberg is full of the trees. Indeed, in Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann recounts how Faust’s author carved his initials into not an oak but a beech tree, the dominant species in the forest (the name Buchenwald, chosen by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, means beech forest). But a beech is a spindly thing compared to an oak. Its roots do not plumb as deeply into the earth, its wood is not as hard, its fruit is not so plentiful.

For the Nazis, it was important to lay claim to the poet’s legacy. Hitler himself had sat beside these same trees. The Führer loved— and was loved in—Weimar and the Thuringia state that surrounds it. A grand hub of Western culture for three centuries, onetime home to Martin Luther, Friedrich von Schiller, Franz Liszt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Strauss, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Hector Berlioz, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Gropius, Rudolf Steiner, Marlene Dietrich, and Richard Wagner, Weimar was an early center of Nazi popularity. In 1926, following Hitler’s release from prison after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, when he was prohibited from speaking in much of the country, Weimar welcomed him. Before becoming chancellor, he often addressed crowds in front of his beloved Hotel Elephant. In 1933 the Nazis won a majority of the votes in the area. It was here that the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, was organized. To the Führer, the Thuringian hills, and the great works produced there, were “the embodiment of the German spirit.”

A truly new society, especially one as revolutionary as that envisioned by the Nazis, could not spring from nowhere, based on abstract ideas alone. Goethe’s Oak provided a powerful foundation for a perfect ancestral line, unsullied by the “bacillus” the concentration camp was designed to weed out. Here was Nature’s own living icon, connecting the glorious German past to the magnificent thousand-year future to come.

But iconography, fudged or not, can be difficult to control, even for Nazis. If Goethe’s Oak represented for the SS a connection to a more perfect blood and soil, it also held special significance for the Buchenwald prisoners.

This owed to the singularity of the Buchenwald camp. Central hub to dozens of smaller, satellite prisons in the immediate area, Buchenwald was considered a “mild” camp in comparison to the death factories to the north and east. Buchenwald inmates might expire in the quarry, be starved to death, or perish from rampant disease, but straightforward murder, the shot to the back of the head, was never the intended purpose of the place. The population was diverse, including a high proportion of educated, often well-known inmates. Over the course of its eight-year existence, the once and future French prime minister Léon Blum, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, Jakob Rosenfeld, who would become Mao Zedong’s personal physician and health minister, historian Christopher Burney, Albin Grau, producer of F. W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, aviation pioneer Marcel Dassault, future Nobel laureates Léon Jouhaux and Imre Kertész, Netherlands prime minister Willem Drees, Elie Wiesel, and Princess Mafalda, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, were imprisoned at Buchenwald.

These people knew who Goethe was. They’d read Faust. They had their own interpretations of how and why humanity makes its deals with supernatural evil. Goethe’s story was so big that everyone in the camp could envision its author on their side. So when the anointed oak burst into a pillar of fire during the Allied bombing of the camp in July 1944, inmates and SS guards alike rushed to hoard flaming chips of pith and bark, collaborating for a moment, in hopes of salvaging pieces of the once-mighty tree.

The stump remains at Buchenwald today, to be seen by those who visit this forlorn place.

The journey to wartime Buchenwald has been described as an interminable winter train trip, prisoners shoved so tightly into a wooden cattle car that their skin froze to the person next to them, turning the unfortunate passengers into one giant, barely squirming block of ice. This living death was interrupted by arrival at the camp, the sudden iris shock of the car doors flung open in a vicious chaos of SS men screaming, cudgels flying, guard dogs baring teeth.

More than six decades later, the trip is appalling mostly in its ease. The two-hour jaunt on the lickety-split Deutsche Bahn from Berlin to the Weimar train station, cheery for the Christmas season, where smiling, rosy-cheeked ladies in white puffy hats sell tasty bratwursts and warming Glühwein in paper cups, is followed by a fifteen-minute ride on the number 6 bus. Like clockwork the bus arrives, bright red and shiny, the destination spelled out in yellow blinking electronic letters: Buchenwald, Buchenwald—as if it were going anyplace, anyplace at all.

Halfway up the hill the bus makes a left turn onto the so-called Blutstrasse, or “Blood Road,” which was built by the prisoners in 1939, eventually stopping in a parking lot in front of the old SS barracks, now the museum’s administrative offices. From there the visitor walks down the Carachoweg (caracho is Spanish slang for “double time”), where arriving prisoners, half dead from their journey, were made to run as fast as they could by SS men with clubs. Ahead, its outline barely visible in the enveloping fog, the squat chimney of the crematorium lurches into the sky.

Just outside the electrified barbed wire fence, into which desperate inmates would sometimes hurl themselves in vain attempts at suicide, is a zoo, where on Sunday afternoons, in full view of the starving prisoners, SS men often came with their wives and young children to feed the bears and monkeys. Unique to Buchenwald, the zoo was created, according to an order issued by Camp Kommandant Karl Koch, to provide camp officers with “diversion and entertainment… viewing the beauty and peculiarities of various animals which they will hardly be able to meet and observe in the wild.” SS men were expected to “refrain from anything that might not be good for animals,” as the camp commander had “again received reports saying that SS men have tied the deer’s horns to the fence, where the animals were found to have had tinfoil shoved in their mouths. Perpetrators of such loutish acts will be reported to the SS chief to be punished for cruelty to animals.”

Passing the empty zoo, the visitor arrives at Buchenwald’s main entrance. At the Auschwitz death camp the sign said Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Will Set You Free,” the sickest of all Nazi jokes. At Buchenwald the message is more subtle, the cast-iron letters on the iron gate reading Jedem Das Seine, or “To Each His Own.”

Again, Kultur, the very mention of which was said to make Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering remove the safety on his Browning pistol, appears to have been at work in the Thuringian hills. Bach, a former Weimar chamber musician, called his 163rd cantata “Nur jedem das Seine!”. But the phrase dates back to Plato and Cicero, who wrote, “Justitia suum cuique distribuit”: “Justice renders to everyone his due.”

This was the big Nazi laugh at Buchenwald, since the letters of the sign, designed by Franz Ehrlich, an inmate and former Bauhaus student, face inward. You might delude yourself, as so many Jews and others did before the war, that you were as German as anyone else. You might hold on to the fantasy of belonging even as they marched you off to the camp. It was only when the camp gates slammed behind the prisoner that the phrase Jedem das Seine became clear. To each his own. You could harbor whatever illusions you wished about yourself, but it was the Nazis, the Supermen, who decided who you really were.

I was at Buchenwald to see about the lampshade. If you are interested in lampshades allegedly made out of human skin, Buchenwald is the place.

Facts pertaining to the so-called Nazi human skin atrocities remain a topic of debate, yet there is testimony indicating that the practice was widespread. During the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech Communist surgeon arrested by the Gestapo, spoke of his forced participation in various Nazi experiments at Dachau. This included, Blaha said, being made to perform over twelve thousand autopsies.

“It was common practice to remove the skin from dead prisoners,” Blaha testified with clinical precision, saying Nazi doctors like Sigmund Rascher and Klaus Schilling were particularly interested in “human skin from human backs and chests. It was chemically treated and placed in the sun to dry. After that it was cut into various sizes for use as saddles, riding breeches, gloves, house slippers, and ladies’ handbags. Tattooed skin was especially valued by SS men. Russians, Poles, and other inmates were used in this way, but it was forbidden to cut out the skin of a German. This skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects.

“Sometimes we did not have enough bodies with good skin and Rascher would say, ‘All right, you will get the bodies.’ The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head so that the skin would be uninjured. Also, we frequently got requests for the skulls or skeletons of prisoners. In those cases we boiled the skull or the body. Then the soft parts were removed and the bones were bleached and dried and reassembled. In the case of skulls it was important to have a good set of teeth. When we ordered the skulls, the SS men would say, ‘We will try to get you some with good teeth.’ So it was dangerous to have good skin or good teeth.”

Similar details turn up in the often disputed deathbed “confession” of Franz Ziereis, commandant of the Mauthausen camp, who was shot by American troops in May 1945 while trying to escape dressed in civilian clothes. “I have personally killed about four thousand prisoners,” the suddenly remorseful Ziereis was reported to have said before dying from his wounds. In the realm of “the use of bodies,” however, Ziereis passed the blame to other, otherwise anonymous individuals like “Chemielskwy and Seidler in Gusen,” who, he claimed, “had human skin specially tanned on which there were tattoos. From this leather they had books bound, and they had lampshades and leather cases made.”

Nonetheless, when it comes to Nazi use of human body parts, particularly the flaying, stretching, and tanning of tattooed skin to make lampshades, one name stands out among all others. That is Ilse Koch, aka “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” the red-haired, legendarily hot-blooded wife of the aforementioned Kommandant Karl Koch.

The former Ilse Köhler was born in 1906, daughter of a lower-middle-class factory worker in Dresden, then, as now, a stronghold of rabidly right-wing politics. After studying to be a librarian and working as a secretary, Köhler joined the National Socialist Party in 1932, when women made up only 7 percent of the membership. A picture of the young Ilse taken around this time shows a somewhat zaftig young woman sitting on what appears to be a table in the corner of a wallpapered room. Her wavy, shoulder-length red hair is parted with obvious care on the right side of her roundish face. She wears a billowy white blouse with a ruffled plaid bow, a skirt that falls slightly below her knees, and black pumps. There is little to suggest that this is the woman who would soon be reviled the world over as an evil succubus. On the contrary, the way she leans forward, lipstick on the slightly pursed lips of her smallish mouth, a faint sense of dare in her canny eyes, she appears a slightly naughty 4-H girl, up for coy fun but nothing more.

With Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship the following year, Köhler took a job as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. It was there she met the camp chief, Karl Koch, a former bank clerk and World War I vet with a reputation as a harsh administrator. A Nazi Party member since 1924 and favorite of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Koch was soon transferred to the Gestapo’s notorious Columbia House prison in Berlin, where he reputedly ordered prisoners to be shackled by the neck and fed from bowls on the stone floor. When Koch entered the room, inmates had to bark and howl like dogs.

Perhaps Koch’s zeal was a compensation for his somewhat deficient pedigree. Considered a vanguard force of the coming racial state, SS men were supposed to be paragons of German masculinity, the cream of the genetic crop. In the early days, no man standing less than six feet tall need apply. Koch was not quite all that. A barrel-chested man with a pronounced, pointed chin who often wore dark glasses over his deep-set eyes, there was a gnomishness about him. Not that this mattered to Ilse Köhler, who, according to her biographer Arthur L. Smith, had a distinct weakness for men in uniform, especially those with the Death’s Head insignia on their cap and collar. Ilse became Karl Koch’s personal secretary, and in May 1936 they married.

Ilse and Karl Koch were wed in a verdant grove outside the Sachsenhausen walls at midnight. Everything was done according to protocols set forth by the 1931 Engagement and Marriage Order aimed at ensuring that the SS would remain “a hereditarily healthy clan of a strictly Nordic German sort” and sanctioned by the Main Office of Race and Settlement. Karl Koch wore his uniform and a steel helmet. Ilse Koch, in a long white dress, was anointed as a “custodian of the race,” from whose womb would come forth genetically pure representatives of the glorious evolutionary future. An eternal flame burned in an urn as the betrothed exchanged rings decorated with runic signs. The newlyweds were given gifts of bread and salt, emblematic of fruitfulness and purity. A copy of Mein Kampf was taken from a wooden box and presented to the groom, after which the couple walked hand in hand past an array of saluting white-gloved SS men.

Koch’s appointment as Kommandant at Buchenwald, the largest and most elaborate of the camps at the time, was a plum. An ugly, vicious man with a beautiful wife, he may not have been popular with his fellow officers, but he was under Himmler’s wing and that was enough. Upon arriving at the new facility, one of Koch’s first orders of business was to confer upon Ilse the title of Oberaufseherin, or “senior overseer,” a rank accorded no other SS frau.

From the start, Koch imposed a reign of relentless cruelty at the camp, marked by innovative tortures, including the infamous “tree hanging,” in which prisoners were strapped to a ten-foot-tall pole with their hands tied behind their necks, sometimes for days. Another practice was a particularly noxious form of waterboarding in which victims were pushed facedown into the vile open latrines. The Koches’ domestic extravagance was an obscene counterpoint to these horrors. At the grand Villa Koch, where dozens of prisoners were employed as plantation-style domestics, dinner was served on the best china and eaten with the finest silver. It would later be proved that the ex-banker Koch and his cronies financed much of this opulence by embezzling camp money and stealing from terrorized inmates.

No small amount of this loot went toward keeping up with Ilse Koch’s ever expanding needs and desires. The former Dresden working-class girl took to the highlife of a concentration camp overseer. Anxious to keep his wife happy, Koch showered her with gifts—from fine clothes to inlaid wood furniture to diamond rings—mostly made by or stolen from prisoners. If Frau Koch desired to take a bath in Madeira, as she reportedly did, the wine was provided. In 1939, thinking his wife might like to learn to ride a horse, Koch commissioned the construction of a thirty-thousand-square-foot private riding hall with mirrored walls and a sixty-foot vaulted ceiling outfitted with dramatic skylights. According to the Buchenwald Report, compiled shortly after the war by the U.S. Army and former prisoners, as many as thirty prisoners died in the rush to finish the hall, which cost in excess of 250,000 marks. When the Kommandeuse, as Ilse Koch was called, took morning canters around the ring, the Buchenwald prisoners’ band provided musical accompaniment.

For many, this would be the enduring image of Ilse Koch: provocatively seated atop her favorite steed (usually remembered as milky white), riding crop at the ready, black leather boots to her knee, and all that red hair. Later, after the war, there would be much talk of the scantily dressed Kommandeuse, riding through the camp, stopping only to accuse men of lasciviously staring at her breasts and her bottom, a crime for which the punishment was a beating or death.

It must have seemed an incredible dream to the Kommandant’s wife, a prize not unlike that granted by the forces of darkness in a dozen retellings of the Faust myth. Saved from drudgery by becoming a Nazi, she was soon accompanying her frog prince husband to Himmler’s Wewelsburg castle with its eighteen soaring towers. Declared by the Reichsführer as “das Zentrum der neuen Welt,” or “the center of the new world,” Wewelsburg was a place where Ilse, as a member of this all-powerful new Chosen People, would always be welcome.

It was sometime in the summer of 1938, according to Harry Stein, the chief historian at the present-day memorial at Buchenwald, that Ilse Koch gave her husband a special gift. Many of the SS wives had become fascinated with the work of the SS camp doctor, Erich Wagner, a former student of “race science” at the then Nazi-run Friedrich Schiller University in nearby Jena. Wagner, apparently a dashing sort, was in the middle of compiling his Ph.D. thesis, “Ein Beitrag zur Tätowierungsfrage,” or “A Contribution on the Tattooing Question,” a report on the relationship between tattooing and criminal behavior. In the process of his research, Wagner and other doctors in the camp pathology block reportedly began to remove the skin of prisoners with particularly colorful and/or lewd tattoos. Inmates would later say that many of these dried and tanned tattooed skins were stitched together into gloves, bookcovers, and lampshades. It was one of these lampshades, Harry Stein said, that was given by Ilse Koch to Karl Koch as a present for his birthday.[2]

“It was considered the most favorite of all the presents given to Karl Koch,” Harry Stein said. “All the guests applauded.” It seemed, at the time, a token of love between husband and wife.

The first published account of the Ilse Koch “Lady of the Lampshades” story appeared in the U.S. Army publication Stars and Stripes on April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, nine days after the liberation of Buchenwald. Ann Stringer, a UPI correspondent, filed a story from the camp saying she had seen a lampshade, “two feet in diameter, about eighteen inches high and made of five panels… made from the skin from a man’s chest. Along side were book bindings, bookmarkers, and other ornamental pieces—all made from human skin, too. I saw them today. I could see the pores and the tiny unquestionably human skin lines.”

This was the first time people outside the Buchenwald camp had heard of Ilse Koch and her alleged passion for objects made from human skin. One prisoner, identified in Stringer’s story as “a Dutch engineer,” described how the former Kommandeuse “would have prisoners with tattoos on them line up shirtless. Then she would pick a pretty design or mark she particularly liked. That prisoner would be executed and his skin made into an ornament.”

By the end of 1941, the Nazi dream-life of the former Ilse Köhler began to collapse around her. Karl Koch was transferred from Buchenwald to Lublin, Poland, to oversee the construction of Majdanek camp, where eighty thousand people would die, most of them Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. In 1943, Koch, his largesse with Himmler used up, was convicted by an SS court of corruption and murder charges. He was returned to Buchenwald in chains and executed by a firing squad on April 5, 1945, only a week before the American troops arrived at the camp. By then, Ilse, her fabulous riding hall now a shabby warehouse, had fled to the small town of Ludwigsburg, where she was recognized by a former Buchenwald prisoner and turned over to the Allied authorities.

By 1947, at her trial before the war crimes tribunal at the former Dachau camp, Ilse Koch no longer resembled the ingénue who married Karl Koch just a decade before. She looked haggard and worn, in part due to the fact that despite being incarcerated for months, Koch was, shockingly, pregnant, father unknown. Some months later, when she gave birth to a son, the child was not greeted into the SS clan as one more potential Norse god on earth. Listing the event in its Milestones section, Time magazine noted, “Born, to Ilse Koch… a male bastard.”

The trial of Ilse Koch was a worldwide sensation. She was, after all, the perfect defendant, perfectly pregnant, perfectly sourpussed, bearing the perfect nickname, “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” a cannily alliterative mistranslation of her prison epithet, die Hexe—“Witch”—von Buchenwald. She was the “Lady of the Lampshades,” whose crimes—the blithe defilement of the human body—struck many as even more indicative of Nazi evil than the killing of millions. The fact that she was a woman, a red-haired black widow, made it all the more shocking.

The testimony was properly lurid. “I had several occasions to see Ilse Koch and also to have personal business with her,” testified Kurt Froboess, a prisoner at Buchenwald from its opening in 1937 until liberation, describing an incident in which he and a Czech chaplain were digging a ditch to lay cables. The chaplain tossed some dirt out of the hole, Froboess said. “Suddenly someone was standing on top of the ditch and was yelling, ‘Prisoner, what are you doing down there?’ Someone was standing with her legs straddling the ditch. We looked up to see who it was and recognized Mrs. Koch. She was standing on top of the ditch without any underwear and a short skirt. As we did this, she said, ‘What are you doing looking up here?’ and with her riding crop she beat us, particularly my comrade.”

Describing another encounter, Froboess testified, “It was a hot day. Some of them [the prisoners] were working without a shirt. Mrs. Koch arrived on a horse. There was a comrade there—his first name was Jean, he was either French or Belgian—and he was known throughout camp for his excellent tattoos from head to toe. I particularly recall a colored cobra on his left arm, winding all the way up to the top. On his chest he had an exceptionally well-tattooed sailboat with four masts. Even today I can see it before my eyes very clearly. Mrs. Koch rode over until she came pretty close and had a look at him. And she told him, ‘Let’s work faster, faster.’ She took his number down. Jean was called to the gate at evening formation. We didn’t see him anymore.”

About a half year later, Froboess continued, he had occasion to visit a friend of his who was working at the Buchenwald pathology department, and there he saw “the skin and to my horror I noticed the same sailboat that I had seen on Jean.”

On August 14, 1947, Ilse Koch, guilty of participating in a “common plan” to violate “the Laws and Usages of War” during her tenure as Kommandeuse of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, stood before the court in a frumpy checkered dress and was sentenced to life in prison. Despite all the testimony about human skin lampshades and bookbindings, no such object was introduced in evidence. For her part, Ilse Koch steadfastly denied ever owning a human skin lampshade or ordering one made. She claimed the first time she ever heard of any lampshades was when “I read about it in Life magazine.”

TWO

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, if not in time, in terms of telling this story. To get to the beginning we have to back up some seventeen years from today, to a beastly hot summer day in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a ramshackle town of about twenty thousand in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, which isn’t a river delta at all but rather a diamond-shaped expanse of topsoil-rich land once home to the American South’s largest cotton plantations.[3] It might not look it at first glance—the landscape flat as a board, and the magnolia trees growing wild in unkempt backyards—but Clarksdale has a lot in common with the Thuringian hills of Weimar, home to both the most brilliant flowering of German humanism and abject Nazi barbarism.

This assertion stems, in part, from Clarksdale’s indisputable position as the epicenter of early African-American blues music, a shriek of syncretic pain born during the dislocation of slavery that eventually morphed into rock and roll, which along with Hollywood came to dominate the cultural life of the twentieth century much as Weimar held sway over the eighteenth and nineteenth. Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and many other artists spent large parts of their lives in Clarksdale. Sam Cooke was born here. After a car crash one night on a lonely stretch of blacktop, Bessie Smith died in the makeshift emergency room of the Clarksdale colored people’s hospital, which later became the Riverside Hotel, where Ike Turner lived as a boy.

More specific to this story, however, is Clarksdale’s close proximity to the intersection of U.S. highways 49 and 61. This is the famous “crossroads” where, legend has it, bluesmen came to sell their soul to the devil in exchange for becoming the best guitar player and singer anyone had ever heard.

This is the often-quoted testimony of Tommy Johnson, who, like Robert Johnson, author of the iconic song “Cross Road Blues,” claimed to have undergone the process. “If you want to learn how to make songs yourself,” Johnson said, “you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Be sure to get there just a little before twelve that night so you know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself… Then a big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.”

It is a narrative that Goethe would have recognized, sitting under his oak tree, the poet’s bemused Mephistopheles being archetypical kin not only to Tommy Johnson’s “big black man” but also the Celtic Puck, the Norse Loki, the Hopi Kokopelli, and a dozen more supernatural trickster/soul barterers. For the Clarksdale bluesmen, the story almost certainly accompanied their forebearers on the slave ships. Called Eshu by the Yorubans, Anansi among the Ashantis, Legba throughout the Caribbean, the god of the crossroads appears in many African mythologies. He waits at the spot where pathways come together, that existential point where options become palpable. Often depicted leaning against a rock, sometimes chewing on a long reed, the crossroads god asks the arriving traveler what direction he’s going, if perhaps he needs a little help finding his way. Not that his advice can be trusted: the riches he claims are down the road come with an even greater toll. But the human sojourner—be he Faust or Peetie Wheatstraw, another bluesman who supposedly went to the intersection of highways 61 and 49 at midnight—is no fool; he knows who he’s up against. That’s the trick of it, an inbred human trait, a cocky hubris of sorts, trying to beat the devil at his own game, if you can.

My voyage to Buchenwald began at the Crossroads. The Crossroads Bar, that is, then located at 224 Sunflower Street in what passes for downtown Clarksdale, where, on the aforementioned breathlessly hot July afternoon in 1995, I first encountered Raymond Henderson, who, along with everyone else, calls himself Skip.

Thinner then, raw-boned almost, his long, straight brown hair flung about with each herky-jerk gesture, Skip was standing behind the rutted wooden bar, talking six times faster than anyone else in the entire state. Hearing his jackhammer diction, so discordant compared to the slurred molasses patter of the locals, I asked, “Hey, you’re not from here, are you?”

“Fuck no,” Skip replied, his Sicilian—Scotch-Irish roots unconcealed. “I’m from New Brunswick, New Jersey.”

Sliding forth a bottle of Blackened Voodoo, the preferred dark brew of the Crossroads, Skip, who started the bar in an old warehouse with the dementedly romantic notion that he’d give the few remaining Clarksdale musicians a place to play, continued his harangue to the two or three assembled drunks. As usual, Skip was exasperated by the shortcomings of his fellow human beings. This particular rant involved the long-abandoned Clarksdale railway station that he wanted to turn into a blues museum. It was at Clarksdale Station that Muddy Waters, who’d grown up picking cotton on Stovall’s plantation, laid his money down at the colored people’s ticket window (located in the baggage department just so no one forgot his place) to ride the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago, where he and other Southland bluesmen would plug their instruments into the electric socket and shake the world. This made Clarksdale Station an important place not only in the annals of the blues but also in the overall account of African-American migration northward following the demise of the sharecropping system, Skip explained loudly and not for the first time.

The train station project grew out of Skip’s larger mission in and around the Mississippi Delta. Back in Jersey, before the breakup of his first marriage, he split his time between his social work day job and his equally time-consuming passion for the collection and preservation of classic, often neglected, elements of pop culture. In the 1970s and ’80s his social work function took the less-than-ideal form of high school counselor/truant officer (“a school pig,” in the vernacular), a hectic position for which the state of New Jersey felt the need to issue Skip a badge and a .38 revolver. It was not a job guaranteed to ensure popularity, and one time Skip pulled in to the school parking lot to see eight-foot-high letters on the building wall spelling out “Mr. Henderson Is A Big Prick.” As Skip walked by, the Polish janitor who was scrubbing off the graffiti seethed, “You—you make them do this.”

Skip took refuge in his guitar business, restoring and selling vintage instruments, usually his beloved Fender Telecasters and Stellas. In this capacity he learned that many of the greatest blues artists, like Charley Patton, Sonny Boy Williamson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Memphis Minnie, geniuses all, were buried in unmarked graves.

To Skip, this was an outrage. A national shame. It could not stand. Establishing the Mount Zion Memorial Fund, he started calling successful white singers like John Fogerty and Bonnie Raitt to remind them that they could relieve part of their acknowledged debt to these bluesmen and -women by paying for their tombstones. R. Crumb, known to Skip through the obsessive record-collecting world, contributed a drawing to crown the obelisk dedicated to Robert Johnson at Morgan City, Mississippi. Skip had the Crumb drawing printed on a piece of porcelain, which he affixed to the monument. When the medallion was stolen, Skip made another one. When that one was taken, he had the picture engraved in the stone. This was a lot of work, especially in light of the fact that every blues fan knows Johnson’s body is not to be found at Morgan City. Neither are the singer’s remains buried at the two other Mississippi locations that purport to be his gravesite. In fact, despite leaving behind some of the most evocative American music ever recorded, no one has ever ascertained what happened to Robert Johnson or his mythically sold soul.[4]

The success of the gravestone project was followed by the difficulties with the train station. The day I met him, Skip was railing that this was sheer Neanderthal prejudice. Only the week before he’d presented his proposal to the Coahoma County supervisors, detailing how the train station would not only memorialize the area’s invaluable cultural legacy but also bring considerable tourist dollars to the chronically depressed local economy. Clarksdale, in case anyone on the board had failed to notice, was a mess. Over on Issaquena Avenue, the black neighborhood’s main drag, the roof of the movie theater had blown off. A giant ailanthus tree, at least fifty feet tall, was growing up right between the derelict seats. Many lived without indoor plumbing. Couldn’t an influx of blues-loving Yankee greenbacks help that? The board, all white, was not impressed.

“Let me tell you something, son,” said one member. “There ain’t nobody we know who is gonna drive all the way over heah to hear about some Negro man playing a ghee-tar. Your project is just for the blacks. I can’t support it.”

It was insane, this tyranny of the skin, Skip declaimed that hot day in Clarksdale, the way the outermost layer of a man was all that could be seen and judged by other men. When would the decent and reasonable impulses of the species, the beating heart of brotherhood, finally break through the surface that kept us apart? It was an admirable but futile screed, as Skip and everyone in the bar that day, a motley assemblage that included a drunken blues singer who called himself Rocking Daddy Juking on the Corner, or “R.D.J.C. for short,” readily agreed. You could scream all you want about the way skin—what could be seen from the outside—had caused so much misery in this world. But it was a hard thing to get around. It was something you were born with, as dictated by God, or some trickster devil juking at the Crossroads who just liked to stir things up.

One thing that could be done, however, was to mess with it. To paint upon it. Make yourself a canvas. To declare that no matter what anyone else thought, the bigots and those who might think you old and ugly, this skin, this personal parcel of living real estate, belonged to you, no one else. This brought up Skip’s tattoo, the most remarkable one I’d ever seen, a bit of ink that would almost have certainly attracted the attention of Dr. Erich Wagner and Ilse Koch.

“Weird tattoo you got there,” I mentioned to Skip, referencing the image on his right bicep depicting an astronaut, wearing a NASA suit, floating free beside a Gemini space capsule. “Who’s that?”

“Who?” Skip replied, ever peeved at the ignorant, poking an index finger at his upper arm. “That’s Ed White, my hero.”

“Ed White, the astronaut, is your hero?”

“First American to ever walk in space. Ed fucking White.”

It was at this point that Skip’s version of the Ed White spacewalk diverged from the official NASA account. As per many published stories at the time, Skip believed that when White made his historic jaunt on June 3, 1965, the astronaut was subject to a condition known to scuba divers as being “narked,” or so one theory goes. This occurs when the change in external pressure makes nitrogen more soluble in the body tissues, causing the diver, or in this case the spacewalker, to experience sensations not unlike ingesting several drinks or breathing nitrous oxide. In other words, while floating amid the boundless expanse of the universe, Ed White was stoned out of his mind.

He was enjoying himself so much that he refused to return to the space capsule. When fellow astronaut James McDivitt signaled that the walk should conclude, White replied, “No way.” “McDivitt had to drag White back in,” Skip recounted. When White was finally pulled back into the ship, he said, “This is the saddest moment of my life, coming back in here.”

“You think you’re sad now, wait until we get down to earth,” McDivitt supposedly replied.[5]

After White was killed in a training accident, Skip memorialized him on his arm. It was a tribute, Skip said, “to the man who would not come back in.” Who cared what sort of ass-covering story NASA put out about the incident. When it came to tattoos, it was the metaphor that mattered. Times had moved from when all you saw were Popeye’s anchors and a sallow “Mom” on the saggy arms of afternoon drinkers. All over, nineteen-year-old suburbanites were walking around looking like yakuza who had fallen asleep in the inkman’s chair. Everyone had a tattoo now, some of them really stupid, picked out of a catalog like a paint chip. This was wrong, Skip thought. A true tattoo was a statement of faith. If you were going to mark yourself, commit it to your permanent record, you had to make it count.

Over the following decade, I saw Skip on and off. He remarried, had three more children to go with his four grown boys—the grandiloquently monikered Michelangelo, Dominic, Alessandro, and Antonio—left Clarksdale, and moved four hundred miles down Highway 61, to New Orleans.

It seemed a crackpot notion to put down roots in a place where the water table makes it impossible to bury a body below the ground, but to Skip it made sense. For a former altar boy equally lapsed and devout, New Orleans was much like the Church, or what the brothers of the Sacred Heart taught him was “the one true faith.” Intellectually you knew it was all lies—the Anne Rice bedsheet-waving crapola and the storied decay—but once you walked into St. Louis Cathedral in the Quarter and smelled the incense, or heard the second-line band going down Rampart Street, Lord have mercy! The place wasn’t what it once had been—even Fats Domino, who preferred sitting on the porch of his Ninth Ward yellow and brown house with the letters FD embossed on the front, had to play the Vegas lounges to make a living—but still the city offered shabby, irresistibly noncorporate redemption, a chance to be part of something, however hokey, bigger than yourself.

Morons call New Orleans the Big Easy, but this is one more carny ruse to keep those out-of-town suckers drinking. The Big Anxiety is more like it. Once the second-largest city in the United States, for years the biggest in the South, the place has always been hanging by a thread. Founded in 1718, the fledgling settlement was completely wiped out by a storm in 1722. In 1788, 856 of the town’s 1,100 structures were destroyed by fire. Yellow fever epidemics were rife throughout the nineteenth century. In 1853, more than 12,000 people succumbed in a matter of months. The only noteworthy outbreak of bubonic plague, the apocalyptic medieval “black death,” in the United States, hit the city in 1914, causing widespread terror.[6]

The willful illogic of building a city largely below sea level, on swamplands sandwiched between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the second-largest saltwater lake in North America, has long flummoxed sober-minded urban planners. According to National Geographic, the city has been subject to major floods twenty-seven times since its founding, which breaks down to nearly once every ten years. The Great Flood of 1927 displaced 700,000 people along the Mississippi, including more than 300,000 African Americans, who were duly rounded up and herded into refugee camps. In response to the deluge, the City of New Orleans, employing a time-honored race/class-based theory of emergency management, notoriously dynamited its overburdened levee system, diverting the high waters from the rich, “uptown” areas to the poorer downriver precincts.

In his resonant tune “Louisiana 1927,” Randy Newman sings, “President Coolidge come down in a railroad train,” but that never happened. In a precursor of more recent history, Coolidge, who refused to extend federal funds to deal with the calamity, remained in Washington. In his stead, he sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover (whom Newman refers to as “a little fat man with a notepad in his hand”), who vowed to resettle the refugees. Later, as president, Hoover reneged on this promise. In a move that would become the template for such disasters, authorities spent federal money to increase the size of the levees, a hit-and-miss approach that failed most notably in September 1965, when the storm surge from Hurricane Betsy breeched the walls, inundating the town for two weeks.

This was what you bought into by moving to the Crescent City, Skip Henderson knew well, the deal you made for getting to eat real good oyster po’ boys and smell the night-blooming jasmine in your backyard. There was a point where simple tolerance for impermanence crossed over into fetishization, but that’s what attracted people like Skip Henderson to New Orleans. They hazarded a glance at the sky, waiting for the other shoe to drop yet again. Between 1999 and 2004, with globally warmed Gulf waters churning at an unprecedented rate, Skip and his family evacuated their home four times.

New Orleans evacuations have a rhythm, a routine. A hurricane is not like an earthquake, a sudden heart attack from out of nowhere and then you’re dead. Tracked by long-range meteorological projection, the hurricane approaches as a dread-drenched creep. From the moment the storm is identified, usually as an anonymous “tropical depression” somewhere off West Africa, and begins moving west, through the Sargasso Sea, onward toward the de rigueur destruction of Haitian shantytowns, now with a name just to make it personal, the tension builds. When it gets into the Gulf, that’s showtime. The doomsday weathermen are waving their laser pointers and here it comes, that buzzsaw Rorschach blot, like a teratoma blanched blue and green by the radar scans, a telegraphed haymaker you can’t quite duck. And there, in the middle, at the center of the swirl, is the eye. The unblinking, Old Testament eye in the sky, malocchio in the Italian, kin-a-hora, as my Yiddish mother used to say: the evil, evil eye.

Of course, this being New Orleans, there are always those who simply will not go. The phlegm coughers, the black tooth types, blustering how they rode it out then and they were going to ride it out now, and the only way they are leaving is when some cop pries their stonecold ass cheeks from the bar stool. It is a rap so stupid, so indolently hell-bent, you could almost envy it, Skip Henderson often thought. But what was a family man to do? Three little kids and a wife. Who wanted to be that one last fool who, upon seeing the birds flying inland, or hearing the crash of a brownshirt’s brick through the shopkeeper’s window, didn’t get while the getting was good?

For Skip, the last few moments before the evacuation, with the boxes packed and kids safe in their car seats, were painful triage. In the collector’s life, what could be left behind? Which Fender? How many of the wristwatches bought from unaware or desperate secondhand dealers? A framed ticket stub from the sixth game of the 1986 World Series? Collecting was a life-defining joy, but hoarding was a sin. It was against what Luke said in his Gospel, 12:15, an admonishment about “covetousness.” There was virtue in traveling light, but it didn’t take away the heartbreak of leaving things behind.

The worst of all the evacuations was Ivan, the category 3 storm in 2004. Skip and his family were on the Crescent City Connection, the double-span bridge over the river, when one of his wrinkle-faced English bulldogs, Ike, brother to Tina, began wheezing and then dropped dead in the front seat. Stuck in panicked, unmoving traffic, hours passed before Skip could get off the bridge and pull the animal’s body out of the car. It was awful, but in the end Ivan veered off, to Alabama or some other redneck wherever. The bullet had been dodged. New Orleans was saved, yet again spared by the grace of God to continue its cheesy cycle of decay.

Still, who could have foreseen Katrina? Certainly the storm was big, hundreds of miles across; on the radar it pulsed like a medicine ball of pain, its outer bands extending from Pensacola all the way to the Yucatán. On the TV screen it seemed to cover the entire Gulf, and the Gulf was a thousand miles wide! The National Weather Service had released that mind-boggling warning that should the hurricane maintain its strength, most of New Orleans would be “uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” that “all gabled roofs will fail,” that “water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

But that had been said before, Skip thought, packing the car one more time. Why should this time be any different?

For Skip Henderson, as for so many others, what had happened in New Orleans during Katrina didn’t fully sink in until he returned to the city nearly two months after the storm. It was one thing to sit numb in front of the TV at his in-laws’ house in Alabama, watching the merciless timeline unspool: the bungling, frightened response by the city government, the breaching of the levees, the failure of the pumps, the horrors of the Superdome and the Convention Center, the people on the roofs, the bodies in the water, the looting and the shooting, Bush in his plane, Brownie doing “a heck of a job.” Sixteen hundred people dead, the beloved city shattered, its population dispersed, often at gunpoint, throughout the country; the news was too horrible to take in all at once.

To be back, however, in the first wave of those to return: that was the real shock.

After eight weeks without power, his refrigerator was so foul that Skip hauled the box out onto the sidewalk and blasted it full of holes with his pistol grip shotgun. This was pretty much his only damage, besides some downed trees. Along with the French Quarter, Marigny, and parts of the Garden District, the Bywater, where Skip had bought his place because the area reminded him of a sketchier circa 1981 East Village in New York, is part of the “sliver by the river”—higher ground, if only by a foot or so. That made Skip a survivor, at least real estate—wise, whatever that was worth in the decimated town. In those early days, with his family still in Alabama and the town so closed up you had to go to the Quarter just to drink a beer, Skip started driving around. He drove around every day for weeks, from morning until the nighttime curfew, when he locked himself inside his house and sweated.

He called it the Magical Misery Tour, not that there was any set itinerary. Nothing was where it should be. Houses were in the water and boats were on dry land, sometimes on top of houses. On Napoleon Avenue, an ultrasound machine sat in the middle of the street for weeks. Over on Martin Luther King Jr. it was a dentist’s chair, the spit bowl still attached. With the streetlights out and the stop signs blown away, these objects created a new traffic pattern. Life, as it had been lived, was gone. Skip drove past Robert’s Supermarket, where he had shopped twice a week, and Charity Hospital, where half the city’s babies had been born, and one look told him: they’ll never be back.

You never knew what might turn up. One day Skip passed a burning house in the Central City section and was amazed when a fire truck tore around the corner, sirens blaring. After the storm, many fires went untended. But there they were, the NOFD, hatchets in hand, pulling hose, just like the firemen kids dream of growing up to be, in real cities. The problem was there was no water pressure in the hydrant. The firefighters stood there looking at the dribbling nozzle as if it were the end of a kinked garden hose. Then, seemingly from nowhere, a helicopter appeared overhead. Dangling from the chopper’s bottom was a giant canvas scoop, which opened, dropping thousands of gallons of water on the blaze. With the house transformed into a steaming hulk, the firemen and helicopter departed. Why this particular house, modest at best before the storm, had been chosen to receive special treatment from the local authorities and then was left to rot away along with the rest of the neighborhood was hard to figure, but Katrina was full of mysteries.

One day in early 2006 the only thing Skip Henderson planned to do was go over to Mickey Markey Park at Royal and Piety streets in the Bywater to see if he could stand to vote for Ron Forman in the upcoming mayoral election. Forman was shaking hands and giving out balloons to the kids at the park. Ordinarily, Skip would never consider supporting a moneyed candidate like Forman, head of the decidedly uptown, if relatively liberal-minded, Audubon Nature Institute, which watched over the zoo and aquarium. But only months after Katrina, with the National Guard driving around the neighborhood in Hummers, this was a different sort of election.

For a hundred years people have said if you want to know what’s up in New Orleans politics, see who parades with whom on Mardi Gras. The fact that everyone wears a mask didn’t really hamper identification. You knew who they were. Of all American cities, there’s no place where the circumstances of one’s birth count so much as in New Orleans. The rich St. Charles Avenue white people are most often found marching with the elaborate old-line krewes, Proteus and Rex. In earlier times some of these celebrants might have paraded, as a good number of their grandparents no doubt did, with the Mystick Krewe of Comus. Named for the Greek god of revelry and nocturnal dalliance, Comus was the first of the Mardi Gras parading societies. Founded in 1856 and long the voice of upper-class racialism—in 1877 the theme of the parade was a celebration of “the Aryan Race”—Comus always held the biggest balls and rolled the grandest floats. One of the last openly segregated organizations in New Orleans, Comus refused to allow blacks in their processions. In 1991, served with a court order restraining them from parading unless they disclosed their membership—seen as a de facto order to integrate—Comus’s response was simply to stop parading.

If New Orleans politics are pretty much race politics, the opposite number to the uptown white parades has long been the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, since 1909 the primary African-American Mardi Gras krewe. Zulu, as everyone calls it, presents itself as an all-inclusive, solidarity-based event, but this is misleading, given the complex history of race mixing in New Orleans, where light-skinned “Creoles” have long enjoyed social and financial benefits not readily available to their darker-hued brethren. In political terms, this caste system is expressed in “the paper bag test”: the large majority of the town’s African-American leading businessmen and politicians tend to be lighter in color than a UP #3 paper bag. From this circle came people like Dutch Morial, who was elected the city’s first black mayor in 1978, his son Marc, who served from 1994 to 2002, and the holder of the office during Katrina, C. Ray Nagin.

Skip had to admit that, all things being equal, he retained a reflex to vote for black candidates on the off chance they might turn out to be another Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Ray Nagin, a cable TV executive who promised to run New Orleans like “a buisness” was another matter. Skip didn’t trust him. Elected by a thin margin, Nagin would prove a bitter disappointment, most disastrously during Katrina. A memorable image from historian Douglas Brinkley’s book The Great Deluge describes the mayor cowering in a twenty-seventh-floor bathroom at the Hyatt, “rearranging knickknacks and toiletries” while the storm raged outside. Skip now regarded Nagin as a clueless buffoon at best. When the mayor expressed the opinion that “hope” might just be the city’s best chance for salvation after the storm, Skip spray-painted “Hope Is Not a Plan” on the wall of an abandoned building in the Bywater. Later, when Bush came to town and greeted the mayor by rubbing his gleaming, shaved head, prompting colleagues at the State Employment Office to exclaim, “You see what Ray let that fool do?” Skip reproduced the front-page picture of the head rubbing from the Times-Picayune with the caption “That’s My Good Boy” and stuck it up on telephone poles around town.

This was where Ron Forman came in. Forman occupied a unique position in the Venn diagram of New Orleans power. He was Jewish. The NOLA Jewish community has rarely exceeded ten thousand, but it has played a significant role going back to the town’s patron pirate saint, Jean Lafitte, the supposedly half-Sephardic rogue hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Judah Touro, another Sephardim who fought in the Battle of New Orleans, built a small dry goods store into a fortune and became one of the city’s most generous philanthrophists, with streets, hospitals, and synagogues named after him.

On the other hand there was Judah Benjamin, a slave owner and Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state, whose picture was printed on the Confederate two-dollar bill. Benjamin gets a mention in Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem “John Brown’s Body.” “Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,” Benét writes of Benjamin, picturing the politician questioning himself: “The eyes stared, searching. ‘I am a Jew. What am I doing here?’”

For Skip Henderson, though, one name stood out from the rest—Morris Karnofsky, a Russian Jew whose family owned a dry goods store on South Rampart Street. In what stands as one of the truly great culturally enabling moments in American history, Karnofsky advanced his young employee, Louis Armstrong, the money to buy his first cornet. Armstrong writes about the incident in his essay, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La.… A Real life story and experiences at the age of seven years old with the Karnofsky (Jewish) Family, the year of 1907.”

Employing his own offbeat syntax, Armstrong wrote: “The Karnofsky Family kept reminding me that I had Talent—perfect Tonation when I would Sing. One day when I was in the wagon with Morris Karnofsky—we were on Rampart and Perdido Streets and we passed a Pawn Shop which had in its Window—an old tarnished beat up B Flat Cornet. It only cost Five Dollars. Morris advanced me Two Dollars on my Salary.

“I had a long admiration for the Jewish People. Especially with long time courage, taking So Much Abuse for so long. Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family I worked for… Of course we are all well aware of the Congo Square—Slavery—Lynchings and all that stuff. Maybe the Jewish people did not go through All of those things but they went through just as much. Still they stuck together…”

Mindful that one of Armstrong’s sacred cornets was among the items damaged when the roof blew off the old U.S. Mint museum on Esplanade Avenue, Skip went to Mickey Markey Park in hopes that Ron Forman might be a Jew in the mode of Morris Karnofsky. It was not to be. Forman mentioned that afternoon that in the storm’s aftermath he’d gone the extra yard to save the Audubon Aquarium’s penguin colony. Nothing against polar avians, Skip thought, but how out of it could one guy be?

Half the parish was sleeping in FEMA trailers full of formaldehyde. In St. Roch people were shooting each other in turf wars over roofless squatter shacks. Just mailing a damn letter was a major project. Things were nasty and getting nastier. In the wake of incidents like Jefferson Parish deputies firing over heads of New Orleans residents to keep them from crossing the Gretna Bridge during the height of the poststorm flooding, race talk was taking on a cosmic tone. There were stories of how Blackwater mercenaries, seizing control of the streets in the absence of the NOPD, had killed dozens of alleged looters and dumped their bodies in the river. No less ominous was the fact, as pointed out by the classically inclined, that the name Katrina had its roots in the Greek katheros, or “cleansing.” The ethnic prefix didn’t even have to be mentioned, not with much of the black community banished to the decommissioned Houston Astrodome, where George Bush’s mother would cluck how much they’d moved up in the world. This attitude dovetailed with commentary from mean-minded idiots like John Hagee, then John McCain’s religious-right point man, who, calling attention to the annual “Southern Decadence” gay parade scheduled for a few days after the storm hit, said, “I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.” Dennis Hastert, then Speaker of the House, said that for the life of him, he couldn’t see why anyone would want to waste a nickel of taxpayers’ money rebuilding a sewer like New Orleans.

The world wasn’t coming to an end—it had ended, Skip thought, and here was Forman, this hapless guy in a Brooks Brothers shirt and tan chinos standing in the middle of Mickey Markey Park, surrounded by piles of garbage that used to be people’s furniture, talking about penguins, not one of which had ever been seen in a bayou.

The handshake closed the deal. With Forman’s hand lying in his own like a limp mackerel, Skip’s attention was diverted to the rummage sale on the other side of Piety Street.

The drum. That’s all Skip wanted. A drum to beat on for Mardi Gras.

Skip had been looking for a drum, but it wasn’t until he left Ron Forman’s rally to cross the street that he realized he’d been searching for a particular drum—this one. It was a fairly new-looking Yamaha model, with a three-inch-wide horizontal smudge bisecting the drumhead. Skip recognized the brown-green stain immediately: he’d been looking at variations of it for months while driving around the ruined city. It was the waterline, the gauge by which the height of the toxic flood could be measured, a malevolent, citywide bathtub ring. Streaked across building walls, visible on the doors of the thousands of cars stockpiled underneath the elevated I-10, in some places the ring was as much as ten feet off the ground, way over your head. The line was Katrina’s mark, like the familiar Xs spray-painted on the walls of almost every building in town by the National Guard. A code like the voodoo veves they resembled, the Xs, called “Katrina crosses,” told what day the house was inspected, which Guard unit had entered the building (“TX 1” for Texas number 1), and how many dead bodies had been found inside.

The skin of the Yamaha drumhead bore the storm’s watermark. That, and the fact that it didn’t seem too warped, made it a perfect noisemaker for the Bywater Bone Boys, Skip thought. Founded by Skip and a few Bywater locals during the Mardi Gras before Katrina, the Bones, whose charter said only “No dues, no officers, no meetings, not bound by circumstance,” claimed none of the lineage of the white uptown krewes or the black second-liners from Treme. Composed primarily of recent arrivals, the Bones nonetheless had their place in the shattered New Orleans power structure. These were the fresh recruits, the wide-eyed Americorps do-gooder types, the drifting, crusty post-hippies, the Williamsburg artist transplants, the real estate speculators. They arrived along with the hundreds of Mexican day laborers who waited in the parking lot of the Lowe’s out on Elysian Fields Avenue hoping for a construction job—all of them ready to buy into the tattered romance of the city even as the absent masses of homegrown refugees considered new lives in Atlanta or Houston. It wasn’t ideal, this post-apocalypse party scene, but it beat the wretched petro-Vegas plans the Republicans had for the next incarnation of the former French river fort founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in 1718.

Besides, the Bones were not without roots. “Boneman” groups had been rising at dawn to wake up the town on Mardi Gras morning for more than a century. For neotraditionalists like Skip and his Bywater buddies, this was the attraction—the connection to the mystical New Orleans gone by, a place where the seamless merge of life and death was celebrated with happy funeral music. This was the essence of the carnival, Skip always said, dredging up his altar boy Latin. Carne means “meat,” vale means “good-bye.” Lent was coming, things would be given up. Carnival was the festival of the flesh and you might as well drink up because after Fat Tuesday came Ash Wednesday with its cold reminder of the dust to which you will return. It was like the refrain in the song the brass bands sang at the traditional secondline funerals—life was merely a ramble, an ephemeral ramble around the town, until the butcher cut you down.

So why not be a Bone Boy, paint a skeleton on a black hoodie and run into the street at the crack of dawn banging drums and screaming things like “Wake up, future dead!” and “Who next? You next!”

After the storm, some said Mardi Gras should be suspended, even if that had never happened except for world wars and when the NOPD went on strike. The Bone Boys did not agree with this sentiment. On the contrary, Skip thought, the storm had done much to repurpose their mission, to purge it of unfortunate hipster irony. Instead of proclaiming the old-news inevitability of death, it was important to wake up the town so everyone knew they were still alive. That was why Skip had to have that water-stained drum. Spiritualized by the Flood, it was the perfect post-Katrina thing to bang on.

The drum was part of a rummage sale, mostly a pile of storm-ravaged junk haphazardly displayed along the paint-peeling walls of the house at the corner of Piety and Royal. It was a motley, obviously scavenged array of mismatched things: a couple of waterlogged Allen Iverson jerseys, a pair of andirons, a Weber grill, some flowerpots, a bed frame, an adding machine covered with dried mud. Nothing anyone would want.

“How much for the drum?” Skip asked the man standing there with his back turned.

At the sound of Skip’s voice the guy turned around. He was tallish but bent over, probably in his forties, but that was hard to gauge with dark bubble shades covering his eyes. Over a greasy New Orleans Saints T-shirt, he wore a thin black leather jacket with the sleeves rolled up to reveal arms covered with what Skip immediately recognized as prison tattoos, blue, black, and blotty. Those must have hurt, Skip thought, picturing a commingled stream of blood and ink dripping onto the cement jailhouse floor. On his right arm the man bore the likeness of a hundred-dollar bill complete with a blurred head shot of Benjamin Franklin. Beside the bill was the inscription “BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.” Tattooed onto the guy’s stomach, visible between the hem of his too-small T-shirt and his beltless jeans, was simply “NOLA.”

To Skip, this second tattoo seemed redundant. Where else could this individual be from? The way he looked, like some unhinged brigand, his haircut a whacked-off Mohawk in the front and long and stringy in the back, his river rat amalgam of off-angled Brooklynese with the occasional flowery Southernism thrown in, the guy was a yat—the tag stemming from the universal greeting “Where y’at?”—a species of Orleanian more indigenous than that army of termites munching away at the foundation of your house.

“How much for the drum?” Skip repeated.

“Can’t you read?” the man replied, pointing to a nearly illegible handwritten sign reading, “$100—take it all away.”

Skip had no need for any of the trash splayed across the sidewalk. “I’ll give you a hundred for the drum alone,” he bargained. “Keep the rest of the stuff and sell that for a hundred.”

The man just kind of hung in space the way becalmed video game characters do, awaiting instructions from a joystick. On the small nearby stoop was a gaunt, almost concave woman, with henna red hair and chalk-colored skin. The girlfriend, Skip surmised. Beside her, sitting on folding chairs, were two men, one white, one black, both in what looked to be their late sixties, wearing those plastic-brimmed nautical caps aging jazzmen favor. They were drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon out of coffee mugs, or so it seemed from the number of empty beer cans at their feet.

“Take it or leave it,” the man finally said, pointing at his sign.

That about tore it from Skip’s perspective. He’d already made his best offer. Walking away, he heard the man’s voice behind him. “Wait a minute,” the man said. “I’ve seen you around here. You’re a neighbor. That’s a whole different story. I got a lot of things. Interesting pieces.”

It was then, Skip remembers, that the man, who had now introduced himself as Dave, Dave Dominici, reached under a mottled table and pulled out a small lamp. “Check it out, neighbor. This isn’t part of the other deal. It’s separate,” Dominici said, flashing a gap-toothed, leering jack-o’-lantern carny smile. “This is going to be right up your alley. There’s a man for every product, and this is the thing for you. I know it.”

The lamp in his hand, Skip felt his collector’s impulse, his reverence for a particular object seen within the proper context, a talent cultivated in backdate magazine stalls, guitar salesrooms, and a thousand hours on eBay, click in. A quick scan revealed what appeared to be a beaux arts—style lampshade (the plastic fixture, from China, was of no interest) likely made in the mid-twentieth century. Ten inches across the top, a foot at the base, composed of panels, eight around, the shade’s condition far from perfect but not too bad. Skip’s first thought was he might be able to use it in his guest room.

Then something caught his eye about the lampshade frame, how the thin metal latticework was held together. When he was running his guitar shop back in Jersey, Skip often handled vintage German instruments, Höfners and Framuses for the most part. Both brands made a high-quality product (Höfner’s jazz models and the hollow-body violin bass Paul McCartney played were especially good), but many players complained about the so-called popsicle stick structure of the guitar neck. Rather than a single piece, the German necks were composed of thin layers of wood sandwiched together with glue. The necks never warped, but to some ears they didn’t resonate like the single-piece models. This made the German guitars sound, Skip thought, a little dead.

One other thing Skip noted about the German guitars whenever he obsessively dismantled and reassembled his stock was the solder. Funny how little details stick in your mind. The solder on American-made Fenders and Gibsons looked silvery and a little blobby. German solder had a darker, bluish appearance, with a liquid, almost oily sheen. The lampshade solder looked like that.

Now he began to grok it, the material of the lampshade itself. The warmth of it. The greasy, silky, dusty feel of it. The veined, translucent look of it.

“What’s this thing made out of, anyhow?” Skip asked.

“That’s made from the skin of Jews,” Dominici replied.

“What?”

“Hitler made skin from the Jews!” Dominici returned, louder now, with a kind of goony certainty.

With that, the two old Pabst drinkers suddenly came to life. “Nazis! Adolf Hitler!” said the white guy.

“That’s right. World War Two! Motherfucking Nazis!” said the black guy.

“Believe me, neighbor,” said Dominici, a half smile on his bumpy face. “Hitler made skin from the Jews. It’s a historical fact!” He pointed at the lampshade Skip now held in his hand. “You want it? Thirty-five dollars. That’s a heck of a good deal.”

A human skin lampshade for thirty-five dollars. That was a deal, all right.

Dave Dominici’s claim about the provenance of the lampshade was unsettling, not that Skip believed it. New Orleans was full of wacky people with scary, implausible stories, more every day since the hurricane. But just because your worst nightmares were coming true on a regular basis was no reason to believe everything you heard. Was there any reason to believe anything Dave Dominici said? The man was seemingly not stable, a potential substance abuser of the first order. That very day, Dominici revealed that, along with his girlfriend, the thin and pale Gaynielle—Gaynielle Dupree, was that New Orleans enough for you?—he had slept right through Katrina.

“Out like a light. Dead to the world,” he said, matter-of-factly. They didn’t even wake up when the storm winds tipped his house on its foundation, leaving spidery cracks in the plaster walls. The next morning Dominici was puzzled to find himself walking uphill to get to the bathroom, as if he’d been transported to an antigravity room in a funhouse. It was only when he looked out the shattered window to see the uprooted trees and overturned cars that it occurred to him to inquire, “What the hell happened here?”

Dave Dominici was a character, all right, a true New Orleanian gone cat. As Skip was walking away with the lampshade, Dominici called after him. Did Skip want to buy some “house columns”? Two eight-foot wooden faux-Doric columns had held up the roof of the small porch in front of Dominici’s house. One had been knocked down during the storm and lay in the yard. The other was in place. “Neighbor! Fifty for the pair,” Dominici shouted, tugging at the still-standing column as Skip walked away.

Skip didn’t believe it. Not at first. Still, even if he once had sold the skeleton of a human hand to one of his guitar shop clients, rock and roller Willy DeVille, Skip wasn’t about to argue when his wife, the lovely Fontaine, told him there was “absolutely no way that thing” was going on any lamp in her house. Not with that story attached to it.

Skip could have thrown the lampshade out at that point, as much as it was preying on his mind, sending out those bad vibrations, real or imagined. He meant to throw it out. But he didn’t. He let it sit there, in his closet, festering.

Once, during his “school pig” days in northern New Jersey, Skip was handed the case of a nine-year-old girl named Jessica. She hadn’t shown up at school for a week and there was no answer at her home. Skip went out to the house to find out why. When he got there he found the house had been burned down ten days before. It was a crime scene. Someone had torched the place. Jessica and her grandfather were dead, burned alive. As it turned out, the whole thing was a big mistake. A female drug dealer in the area had been ripped off by another dealer, so she gave her crackhead boyfriend a can of gasoline and told him to burn down the rival’s home. He got the wrong house. Jessica’s body was nearly unrecognizable by the time it was recovered. The cops had Skip look through pictures of dozens of burned children, trying to get some kind of identification.

What made people do things like that, Skip often wondered, kill other people out of sheer stupidity and greed? On another truant case he showed up at the kid’s address to find her three-year-old sister lying in a snowbank in her underwear. The mother had thrown her out of the house because she wouldn’t stop crying. Skip wrapped her up in his trench coat and took her to the emergency room. When the doctors finally came to attend the child, Skip just stood there in the hospital hallway screaming.

These things stayed with you. They scarred you. Twenty-five years after the incidents, Skip could remember the names of all the victims, the colors of the rooms they lived in, the way the rugs in their houses seemed to be alive beneath your feet until you realized it was roaches, the bugs in shag carpeting that made it look like it was moving. What made seven-year-olds shoot other seven-year-olds in the face at the Iberville projects? Sociology was one thing, evil another. Evil was a magnetic force, Skip thought. It was as ubiquitous as the broken glass beneath your feet, the stale air you breathed. This was what priests had taught him, and Skip saw no reason to stop believing it now.

One morning, after a restless sleep, Skip packed up the lampshade and sent it to a drum maker he knew, a person with a taste for the macabre. A few days later the lampshade came back. “I’ve been beating on skins my whole life,” the drum maker told Skip, “and I never saw anything like this. The animal that came from never had any fur on it.”

A few days later Skip packed the lampshade up again and sent it to a pathologist he’d known for years. Once more the lampshade came back. “Don’t send me shit like that,” the pathologist said.

It was around then that I happened to call Skip. We’d gotten closer over the years, especially since I’d joined the Bywater Bone Boys and spent Mardi Gras morning making as much noise as possible, waking the “predeceased.” Skip told me about the lampshade, the whole saga more or less.

“That’s a weird story, Skip,” I said.

“Well,” Skip replied, “it isn’t my problem anymore.”

“How’s that?”

“Because I just sent it to you. You’re the journalist, you figure out what it is.”

A few days later a box arrived at my door in Brooklyn. It came U.S. mail, covered with forty or so first-class stamps bearing the likeness of the great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Sugar Ray was Skip’s way of saying he was sorry for sending the thing. He knew Ray was my all-time favorite, the way he moved. Like that was supposed to soften the blow. I opened the box and looked inside.

“Gevalt,” I said.

THREE

Half a century before Skip Henderson’s package arrived at my door, before the word holocaust was spelled with a capital H, my subteen friends and I, growing up in the “fresh air zone” of Flushing, Queens, knew the lampshade was a bad thing, not that any of us thought about it very much. Beloved child actors in the then fully functioning American Dream theater, we rode our bikes and bounced our Spaldeens in our own personal Utopia. If anyone said it wasn’t so, we had Utopia Parkway, a nice six-lane road with its own exit off Robert Moses’s (our Albert Speer) newly constructed Long Island Expressway to prove it. Just about everyone’s dad worked for what civil servants always called “the City of New York,” got his house on the GI Bill, and made the same amount of money. It was probably as close to socialism as there ever was in the United States, not that we Cold War kids, who one day gathered by the expressway to boo as Khrushchev’s car drove by, were supposed to know anything about that.

The Italians were the tough guys, of course. Mostly they were okay, but there were those times when you’d hear that ominous chorus of fake sneezing. “Ah-ah-ah… Jew!” And there’d they be—Vito, Joey, and Willie, the Romanos, the Littelis—bouncy in their continental pants, hairless chests thrust out, waiting to see what you’d do.

There were two choices. You could ignore them, hope they found someone else to hassle. Or you could reply, as I sometimes did, “Guinea-sundheit.” Screaming and yelling followed, maybe some pushing. Sometimes the conflict would escalate. Then it would come out: “Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll turn you into a lampshade. You heard me, Jewboy. A lampshade.”

This could not be ignored. “Take that back!” was the only acceptable response, and when it was not, there’d be no choice but to start swinging. It was crazy, because back then, at age ten, none of us knew exactly what we were fighting about, except that the lampshade had something to do with what the Nazis had done to the Jews—or more important in the universe of training-wheel machismo, something the pussy Jews had let the Nazis do to them, a really terrible, unspeakable thing.

In America, the story of the Nazi lampshade peaked following the 1948 commutation of Ilse Koch’s sentence by General Lucius Clay, then military governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany. Stating “the evidence just wasn’t there,” Clay, accepting the recommendation of his staff, reduced the life sentence Frau Koch had been given at the Dachau trials to a mere four years, with credit for time served.

Stateside, reaction to the prospect of the skin-flaying, lampshade-making Bitch of Buchenwald walking free was instant and loud. New York congressman Emanuel Celler attacked Clay’s decision as “an outrage… This woman has been responsible for the making of hundreds of innocent people into lampshades.” The sentiment was echoed in the press and the fledgling television industry. Ed Sullivan, still on the Broadway beat for the New York Daily News in the early days of his Sunday-night variety show, wrote, “Maybe our Army has revised the conviction so that Ilse Koch can get back into the lampshade business again.” Dorothy Fuldheim, a popular news figure of the time and the first anchorwoman to appear on television, expressed a common opinion, saying, “If Ilse Koch is not guilty, then Himmler and Hitler are also not guilty!”

The protest crossed political lines. Woody Guthrie, whose guitar bore the legend “This machine kills fascists,” wrote a song called “Lucius Clay and Ilsa [sic] Koch.” The lyrics were sung from the point of view of a camp prisoner. “I’m here in Buchenwald, my number’s on my skin,” Guthrie sings, describing the horror of the bodies being dumped in piles, the SS officers cracking their skulls and stealing the gold teeth from their mouths. Telling of “lampshades made from skins,” Guthrie goes on, ending by saying the “stink is killing me” because “old Ilsy Koch was jailed/Old Ilsy Koch went free.”

With Walter Winchell, then the most powerful newsman in the country (and a strange bedfellow for Woody Guthrie), attacking Clay’s decision and demanding to know “What kind of friend does Frau Koch have in the Berlin High Command?” the U.S. Congress convened highly publicized hearings chaired by Michigan Senator Homer Ferguson to investigate the matter. Much of the damning testimony from the Dachau trial was read into the record, further cementing the image of Koch as a horseback-riding, lampshade-making Nazi monster. The hearings were front-page news for days. Treading a tenuous path between further embarrassment of the Army, which had just won the war after all, and troublesome possibility of double jeopardy, the Ferguson committee recommended that the fledgling West German government try Frau Koch for “crimes against German nationals,” a category of offense that had not been covered by the Dachau proceedings. Eager to please the Americans at little expense to itself (who was going to come to the aid of someone like Ilse Koch?), the West German government quickly reconvicted the Kommandeuse, who was again given a life sentence.

What he called “that Ilse Koch business” would hound Lucius Clay for years. In 1950, he delivered a speech at New York’s Town Hall and was interrupted by shouts of, “Let’s ask General Clay about Ilse Koch and the human skin.” Clay, who still has a street named for him in Berlin, claimed never to have regretted his decision to commute Ilse Koch’s sentence, saying, “My judgment might be wrong but it fits my conscience.” His comment that the famous Buchenwald lampshades were “absolutely proven” to be made of “goat-skin”—even though there is no record of any proof of this claim—would later become a staple of Holocaust-denier rhetoric.

How much of this history filtered down to our preadolescent brains is difficult to recall, except that I remember one evening sneaking my parents’ copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a book found in every Jewish household at the time, in hopes of reading some of the dirty parts my friends had told me about. I never got past the sentence where Uris writes about how “Ilse Koch used the skin of Jews to make lampshades.” That sent me to bed with the covers over my head.

Then again, the 1950s were an odd time to be Jewish in the United States, at least in my family. Culturally we were Jewish, willing to assimilate as long as the seltzer man still brought the Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda to the door. The religious aspect, outside of no Christmas tree, however, remained only a hollow but ensnaring echo of the past. My parents never went to temple, even on the High Holy Days (not riding in a car on Yom Kippur was their single act of atonement); nonetheless I was made to attend Hebrew school three days a week until my bar mitzvah in 1961. Our temple was of the Conservative persuasion, a sensible middle-class path between Unitarian-style Upper West Side Reformists and the long-black-coated ultra-Orthodox. Still, as the temple was relatively new (how we resented their building the rabbi’s house on our best baseball field!) and not well established, many of the instructors were bussed in from more observant Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Rabbi Adler was one of my teachers. Older than the others, with hooded eyes, unkempt beard, and shabby coat, he was a scholar. He’d grown up studying in unheated European yeshivas and did not keep secret his humiliation at being so needy in this foreign land that he was forced to make a living teaching a classroom of faux-goyishe pishers like us. One time my friend Stewie forgot his yarmulke and was wearing a Yankee cap instead. Adler snatched it from Stewie’s head and threw it out the window.

“You!” Rabbi Adler yelled in his nearly impenetrable inflection. “You are not a Jew! None of you are.”

I was afraid of Rabbi Adler, his fright-wig hair and mottled skin no doubt fulfilling many of the anti-Semitic touchstones that had been drilled into my young, unknowing Yid head. Consequently, I wasn’t thrilled one afternoon to find him standing beside me at the next bathroom urinal, specks of food in his scraggly beard, smelling like an old kitchen. Things had not been going well in class. Well aware that I, like most of my doo-wop-regarding, baseball average—memorizing classmates, could not read a word of Hebrew, Adler had been calling me to read from the prayer book. “Ha-ga-la… na…” was all I usually could muster, to his mounting rage.

Rabbi Adler stood there a moment, staring at me. “Mordecai,” he finally said, using my Hebrew name. “Do you have any idea?”

“Excuse me, Rabbi, idea of what?”

Adler did not answer but instead pulled up the sleeve of his black coat to reveal a series of tattooed numbers on his forearm. He stuck the numbers in front of my face and held them there. “Idea of this,” Adler spat before zipping himself up and leaving the bathroom.

That night I mentioned this incident to my father, who to my surprise seemed really angry about it. “He had no business doing that,” my father said, agitated. Previously Dad’s attitude toward my “Jewish education” was that I was to shut up and simply do it, get bar mitzvahed so everyone in the family could come to the party, and that would be that. This was the old man’s basic approach to most parenting issues, in keeping with the standard operating mode of the stoic World War II vet. Arriving in Europe a few days after the Normandy landing, he’d fought with Patton’s Third Army, in the Battle of the Bulge, up and down the Rhine Valley.

These were the facts, not that I heard them from my father. I read about them in old issues of Yank magazine and other Army publications that kept track of his unit, the 133rd Engineers Division. I always asked him if he’d killed the soldier whose German helmet, complete with swastika decal above the rain curl, he’d brought back from the war. His standard answer was “He saw me, I saw him, we both fainted, but I woke up first.” My mother, though, said Dad had killed the guy. “Shot him. Dead. The Nazi,” she said, which definitely provided me with bragging rights down at the park.

What was true I never knew, but my father didn’t care if we used the helmet for our war games. One day Dad saw me carrying my air rifle with the helmet on my head. “Oh, so today you’re the Nazi,” he said with a shrug, and went back to pruning his rosebushes.

Rabbi Adler’s act, however, got under my father’s skin. Later that night I heard him and my mother arguing about it. “He did that on purpose,” my father said to my mother, who told him to keep his voice down. The incident was not mentioned again. It was near the end of the school year and Rabbi Adler did not return, replaced by other scary bearded men from nightmare worlds across the sea. But still, I think about why my seeing Adler’s number tattoo upset my parents so. What was he showing me, after all, but history, what had happened to people for no other reason than that they were Jewish—Jewish like me, regardless of what the rabbi thought?

I didn’t quite get it until many years later, after both my parents were dead. I went to a funeral for a great-aunt of mine, the sister of my father’s father, Harry. There were twelve of them to begin with, eight boys and four girls. Some I knew, some I had never met, like the celebrated Uncle Larry, the family gangster who once, as the story went, won a Mott Street Chinese restaurant playing craps in a downtown opium den. The fact that he lost the restaurant to another gambler a couple of weeks later mattered little. For decades after, when anyone in the family craved a bowl of yat gaw mein, we always went to “Uncle Larry’s,” out of loyalty.

My great-aunt was the last of them, well into her nineties when she died. I drove out to the cemetery for the funeral and there they were: all the headstones, one for each brother and sister, none on this earth for less than sixty years. Their parents had bought that one-way ticket to Ellis Island in the nick of time; they’d all gotten out, not one of them had ever been sent to a death camp or had their skin turned into a lampshade by Ilse Koch. It was something to feel good about: their bones planted in the dispassionate earth of Nassau County.

This, I decided, was the key to my father’s long-ago rage. It wasn’t as if our family was so smart. There were plenty of others way smarter than us and they had been caught and killed. You couldn’t just call us lucky, either. Dad would spend long afternoons playing blackjack in Atlantic City casinos when he was dying of kidney failure and wound up having a heart attack instead. He knew the limits of luck. The reason we had survived to thrive in this, our wondrous Queens Utopia, transcended luck or brains. You couldn’t call it a smattering of benevolence on harsh Yahweh’s part, either, because my father never believed in any of that. The way things worked out was beyond any accounting, not to be taken for granted but simply accepted. What had happened to Rabbi Adler and his people was their problem. We were Americans, citizens of the true promised land. Adler had “no business” trying to infect me, the blessed son, with their misfortune.

I appreciate my father for this sentiment, if indeed that was what he was thinking. No doubt he felt he was looking out for me. But as the sign on the Buchenwald gate says, Jedem Das Seine, you are who you are. And now that this stupid lampshade had arrived in my life, certain existential details could no longer be overlooked.

New York has gone through many changes since I ran free with my friends in as yet unsubdivided Queens. One thing remains the same, however. Even since Rudolph Giuliani supposedly cleaned up the town, there are still a lot of ways to wind up dead in the big city. Anyone who spends any time working at the Office of the Medical Examiner—what most people call “the morgue”—gets used to seeing all kinds of bodies. Shot bodies, stabbed bodies, poisoned bodies, strangled baby bodies, beaten-to-death bodies, to say nothing of so-called naturally diseased bodies and bodies whose vital parts are simply too far out of warranty to keep on ticking.

No morgue worker, however, had ever seen anything like September 11, 2001. From the first moments after the planes smashed into the Trade Center towers, the medical examiner’s office was on full alert, ready for the unprecedented carnage certain to follow. Early estimates said as many as ten thousand people could be dead.

“That was the eeriest thing,” says Shiya Ribowsky, who was Director of Special Projects at the ME’s office on 9/11, “standing around on Thirtieth Street at the office waiting for the bodies. Bodies that never came. That’s when we began to realize the scope of what had happened. We weren’t going to get any bodies. Not intact, anyhow. What was coming would be pieces of bodies, if that.” Over the next several months Shiya Ribowsky and his coworkers at the examiner’s office spent as many as sixteen hours a day attempting to sort the remains of the people killed at the World Trade Center, some of whom would take years to identify.

I got Shiya Ribowsky’s name from a former NYPD homicide detective who spent a long time working on missing persons cases. “Try this guy. I met him at the ME’s office,” the cop said, in his cop way, offering the name, the phone number, and nothing else.

Truth be told, I’d been dragging my feet on the lampshade. In fact, I’d done almost nothing about it in the four months since it had arrived from New Orleans other than to stick it in a closet. When Skip Henderson called, as he often did, to find out “What’s up with the lampshade?” I told him I was working my way up to it. After all, I was busy, a working man with things on my mind. Even if what Dave Dominici had said was true, a long shot at best, the thing had been lying around for more than sixty years. Another couple of months wouldn’t hurt. No need to rush into things.

Every so often, however, I’d take it out of the box, give it a onceover. On the surface, the thing didn’t look all that creepy. If you didn’t know—if the idea hadn’t been planted in your head—it would have been very easy to walk past the shade in some dusty secondhand store. Even if you did stop to pick it up and inspect the oxidized metal frame and the parchment panels, what would you see? Just a vaguely antiqueish table lampshade with some cheesy boudoir tassels in the shape of little bells hanging off the bottom.

Not knowing the story, a person might easily enough confront the lampshade armored with the rational. After all, if there was one thing everyone had heard about human skin lampshades, especially the human skin lampshades associated with the so-called Bitch of Buchenwald, it was that they were made of tattooed skin. That was the whole decorative scheme, so to speak. The lampshade that the heavily tattooed Skip Henderson bought from the equally heavily tattooed Dave Dominici had no such markings. It was tattoo free. Beyond that, the standard opinion among scholars (it is now possible to get a Ph.D. in “Holocaust studies”) had long been that Ilse Koch did not make “hundreds” of human skin lampshades as Emanuel Celler had contended. In fact, as with the equally celebrated case of the soap the Nazis supposedly made from “Jewish fat,” many historians now believed the lampshades, if they existed at all, were quite peripheral to the vast story of the Holocaust, that they were possibly even illusionary tchotchkes of terror, the product of Allied propaganda and the brutalized imagination of prisoners.

This was how the rational person would regard the lampshade. But knowing the story, just having the suggestion inside my head, changed everything. It preyed on your mind, as Skip Henderson said. Knowing the story made it almost impossible not to feel what Skip felt when he picked up the shade: the warmth of its touch, the strange, greasy smoothness, how diaphanous it looked when placed near the light, the way the stretched panels looked to be marked with striations similar to the ones I saw on my own skin. Knowing the story brought up unsettling questions beyond even the obvious ones of who made the shade and how it had come to be in New Orleans. For instance, what about those tassels, which at least to the untrained eye appeared to have been affixed to the bottom of the frame at a later, perhaps even significantly later date? Why would someone go to the trouble of adding them onto an old lampshade? And what did that person know?

About five minutes of that was enough to make me stick the lampshade back into its Sugar Ray Robinson—plastered box and lock it in the closet for another few weeks. Still, what was I to do? I could have sent the box back to Skip Henderson when it arrived, as the drum maker and the pathologist had. But I hadn’t. I had kept it. I had put it inside my home, where my wife and I raised our three children. Skip was desperate to get rid of the thing and he had. He’d passed it on to me, and the fact that it was inside my closet, and inside my head, was proof enough that I’d accepted the assignment.

My first idea was to send it to a friend of a friend who worked at the American Museum of Natural History. My friend said this guy was a genius with taxidermy. Certainly he would be able to tell human skin from that of other animals. A few days later the man called me and said he couldn’t help me.

“Look,” he said. “A lot of my relatives were killed in the camps. This isn’t something I need in my life. You understand, right?”

“Yeah, sure. I understand.” It wasn’t something I was about to insist on. I asked him if there was someone else there who might help me.

“No,” he said, and hung up.

Shiya Ribowsky, despite his seriously Jewish name, had no such compunctions on this account. I called him and told him the story about Skip and Dave Dominici and how the thing had come to me. “I’d be very interested to see that,” he said with a friendly eagerness. He lived on Long Island, but today being Friday, he was in New York. He had a free hour late this afternoon. Could I bring the thing over right now? Did I know that synagogue in Gramercy Park?

“Yeah,” I said. My dentist happens to be on that block. I passed the synagogue, located in a former Quaker meeting hall, all too often. Why did he want to meet at a shul?

“I’m the chazzan there.”

“You’re the cantor? I thought you worked at the ME.”

“I did work there. But I’ve always been a cantor. I do both.”

“A forensic cantor—that’s a trip.”

“Tell me about it.”

Now forty-three but still sporting the boychik good looks to make the Hadassah ladies swoon, Shiya Ribowsky has been saying the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for more than thirty years now, ever since his debut as a boy cantor in the Flatbush synagogue his father had helped found back in the early 1970s. Put this history alongside his fifteen years in the medical examiner’s office, where twelve thousand dead bodies arrive every year, eight thousand of which are autopsied, and you could say that Shiya’s relationship with death is more nuanced than most, on both the spiritual and the physical plane.

In Shiya’s view, his twin professions coincide paradoxically. When he sings in his exquisite, neo-operatic tenor and recites the Kaddish, it is for the benefit of the living. Inside the tiled walls of the medical examiner’s office, there’s only the dead.

“It is job one of every religion ever invented,” the cantor said with his characteristic matter-of-fact, somehow uplifting manner, “to make us feel better about what we will inevitably become, which is for most people, let’s face it, a mass of rotting flesh under the ground. You could say I work both sides of that street.”

In the months and years following 9/11, more than twenty-two thousand separate fragments of what had once been human beings arrived at the medical examiner’s office. In the beginning the parts were large—sections of legs, whole hands—but gradually the pieces were smaller, sometimes so tiny as to be seen only under a microscope. To be working at the ME’s office then, Shiya says, “was about as close to Auschwitz as I’ll ever get, a total onslaught of death.”

Even for the forensic cantor, someone who for years often spent all day Friday walking up housing project staircases to see the aftermath of domestic violence, blood and entrails splattered against the apartment wall, and then, mere hours later, found himself singing to his well-heeled congregation of the immortality of the soul, the unprecedented interface between the living and the dead on 9/11 was traumatic.

“In this world we will do anything to isolate ourselves from the dead, to pretend that these are two completely disconnected states,” Shiya said. “Nine-eleven removed that barrier. So many of the people killed that day were simply pulverized, turned to dust. They were there, in that cloud that hung over Ground Zero. They became the very air we breathe. Chances are if you were in downtown Manhattan back then, every time you inhaled you were taking in the dead. If you were a jogger, you were lining your lungs with them.”

Then, in his impish way, Shiya smiled. “You could say I have a special insight into death, being dead myself.”

Shiya was talking about a wholly other kind of death, one that spoke of his existence as a New York Jew, an experience very different from my own. Born into a Brooklyn family that was “as frum as they come” (frum being the name the ultra-Orthodox Jews give to themselves), Shiya is descended from a long line of clerics. “When my family got together, you couldn’t throw a prayer book without it hitting half a dozen cantors or rabbis.” There was no doubt that Shiya, despite his father’s demeaning contention that he had “a small voice” that “couldn’t reach the back row of the shul,” would follow in these hallowed footsteps.

“This was the future, I thought. I had no reason, none at all, to think any differently,” remarked Shiya, who lived the life of a young Orthodox boy, wearing only black pants and white shirts, attending yeshiva fourteen hours a day from the age of seven, studying Torah. “That was going to be me,” Shiya said, “one of those stooped-over young men with the Coke-bottle glasses, twenty-five going on sixty, cashing a small check—that’s what they call them, ‘check cashers’—from a rabbinical organization to read Torah and think about Jewish law all day long… except my mother made a big mistake, or at least I know she thinks it was a mistake, one she regrets to this day.

“You see, my mother was something of an anomaly in the frum community, partially because her mother was born in the U.S., in Lowell, Massachusetts, but mostly because she went all the way through secular schooling and got a doctorate. In most frum communities that simply never happens. Whatever schooling most women get stops at the point when they’re ready to start having children. You won’t find very many women in Borough Park with a Ph.D., believe me. But this didn’t affect my mother’s religious zeal, which has only kept growing to this day. Fundamentalism is an odd thing. It gives you this special sight, the ability to be on the lookout for any and all invading impurities. On the other hand, it makes it so you can’t see your nose in front of your face. So I don’t think my mother ever considered the risk she was taking, dropping me off at the public library once a week while she did her errands.”

It was at the Flatbush library that Shiya first encountered Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and many other science fiction writers whose ideas often clashed with what he was hearing in the yeshiva. Soon he was reading straight science writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. “Carl Sagan,” Shiya said. “Carl Sagan caused a lot of spiritual warfare inside my head.

“I was in a bind; as my thinking got more liberal and secularized, the community, the Orthodox community, was getting more Orthodox. The first generations of Jews that came to America, like your relatives, wanted to fit in, to assimilate. They succeeded. Jews were more confident, secure that the knock on the door in the middle of the night was really a thing of the past. That was truly wonderful. It also made the Orthodox feel free to become more Orthodox. They became more protective of what they felt were their true roots, although very few Orthodox practices would have been recognizable to Moses, or at least a Moses who had never been to the shtetls of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“The past, the life of the shtetl, this whole kind of imagined life with its fundamentalist attitude, took over and gradually I began to realize that religiously I’d become this totally run-of-the-mill, nicely well-adjusted Conservative American Jew, living among these aliens. I was reading evolutionary biology and they were telling me the world began fifty-seven hundred years ago and believing otherwise was a chil’ hashem, or an affront to God.”

It all came to a head when Shiya’s marriage to his first wife began to break up. “We were married in the Orthodox tradition, but increasingly I felt no longer part of that. My ex and I fought bitterly about it, how I was no longer religious enough. I decided I didn’t want to be there anymore. The problem is, the way the community had become, once you leave, the door slams behind you. All of a sudden my ex was making it very difficult for me to see my three children.

“My parents took her side because at a certain point, in the transformation from the rationalist thinker to the fundamentalist, religion and a specific way of practicing is all that matters. That way of thinking is beyond me. I would never presume to know exactly what God wants for humanity and the Jews. The zoom on my Google Earth doesn’t pull back that far. The fact that I was a cantor and had been for years, leading services every Friday and Saturday, every High Holy Day, the fact that I have to sing, that for me singing is something totally necessary, and that the cantorial liturgy is the music I want to sing—that in many ways I felt more Jewish in spirit than ever didn’t matter. I might have been singing the same prayers they sung, but I was doing it in a Conservative temple, so that wasn’t good enough.”

The end, as far as his family was concerned, occurred when Shiya remarried, to his wife, Jen, who was raised Catholic. “Jen converted, she went to the mikvah, consulted with many rabbis, but this was never going to cut it for my family. They declared me dead.

“Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve had your mother and father sit shiva for you.”

This was the man who greeted me at the door of the shul on Gramercy Park South that late winter day in 2007. He was just saying good-bye to some hip-looking Manhattan kids he’d been tutoring for their bar mitzvahs, just like Rabbi Adler and his successors had tutored me. We sat down in the temple banquet hall and talked for a few moments before Shiya said, “So let’s see.”

The lampshade was still in the box with the Sugar Ray stamps. Shiya lifted it out and held it in his hands, then turned it around. He held it up to the overhead light.

“It’s parchment, that’s for sure.” Shiya has handled a lot of parchment in his life, parchment inside tefillin, mezuzahs, and the Torah itself. The lampshade material reminded him of all that. “But it is thinner, much thinner.” He held the lampshade closer to his face and turned it around again. Then he took a deep breath and sat heavily into a chair, placing the lampshade on the table in front of him.

“This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

He looks at twenty thousand pieces of murdered human beings, and this lampshade Skip Henderson bought from Dave Dominici on Piety Street in New Orleans is the saddest thing he’s ever seen in his life? “You don’t really think this is real, do you?” I asked.

Shiya kept staring at the lampshade on the table in front of him. “There’s one way to find out. The DNA.”

He went out to his car and came back with a surgical scissors and some small plastic bags. “Mind if I take a couple of samples?” No, I said, I didn’t mind.

With Shabbos soon approaching and a few of the congregation members beginning to arrive for services, I left Shiya and headed back to Brooklyn. The F train was packed with the usual multihued crew. The blacks—harried office workers getting looser for the weekend, mixing with slouchy high school hip-hoppers—would mostly get off at Jay Street to change for the A train out to Bed-Stuy and beyond. With them went the various Caribbeans, headed to the far reaches of Crown Heights, to Utica Avenue. The few straggler Hasidic black-hat Jews, cutting it too close for comfort on a Friday afternoon, would stay on until Borough Park and Midwood, along with Bengalis and Pakistanis. Ditto the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, who lived up on McDonald Avenue. The Russians, more of them every day, it seemed, their outward demeanor stolid and put-upon, would ride to the last stops, where Brighton meets the ocean. There were the “professionals,” too, mostly white and mostly young, slogging home from midtown cubicles. Many of them would get off at my stop, which is Seventh Avenue in what used to be called South Brooklyn but now like everything else around, is called Park Slope, a nomenclature dictated by the real estate market.

Sitting among the daily gaggle, the lampshade in its box on my lap, it was no great reach to assume that many of these people, myself included, might never have been born had Hitler’s killers succeeded in winning the war. In the brand-new world envisioned by the Reich planners, this trainful of supposed Lebensunwertes Leben—“life unworthy of life”—would be replaced by a whole other kind of humanity, riding not in the subway but in the sleek comfort of a Deutsche Liner, a posture-perfect array of second- and third-generation volk in their Hugo Boss tailored daywear, medicated for extreme performance by I.G. Farben, checking their holdings in a tightly edited merger of the Wall Street Journal and Der Stürmer.

This subway cacophony, with its sticky floors and zombie iPod listeners, was so different from the Valhalla the Nazis foresaw for themselves. Down here, nobody needed Plato, or Darwin, to tell them the world was a finite place, without enough to go around for everyone with the deluded temerity to call themselves human. Democracy, even the illusory sort practiced in America, was a dangerous, inevitably suicidal thing. Sooner or later these F-train untermenschen would rise up like the nasties in Metropolis, demanding their wholly undeserved share. But in the dream-life of the Reich, with all of Africa and the Russian commies dead or forced into slave labor, some already working on moon colonies organized by Werner von Braun and other rocket wizards, there would be no commodities crisis, no global warming, no economic criminality. It was a fact of natural law that superior groups would triumph over and subjugate the inferior. So why not just make it the law of the land, remove the hypocrisy? And when this happened, the planet would be returned to a primally clean Eden for the New Chosen People, at least after the perceived competition, the viral Jews, with their rootless, conspiratorial culture, had been eliminated.

With the lampshade samples already on their way to the DNA lab, it was no stretch for me and my fellow riders to count ourselves lucky that the Nazis had made their grab for racial hegemony when they did. A mere seven decades after the promulgation of Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor in 1935, which among other things forbade “the extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state of Germany or related blood,” it was sobering to imagine what the Hitlerites might have accomplished had they cracked the genetic code. With their zealous Teutonic genius for organization, what chance would supposed lesser beings have had if Mengele’s mad alchemist notions of turning brown eyes blue had been replaced by a technology capable of producing a complete chromosomal profile from a single strand of hair?

Shiya sent the lampshade samples to the Bode Technology Group, a well-known genetic analysis laboratory in Lorton, Virginia, outside Washington D.C. In the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster, the New York medical examiner’s office had done a lot of business with Bode and Shiya had been impressed by the results.

“Medical knowledge tends to expand during wartime, and nine-eleven was no different. The science of DNA identification grew up on the back of nine-eleven,” Shiya explained, adding that despite the lab’s distressing address on Furnace Road, Bode had the best chance of making an analysis of the aged and desiccated lampshade cutting. “Nobody can do what they do,” he said.

A quick look at the corporate history of the Bode company, however, was a bit unsettling. Founded by Tom Bode in 1995 as a midsized laboratory providing DNA identification primarily to law enforcement agencies in sexual assault and paternity cases, the lab was purchased in May 2001 by ChoicePoint, a leading “data aggregation” company with strong ties to Republican Party heavyweights in both the public and the private sectors. Onetime CIA operative and Bush administration undersecretary of state Richard Armitage was a former CEO; John Ashcroft served as the firm’s main Washington lobbyist after his run as U.S. attorney general. Despite involvement in a number of controversial episodes, including the 2000 Florida presidential vote counting, by 2005 ChoicePoint was maintaining seventeen billion separate records dealing with individuals and businesses. In 2007 Bode was sold again, this time to the GlobalOptions Group, another Pynchonesque-named concern whose advisory board included two former FBI directors, William Sessions and William Webster. At this point, Howard Safir, once Rudolph Giuliani’s largely ceremonial police commissioner, now head of the GlobalOptions Security Consulting and Investigations division, became Bode’s CEO. Although primarily known in law enforcement circles for once busting acid guru Timothy Leary and being related to Louis Weiner, the detective who arrested bank robber Willie Sutton, Safir was a strong advocate of the commercial possibilities of DNA typing in the security industry. Shortly after he took over at Bode, the New York Daily News ran a story questioning whether $20 million of NYPD contracts with the lab during Safir’s tenure as police commissioner had been “extended without competition from other bidders.”

Asked if he worried about the potential exploitation of such a powerful identification tool as DNA sampling for political, commercial, and/or privacy-invading reasons, Dr. Robert Bever, vice president and head research and development officer at Bode Technology, sat in his office on Furnace Road and offered only a small smile. A cautiously friendly man whose wire-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved white shirt give him the aspect of an earnest colonial missionary, Bever is not given to making global comments, especially when they might reflect upon his boss.

Originally trained as a microbiologist, Bever, now in his early fifties, began in the forensic DNA business working on paternity cases in a lab he set up in his garage. “It was all test tubes and used Volvo parts,” he said. Author of many peer-reviewed articles with titles like “Utilization of a Robotic Workstation, Fitzco FTA Paper and the Promega Powerplex to Optimize Laboratory Procedures for the Analysis of STR Loci,” Bever first came to Bode in the late 1990s and has been head of R & D for the past half dozen years.

“I think about the implications of this work, the way it might possibly be misused,” said Bever in between phone calls with technicians. “We’re dealing with the structure of life itself. You can’t approach that from a totally technical point of view. This is something I think about—the big picture, the context of our world within all of Creation. In the office, however, we must look through a different lens. Here, all that matters is what can be seen at the end of the microscope. The results. As a scientist and a believer, I don’t have any problem with this juxtaposition. There’s no real contradiction to me.”

When it came to the lampshade, however, Bever acknowledged an added complication, offering a personal note about how a number of his family members had just managed to escape the Nazis. “They left only a couple of weeks before Hitler closed the border… That disrupted their lives forever. Sometimes I think how my own life would have been different if that hadn’t happened,” Bever related, in his measured tone. “When you bring in something like this, a lampshade, with all the stories attached to it, you can’t call it just another sample. But it is our job to treat it like that.” Still, it was something of a coincidence, my bringing the lampshade to Bode, Bever added, since Jared Latiolais, the research scientist who would be doing the actual DNA testing, was from New Orleans and still had many family members there, several of whom had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Bever would not guarantee any success. He agreed with what Shiya Ribowsky had told me: “With a sample from a living being or someone recently deceased, there will always be a lot of genetic information. The human body is like a wet sponge, DNA-wise. You just have to squeeze it. With this lampshade, the age of it and state of degradation, that’s very problematic. With these kinds of samples, what we’re doing is trying to wring a bit of life out of death. Some things are more dead than others.”

From the start, Bob Bever was fairly certain that any meaningful DNA identification of the lampshade would be of the mitochondrial variety. There are two varieties of DNA to be found in every cell. The vast majority of genetic information is in the nucleus. This is the nucleotide DNA, the site of Crick and Watson’s double helix, the full ledger of a being’s hereditary dossier. However, as Bever made clear, nuclear DNA is relatively fragile, susceptible to degradation in the face of excessive moisture and sunlight, which was a problem since if there was anything New Orleans had in abundance, outside of bon temps and drive-by shootings, it was heat and humidity.[7]

This left the mitochondrial, or mtDNA, the feminine ghost in the genetic machine. The DNA in the cell nucleus is the product of equal contributions, twenty-three chromosomes each from the offspring’s mother and father. MtDNA, on the other hand, is descended solely from the female, a matrilineal linkage that has given rise to the often debated concept of “the mitochondrial Eve,” the idea that all humans can trace their origins to a “most recent common ancestor,” conjectured to be a woman who lived 140,000 years ago in East Africa. While that is not an evolutionary scenario to cheer a blut und boden Nazi eugenicist, mtDNA has nonetheless proved a boon to modern-day forensic detectives. It has been especially useful in the search for so-called ancient DNA, since even if the genetic information found in the mitochondria is less varied than the nuclear, it tends to be hardier and more stable.

Certain that the age and condition of the shade precluded much recoverable data, Bever said he hoped to “amplify the mito” in the lampshade sample, thereby enhancing the remaining DNA sequences. One major hurdle would be to eliminate “contaminates.” You didn’t want to pick up genetic material from the various handlers of the shade. Buchenwald, if that was indeed where the thing had come from, was liberated in 1945. It was now 2007. Who knew how many individuals might have touched the lampshade in its prospective journey from the Ettersberg forest to New Orleans? At the time it was impossible to know even how long the lampshade had resided with Dave Dominici before he sold it to Skip Henderson. By the time I came to see Bever, Dominici had already changed his story three times as to how and where he had come upon the lampshade. To get a verifiable reading on the DNA of the “base material” of the shade itself, the “competing profiles” of its handlers would have to be stripped away. The sample would have to be bleached and bleached again. This was a laborious process, Bob Bever said. It would take some time.

Meanwhile, the lampshade, snug in its box, sat quietly in my closet, biding its time.

Having written that cool five-thousand-dollar check to Bode Technology, a true point of no return, I figured there were only three ways it could go:

A) The lampshade could be “fake,” made of Lucius Clay’s unverified “goat skin” or perhaps pig bladder—the bladder of a pig being apparently so similar in molecular structure to human tissue that doctors have used it to reattach severed fingers.

B) Very likely the lab would be unable to make a definite identification. Bob Bever had already said that even if DNA could be retrieved from the sample, it would likely be at the “picogram” level. Asked what a picogram was, Shiya Ribowsky said, “Think of it like this: if the universe is so large as to be beyond imagining, then the picogram might be smaller than we can conceive of.”

Then, there was C) The tests would come back saying the thing was real: made out of human skin. This would change things quite dramatically.

After all, you could look at paintings like Fritz Hirschberger’s pastel nightmare Arts and Crafts in the Third Reich, which shows a demure-looking Ilse Koch seated at an ochre-colored table with Karl Koch, a long-stemmed floor lamp with a pinkish shade bearing the image of an innocent girl in a forest green bonnet. You could read “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, surround yourself with the poet’s wrenching sectioning of her soon-to-die body, her right foot “a paperweight,” her face featureless and fine like “Jew linen,” her skin “bright as a Nazi lampshade.”

However, to possess such a thing, to be able to hold it in your hand—a real human skin lampshade—this was an emotional and intellectual bridge not yet crossed. It was news. And, I had to confess, a large part of me wanted it. That was the shock, how much I wanted that object in the closet to have once been part of a walking, talking human being. It wasn’t only me. Nearly everyone I spoke to about the lampshade said, given a choice, they would, with grave reservations of course, rather it be real. It was more than the fact that pig bladders aren’t what you call a good story. Here, even in the age of 9/11, after a century of genocide from Guatemala to East Timor, was an opportunity to grasp the unthinkable.

The phone call came soon enough. You couldn’t say it was a eureka moment because someone as sober as Bob Bever does not have eureka moments, at least none that show. The lab had done the testing several times, all with the same result. It wasn’t much, a level barely above what could be measured definitely, but it was there.

“The report says it’s human,” Bever said evenly.

“You’re sure? No mistake?”

Bever exhibited a sense of irritation. Yes, he said, a mistake was possible, but he was not in the business of making mistakes.

Bever said, “Right now, if I had to stand up in a court of law, as I often do, I would testify that we have found evidence of human origin.”

“Huh.”

The report emailed from Furnace Road arrived in my in-box a few moments later, dated April 20, 2007, which would have been the Führer’s 118th birthday, sixty-two years to the day after Ann Stringer’s story about the Buchenwald lampshade broke. A number of items jumped out. Comparing the mtDNA haplotypes found in the lampshade samples to “standard Cambridge Mitochondrial sequences,” it was ascertained that the “NCBI database… came back with a 0.0 e-value signifying a 100% probability that the cyt b sequence is human.” Two such human profiles were found, one major and one minor. It was the opinion of the lab that the minor profile might be due to the handling of the lampshade, but “the major profile is most likely from the lampshade material itself.”[8]

A few hours later, Bever called again to make sure I had gotten the report. Yeah, I told him. I did.

FOUR

When I called Skip Henderson to tell him about the results of the DNA test, he was driving down North Claiborne Avenue under the I-10 in “the Bus.”

The Bus, a $400,000, forty-five-foot-long converted RV with thirteen Internet-ready computer terminals and a $20,000-plus satellite dish on the roof, was a gift to the City of New Orleans, part of the Bush administration’s scattershot Hurricane Katrina recovery plan. The original idea was to create a mobile center to help the handicapped and those otherwise unable to travel find employment. However, with the ravaged city short of cash and unsure how to properly deploy the extravagant vehicle, the Bus remained parked out at Louis Armstrong Airport for more than a year. When Goodwill Industries arrived at a public-private arrangement with the city to organize new post-Katrina employment services, the Bus became part of the deal. It was supposed to be a two-person unit, staffed by a computer-savvy employment counselor and a driver. However, there was only enough money for one salary, which is how Skip, ace employee of the Louisiana Department of Labor, wound up doing both jobs.

Planning was somewhat free-form. Basically, Skip was given the key and told to park in various parts of the largely deserted city and teach whoever happened to straggle in how to log on to Craigslist and other employment sites. There were difficulties from the start. When Skip went to pick up the RV for the first time, he found all the tires of the eight-ton vehicle completely flat. There was no spare. Skip warned the Goodwill people the satellite dish was going to get stolen, but no one listened. One day parts of the thing slid off, crashing to the pavement. Apparently some thieves, trying to remove it, had loosened the bolts.

The presence of Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s name on the side of the Bus, part of a complicated municipal takeover of the program, didn’t help. On one occasion an outraged citizen started banging on the door, demanding to talk to the mayor. His life in shambles since the storm, the man hadn’t received any of his promised state or federal relief and wanted to make sure the mayor knew of his frustrations. “I know he’s in there. It says so right there,” the man screamed, pointing to the mayor’s name on the vehicle. “Send that motherfucker out here! Right now!” The Craigslist thing was also problematical, with several would-be job seekers saying, “List? You ain’t gonna put me on no list.”

Still, Skip forged ahead, testing the Bus’s loosely strung suspension system in the ruined sections of town, attending to those he called “America’s Least Wanted.” When I reached him with the news about the lampshade, Skip was returning from Gentilly, where the still-visible Katrina waterline ranged as high as ten feet in some spots. Skip listened to what Bob Bever had told me, then, barely audible, said, “Let me call you back.”

I didn’t speak to him again until the next evening. After hearing the news, he had immediately driven the Bus to its lot, locked it up, gotten in his car, and driven home, where he drank quite a bit of Jack Daniel’s and several beers. Then he went to his computer to retrieve a picture he’d downloaded of Masha Bruskina, a seventeen-year-old Byelorussian Jewish Communist partisan being hanged by a laughing Nazi SS officer, an image that had haunted him for decades. Skip stared at Bruskina’s dead face, impassive, unrelenting beneath the hair she’d bleached blond to pass as an Aryan, and began to weep. Then he stumbled into his living room and fell asleep on the couch. When he woke up several hours later, both his young daughters were perched on top of his prone body as if it were a bleacher seat as they watched an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.

Getting up, Skip drove the five blocks to Piety Street, where Dave Dominici lived. Reaching through the padlocked iron gate, Skip knocked on the wood door, which bore a sign saying, “Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again.” There was no response, so he knocked again, harder this time. He heard the sound of someone stirring, followed by a shout of “Identify!”

Being, as he later described himself, “pretty much out of my mind by this point,” Skip screamed, “It’s me! Skip. Remember me? I bought the lampshade!”

The door opened a crack. Dave Dominici’s face appeared, a New Orleans Saints fleur-de-lis skull wrap askew across his forehead. Dominici opened the door wider. He was wearing boxer shorts. In his hand, underneath a folded newspaper, Skip could see what he imagined to be the barrel of a large pistol.

It was late now, and there was no one around except for a couple of drunks exiting Markey’s Bar a block down Royal Street. “You remember me,” Skip said again. “The guy who bought the lampshade. You know, your neighbor.”

A glimmer of recognition set in. “Oh… Neighbor!” Reaching through the gate, Dominici opened the padlock. “Come on in, neighbor,” he said, suddenly as friendly as can be.

The door opened into the kitchen which was lit by the glare of a single floodlight clipped onto a nail beside the refrigerator. Running around the room barking her head off was Dixie, Dominici’s shepherdlike mutt. A beige rug covered most of the kitchen floor. Dominici told Skip not to step on the rug because it was covering a four-foot-square, three-foot-deep hole in the floor.

“Don’t want to lose you, neighbor,” Dominici said.

“That lampshade you sold me—remember that lampshade? It’s real!”

Dominici looked out of it. Totally fried. He didn’t seem to have any idea what Skip was talking about.

This angered Skip. When he first got the lampshade, he entertained, for a moment, the notion that Dominici might be some kind of neo-Nazi, a rump follower of David Duke, Louisiana’s foremost fascist, who’d run for governor and senator a number of times back in the 1990s. Skip had met those freaks in the various jails where he’d worked trying to save the prisoners from themselves. But Dominici didn’t fit that bill. He looked like a hophead, not a Nazi, unless it was possible to be both at the same time, which Skip doubted in a place as lethargic as New Orleans. Still, you couldn’t just lay a human skin lampshade on a guy, along with all those sleepless nights, and then claim to have forgotten all about it.

“The lampshade—the damn lampshade,” Skip screamed, his ire dissolving to pleading incomprehension. “It’s made out of a person.”

Now Dominici was engaged. “A person?”

“A human being. They did DNA testing on it. In a lab. It’s human.”

“Human,” Dominici echoed, and began walking around the kitchen, stopping in front of the stove, where he squatted and placed his hands on his head as if trying to ward off a migraine. He stayed balled up like that for several seconds before catapulting himself forward, barely missing falling into the hole covered by the rug.

“I knew it. I knew it was Jew flesh!” he screamed.

It was not long before more came to light about Dave Dominici. As I would find out when I visited him at his Piety Street home, the hole in his kitchen floor now covered by a pair of nailed-down exterior doors. Dominici was something of a local celebrity. He was, as he said, “The famous cemetery bandit. The most hated man in New Orleans.”

Dominici opened a battered leatherette valise and pulled out a handful of creased clippings from the Times-Picayune. “These are all about me,” he said, with a salesman’s pride. There were two dozen or so articles, from 1998 up through 2002, with headlines like “A Grave Injustice,” “Stolen Artifacts’ Worth Could Run into Millions,” and “Cemetery Thief Pleads Guilty.”[9]

The story was this: In February 1998, a groundskeeper at the Lake Lawn Metairie Cemetery, one of New Orleans’s celebrated “cities of the dead,” from which a large number of decorative statues, brass urns, and benches had been disappearing, spotted what he termed “a suspicious-looking Chevy van with white curtains” moving slowly along the narrow roadways between the graveyard’s rococo tombs. The groundskeeper noted the van’s license plate and called the police. The vehicle was traced to one Carl Campo, the twenty-six-year-old son of a St. Bernard Parish handyman. After some questioning by New Orleans police detectives, Campo confessed his part in a cemetery robbery gang, fingering Dave Dominici as an alleged “ringleader” in what Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, writing in People magazine, called “a gothic netherworld of crime and greed involving people on all levels of Big Easy society, from petty criminals to the beau monde.”

Local color writers have been milking the spiked treacle of New Orleans’s seedy hoodooism for more than 150 years, but this was hard to beat. Dominici, in the role of a forty-year-old subtropical Fagin, had rounded up a dope-fiend krewe of yats and entered into a compact with a number of French Quarter art dealers, notably one Peter Patout, a descendant of a leading antebellum Louisiana sugar plantation family, to steal and sell a large parcel of the city’s most treasured commodity: the dead, or at least the accoutrements of the dead. The dealers kept some of the stuff, sold the rest. A six-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary taken from Lake Lawn was selling at a French Quarter shop for $5,200. Other items taken from Orleanian cemeteries began turning up in antique stores in Los Angeles and London, some going for as much as $50,000. According to the Times-Picayune, cops had recovered artifacts estimated to be worth a million dollars but believed that there was “still ten times that out there.” The thefts provoked public outcry across class and racial lines.

Perhaps it has to do with those bodies entombed above the ground, never quite consigned to the finality of having stern Protestant dirt flung across their face, but even a newbie Bywater Bone Boy calling out to the predeceased on Mardi Gras morning knows that in New Orleans, you can stomp someone in a bar, spray bullets from a passing car, murder your parents, and that’s just a call to the NOPD, who may or may not get around to it in due time, blue lights flashing. But you do not mess with the dead. You do not, no matter how desperately depraved you may be, desecrate those waterlogged, moss-covered cemeteries, trash those marble-lined pathways that Walker Percy, the greatest of the New Orleans local color writers, even better than the obscurantist Faulkner, called, in his best tourist pamphletese, “tiny lanes as crooked as old Jerusalem, meandering aimlessly between the cottages of the dead.”

These were not just any dead. As the Times-Picayune reported, “The thieves hit the final resting places of some of the best-known New Orleans families, including the restaurant-owning Brennans; the Brocatos, known for dispensing Italian ice cream; and the jazz musician Louis Prima, of Louis Prima and Keely Smith fame.”

If the bandits had raided only the graves of Comus, the sarcophagi of the uptown rulers, expensively capped teeth might be gnashed, but few hoi polloi tears would have been shed. But this was a violation of the eternal rest of the immigrants, the Irish and Italians who came to the city in the late 1800s when New Orleans was the second-largest port of entry in the country behind Ellis Island, the dead of those who’d arrived with nothing and made the new money that kept the place going beyond the stink of the Confederacy when to be called a dago in the Quarter often meant running for your life right behind the blacks. No doubt the immigrants who made it big had profited handsomely from Jim Crow laws, becoming rich during those soul-deadening times when the only nonwhites seen around the hot spots of the city’s famous heart-attack cuisine were smiling, always smiling waiters. But at least they redistributed the wealth from the hands of the plantation class, extending democracy by running businesses based on providing pleasure, even if it was often tourist pleasure.

These were the dead plundered by Dave Dominici, whose grandfather, Papa Tony, came to New Orleans from Palermo in 1910 and, in the manner of so many immigrants who made good, sold enough pasta out of his Colonial Macaroni factory to advertise on New Orleanians’ favorite horror movie TV show, The House of Shock, hosted by Morgus the Magnificent.

Eight years after his cemetery bandit arrest, kicking back in “the sitting room” of his Katrina-ravaged house, Dave Dominici flipped through his cemetery bandit clippings with a mix of regret, nostalgia, and bravado. “Twenty-two times we were mentioned on the front page, twenty-two,” he intoned, pausing over a photo of the distraught Brennan family in front of their desecrated Lake Lawn mausoleum.

“I know I shouldn’t have done it and I don’t blame these people for getting upset. I’d feel the same way if someone stole from my gramps’s tomb. But I was broke and I had this habit, so do the math on that.” The haphazardly colored images from Dave’s malfunctioning big-screen TV flitted across the cracked ceiling. When he was first arrested, they said he was looking at life in prison, on account of his two previous felony convictions, on drug and burglary charges. This prospect was reduced due in part to the contrite Dominici’s efforts to help recover the stolen objects. But still, five years is like forever when you’re ticketed for Angola.

“Angola Prison,” Dominici said, with dread befitting the fearsome 18,000-acre “farm” in West Feliciana Parish, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, home to as many as 5,000 bad men at a time, many of whom will never again walk free.

Angola was no picnic; you did what you had to to survive. If this included alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood, Angola’s leading white-power gang, so be it. “I’m as proud of my race as the next fella, but I wasn’t into that stupid Nazi shit,” Dominici said. “But if you had two thousand black guys trying to punch a hole in your scrotum with a sharpened Bic pen, you’d be Heil Hitlering all over the place, too. Moses would have done the same.”

Dominici had no complaints about his punishment. What bothered him was how the art dealers like Peter Patout “got off light” and left him holding the bag. “It was all their idea,” Dominici moaned, his eyes bulging slightly from his head. “All along they’re buying this stuff from me for like a hundred dollars apiece, marking it up a hundred times, sending it all over the world. Then I’m in Angola reading a month-old newspaper and I see Patout is out of the joint and he’s so fucking repentant he’s joining some Save Our Cemeteries bullshit because all that matters to him is preserving New Orleans’s heritage. I’m like, ‘Nigga, please!’”

Since getting out of prison in 2004, he said, he’d turned over a totally brand-new leaf. The house on Piety was an integral part of that. “I got it from a little old lady for thirty-nine thousand before the storm, a real steal.” Just two blocks from the river, soon enough the place would be worth “five times that,” thanks to the coming Mississippi “Riverwalk” park that Mayor Nagin and his fatcat buddies were talking about building along the levee with the federal money supposedly pouring in for storm relief. His house had the value-added aspect of having “a historical location,” since the long-defunct streetcar named Desire used to pass right by his kitchen window making its run down Royal Street. It all made sense, Dominici said, since way back to Chalmette High School the girls were always saying he reminded them of Marlon Brando before he started playing those fat-guy parts. Who was Stanley Kowalski, anyway, but a yat?

All he ever wanted, Dominici said, with junkie earnestness, was a chance to prove himself. To be “a normal person.” The house was the big first step, “the nest egg.” Even if the Riverwalk thing got bogged down, he could still rent out the back half of the place to some strippers he knew. Sure, it needed some “cosmetics,” but that was no problem since he was a wizard at interior decoration.

“I’m not just another guy with a head on his shoulders. I’m a guy with a head on my shoulders.

“Back in school all I cared about were science and history. Logic. Not that faith business, that pie-in-the-sky religious baloney. The rest of the class is reading Dick and Jane and I’m going through Einstein. The theory of relativity. E equals MC square, Jack, that’s what I’m talking about! Teachers said, ‘David, you’re a sleeping giant, so why don’t you wake the fuck up?’ People are always underestimating me. I got a knack for innovation. I ever tell you how I was the first chicken spicer at the first Popeye’s? Ask Al Copeland if you don’t believe me. I was the one who mixed up the spicy and the mild, the fucking flour and cayenne powder all stuck up in my eyebrows like Elmer’s glue. Who knows, I’m a hell of a cook, I could have put something in there, that one missing ingredient that clinched the whole deal. People might be eating Popeye’s all over the world for no other reason than that little dash of paprika I threw in. I should have gotten something for that! I should have gotten a high-volume franchise in a good location. An honorarium. Something! But fuck it, I’m patient. My time will come. Like the cemetery bandit thing. That wasn’t nothing. It wouldn’t have made the papers so much if it was nothing. You think it’s easy running through a pitch-dark cemetery with a hundred-fifty-pound marble angel under your arm?

“If there was one thing I tried to instill in my krewe, it was some appreciation of art history and taste. You just can’t walk in there and start loading up, grabbing the first thing you see. You got to know the difference between the Italianate styles, because Sicily ain’t Florence, Florence ain’t Rome. You got to check the fingers and the toes, the thin parts, see if it’s marble all the way through. Because a lot of people are cheap. God bless them, but they’re cheap even in death. It could be just cement covered with marble. You don’t want to be out there in the middle of the night stealing fakes. But I know… I can tell things. When it comes to the value of things, what they really are, I got a sixth sense. I’m never wrong.”

That was how he knew about the Nazi lampshade. “I got an eye for antiquities, spot them right off. But you got to find the right buyer, you know. The person who is really going to appreciate an object. The proper fit.”

This was where Skip Henderson came in, Dominici said. “When I saw him coming across the street from Mickey Markey Park, I thought to myself, Oh, here comes one. A fish. All I got to do is put out the line and it’ll be gobble, gobble, gobble. He looked just like the kind of guy who’d buy a Nazi lampshade.”

Over the next few months I spent a fair amount of time with Dave Dominici, trying to get him to tell me where he got the lampshade.

Originally Dominici told Skip Henderson that he got the lampshade from his dead father, Ralph Dominici, who’d fought his way through Europe after the D-Day landing. His father didn’t talk about the shade much, Dave recalled, only said that it was a “trophy of war” to be handled with extreme care. The problem with this story was that Ralph Dominici, who died in 1975, fought in a war, but it was the Korean War. Later Dominici told me he’d been given the shade for “safekeeping” by a ninety-year-old “Jewish fellow named Cohen with one of those tattoos on his arm” who’d moved to Terrebonne Parish to be the rabbi of a synagogue and “live out his twilight years with his people.” Told there was no synagogue in swampy Terrebonne Parish (Jewish population, circa 2000: 936) with a ninety-year-old rabbi named Cohen, Dominici said, “Okay, I’ll tell you the truth.”

The truth was, he said, that he had been given the lampshade by a legless, wheelchair-bound World War II vet, Master Sergeant Peter Patrick Francis Walsh III, whom he and Gaynielle Dupree had met while they were living in a trailer park on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain outside of Covington, Louisiana. It was an act of forgiveness, Dominici said, explaining that he, being “dope sick,” had robbed Walsh’s trailer, stealing his credit cards. “But I felt bad about it,” Dominici said. “I gave back the stuff. And apologized.” This was why Walsh, then near death, gave him the lampshade, Dominici said. “He wanted to show that he wasn’t mad.”

The farfetchedness of this story, plus the fact that no local veterans’ organization, the VFW, or the American Legion had any record of a Peter Patrick Francis Walsh, did not deter Dominici. Sticking to his story, he wrote out “an affidavit” attesting its truthfulness. Set down in looping cursive on a piece of lined loose-leaf paper, the statement was titled “How I Met Mr. Walsh.”

It said: “Sr. Peter Francis Patrick Walsh III (Covington) (War Vet.)… Bobby Bartholomew, sometimes boyfriend of Mr. Walsh’s drinking buddy, Mrs. Ann Willie Lester. Bobby Bartholomew met his end at the bottom of a railroad track when he decided to end his (considered) worthless life. Committed suicide (alcoholic). This is how I met Mr. Walsh.” Signing the document with his middle name, Ralph, “just to make it more legal,” Dominici said that Bobby Bartholomew had actually died by putting his head on the tracks and having the train run over it, but he didn’t think that was important to mention in his statement. All the rest, however, was gospel, and he offered to go over to Walgreens to get it notarized. I told him this would not be necessary.

I’d about given up on getting anything more out of Dominici when he called me one Sunday morning. Sounding strangely upset, he said if I wanted to hear “the real truth” about how he got the lampshade, I should come over to his house right away.

Meeting me at the door in his Saints wear, Dominici was a wreck. He’d lost his sunglasses and looked like he’d been crying. I don’t know what calamity had befallen him, but something had stolen his swagger. He apologized for sending me on “so many wild goose chases” but said he had no choice after Skip Henderson had come by to tell him about the DNA test. “He said that and I got so freaked out. Ask Gaynielle, it was keeping me up. I was sweating, going nuts.”

He was already the most hated man in New Orleans on account of the cemetery caper, a longtime loser. “If it got around that I had a human skin lampshade, I’ll tell you what would happen. The cops would be over here trying to hang some Hannibal Lecter rap on me. Like I was some kind of sick maniac, a disemboweler and whatnot. Believe me, I have fucked up enough in my life. My moms don’t need to be reading that in the Times-Picayune with the morning coffee.”

The truth was, Dominici said, “It came from the storm. Katrina. That’s how I got it. From Katrina.”

To hear Dominici tell it, the hurricane had left him in a “state of shock, a temporary insanity.” Yes, he’d slept through the storm, but that just made it worse, waking up to a ruined world. “We get up and we’re totally out. No dope. No works. Talk about your junkie nightmare. I come out the door and it’s like everything is destroyed. Trees gone, cars upside down. But when you got to cop, you got to cop. Down here we weren’t flooded. I didn’t have much street water. That kind of fooled me, because the TV is out, so I didn’t hear anything about the levee breaks, I didn’t know about the floods. I just know I got to see Momma Hilda. She was an old black lady with diabetes who sold syringes for one dollar. To her house is just a straight walk up Piety; I done it a thousand times. But now, as I go, I’m seeing the water is getting higher. By St. Claude it’s all over my feet. By Robertson it’s up to my waist. I’m going, what the fuck is this? Because now I’m swimming. I’m swimming through these tree branches, all these articles of clothing. Shoes, eyeglasses, a whole damn shed went by.

“So I finally get up to Momma Hilda’s place, where the water is, like, ten feet high, and I see what looks like this gray bush just bobbing in the water between the shotgun houses. Right away I know it’s Momma Hilda, ’cause she’s got that color hair. She must have fallen off the porch because she couldn’t walk too good and drowned. Poor dear! I pulled her out of the drink. I’m crazy dope sick, but what can you do? She was such a nice lady. I just stayed there crying because it was really awful what was happening. After that I went around, trying to save people, getting into houses, seeing who was alive. I was obsessed, because when it comes down to it, I hate death.”

A couple of days later the National Guard came by Dominici’s house and told him he had to get out. “They got ten guys there with M16s telling us to get our toothbrushes and jump in the truck. That’s all they said. ‘Get in the truck.’ They took us to the airport and put us on a plane. Never said where we were going. I’m screaming, ‘Ain’t this supposed to be America?’ Nobody gave two shits about that. They took us to Knoxville, to some fucked-up Beverly Hillbillies housing project. I’m yelling I got to go back to New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, that’s my home. They said to shut up, there was no such thing as New Orleans anymore and I should be glad to be in Tennessee.”

Soon after, Dominici and Gaynielle were moved up to New York. “They put us in a Ramada Inn near the airport, room 702 in LaGuardia, New York. I could hear the planes flying by, could see Shea Stadium out the window, and I’m screaming, ‘Hey, Bobby Bonds, bust one my way.’ We got arrested for not paying the subway fare, but they let us go on account of being refugees.

“New York was cool. But I missed New Orleans too much. I bought this fucked-up little Amigo pickup truck with our relief check and drove back down here. Car was a piece of junk. Every hundred miles or so something would fall off it. But we had to get home, you know? It started making really loud noises around Hattiesburg, Mississippi. But I told Gaynielle, we’re so close, we can’t stop now. The thing finally died, right out here, coming down Piety Street. We just cruised the last two blocks and shut it off right where you see it now. My house was a mess. Some squatter kids had been in there, dog shit all over the floor. I ran them out of there with shotguns. But at least I was back, you know.”

That was when he started “finding things,” Dominici said. “There were so many abandoned buildings. People just left everything and got out of town. Plenty of it was ruined, but not all of it. It wasn’t like stealing. No one was coming back for these things.” It was in one of these houses, Dominici said, that he found the lampshade.

“There was this whole pile of stuff piled up in the front room. Everything nobody would ever want. And there it was, right on top of the pile, balanced up there, like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae. There wasn’t any electricity. Not for months. But I had my flashlight. I remember it was raining. Kind of a mist. The rain was coming in because the roof of the house was ripped off. The way it looked in the flashlight, glistening, it caught my eye. Don’t ask me where I got the idea of what it was. But I’d been watching some Hitler stuff on the History Channel. I’ve always been a history buff.

“You have to trust your instincts, know when something’s special… That’s why I say it was from Katrina. If it wasn’t for the storm, I never would have found it.”

For the life of him, Dominici could not remember in which house he had found the lampshade. It was part of his post-traumatic shock from the storm, he said. There had been so many houses. Nothing, not even a hundred-dollar bill, could jog his memory. It had long been a bad problem with him, remembering things. One time he shot himself in the leg by accident. Sometimes it still hurt, but when he’d roll up his pants to show the scar, half the time he’d have the wrong leg. He chalked it up to his ADD. All he could recall was that the house where he got the lampshade was in the lower Bywater, past Alvar Street, not across St. Claude.

Dominici was born in the neighborhood, on Mazant Street in the late 1950s, before the whites moved out to St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes when the feds forced the schools to integrate. Katrina’s impact on the area had been erratic—not a lot of flooding, but a lot of wind damage. In the middle of 2007 the piles of debris were still in the streets. Maybe half the buildings were inhabited. A knock on about fifty doors followed by a couple of increasingly labored questions as to whether anyone was missing a human skin lampshade produced mostly puzzled looks.

A meeting with Terry Fredericks, a local contractor who’d employed Dave Dominici briefly to gut wrecked houses after the storm, provided a lead. Fredericks said he’d known the Dominicis for a long time and gave Dave a job “only because his mother begged me… I had to fire him after my chain saw suddenly disappeared. He said he didn’t know anything about. But I knew he stole it.”

Hearing the lampshade story, Fredericks said Dominici wasn’t the type to have something “creepy” like that. “He’s just a thief, if you know what I mean.” Fredericks did, however, have a thought. Right on the other side of the Industrial Canal, in the Holy Cross neighborhood, there was a house that Dominici had worked on. “Someone weird must have been living there. We found a crossbow and some knives. I saw David poking around in the debris, like he always does,” Frederick said. “I’d check there.”

The house was on Lamanche Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood that bore the brunt of Katrina’s worst devastation. St. Claude Avenue on this side of the canal had never exactly been the Miracle Mile, but two years after the storm there wasn’t a single store open for business, not even a gas station. Tourists could still see many of Katrina’s most photographed sights—the boats in the middle of the street, the broken church cross stuck in the upper branches of a leafless cypress tree, a white limo on top of a Mitsubishi pickup truck. At nightfall, the place became forbidding, what with the squatters and the unreliable electricity. Even in midafternoon the desolation of the place, its near-total abandonment, was appalling.

It took a few passes to find Lamanche, its street sign was nothing but a Magic Marker scrawl on an eight-inch piece of broken picket fence nailed to a post. The flooding had been severe here, and fifty feet down the street, nature was taking back the land. Tall reeds had grown up on either side of the narrow, potholed road and slapped against my rental car as I drove through. Amid the runaway growth it was possible to forget the surrounding destruction, to discount the entire man-made history of Louisiana back to its purchase in 1803, when the territory made up, as most people here are happy to remind you, more than half the United States.

Throughout nearby St. Bernard Parish, where the prestorm population of about seventy thousand now had fallen to less than twenty-five thousand, you could drive along the curving streets of devastated subdivisions and occasionally come upon a ranch home that had been renovated. The house looked like a totally normal American suburban dwelling, with the pickup in the driveway, bicycles on the porch, a happy face sticker on a shiny mailbox announcing the family’s name. The homeowner himself might be out front, watering his resodded lawn, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every other dwelling on the block was abandoned, many with fading Do Not Demolish signs in front.

The house on Lamanche where Terry Fredericks suspected Dave Dominici might have found the lampshade was in the middle of a slo-mo fix-up. Work had been done on the roof; the windows were new. Water-damaged Sheetrock leaned against the porch; a tattered plastic sheet covered the side door. Sitting on the porch was a teenager, probably fifteen or so, holding a sleeping baby. Light-skinned in the manner of what is called Creole down here, she was talking on a pink cell phone. She was laughing when I pulled up, but my unannounced presence put a stop to that.

“Do something for you?” the girl asked, warily.

I said I was doing some research on the area and did she know anything about the people who might have lived in the house before the storm.

“Before the storm? Don’t know nothing about before the storm.” Her aunt, whose house in New Orleans East was wrecked in the flood, had just moved in a couple of weeks before. Their stuff, what they had, was still packed in boxes. Asked if she had found anything “strange,” like some old military stuff, or anything foreign, the girl’s mood brightened. Yes, she said. Her aunt had found “this weird money” behind the house. “It’s foreign. I don’t even know where from.”

She got up, taking the baby with her, and returned a few moments later with a canvas bag containing maybe twenty coins. “They might be from anywhere.”

I dumped a couple into the palm of my hand. “They’re Canadian.”

“You mean, like, from Canada?”

“Says it right on there.”

The girl looked at the coin. “Guess I didn’t see that. Shit. Canada’s next door. I thought it was far,” she said, deflated. Sullen once more, she said she couldn’t give me her aunt’s number, but I could leave mine. “What am I supposed to say you want?” Seeing no downside, I explained a bit about the lampshade.

The girl looked horrified. “You think it was in this house? They found it here? That’s terrible!”

“I didn’t say it was from here,” I said, attempting to backtrack. “I’m trying to find out about a story I heard.”

The baby started to fuss as the girl gave me that look, like if she lived to be a thousand, she’d never understand why white people say and do the things they do. “You looking for something that used to be a person,” she said. “People I know—they’re looking for people that are still people.”

In his book The Theory and Practice of Hell, the first comprehensive account of life in a Nazi concentration camp and in many ways still one of the most informative, Eugen Kogon, a conservative Austrian Catholic who was a political prisoner at Buchenwald from 1939 to 1945, describes the daily routine of the place. Awoken as early as four in the morning by whistles, prisoners were given a meager breakfast of weak coffee and a piece of bread and then made to assemble in the Appellplatz, the wide-open field between the inmate barracks and the entrance gate, for roll call.

“Thousands of zebra-striped figures of misery, marching under the glare of the floodlights in the haze of dawn, column after column—no one who has ever witnessed it is likely to forget the sight,” writes Kogon, describing how the various categories of prisoners were denoted by color-coded SS-issued triangular patches sewn onto their clothing. The “politicals” bore a red triangle, “criminals” green, black was for the “work shy” and the “asocial,” purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses (described in camp parlance as “Bible researchers”), and pink for homosexuals. Jews wore the infamous yellow triangle. If a Jew was deemed to also fall into any of the other groups, the appropriate colored triangle would be sewn over the yellow one to make a Jewish star. At the morning roll call, the prisoners would line up—as many as twenty-five thousand forced laborers, slaves, really—to be sent out to their various work details in the quarries, machine shops, and pigsties, and in the evening were reassembled in the same spot.

The evening roll call included the dreaded head count, which often took hours, since if anyone was missing, the entire camp was made to stand at attention until the absent prisoner was found. Kogon recounts one such occasion. In December 1938, the prisoners were assembled on the Appellplatz for nineteen hours in subzero temperatures, motionless except for incessant commands to remove their caps from their shaven heads and put them back on again.

“Twenty-five had frozen to death by morning; by noon the number had risen to more than seventy,” he writes. Kogon describes a similar situation the preceding winter when prisoners were forced to strip naked for a number of hours, a sight which attracted “the wife of Kommandant Koch, in company with the wives of four other SS officers,” who came “to the wire fence to gloat at the sight of the naked figures.”

One recurring feature at roll call was the singing of “The Buchenwald Song,” always accompanied by the camp band. The song was commissioned by SS Major and Deputy Camp Kommandant Arthur Rödl, an alcoholic Karl Koch crony and member of the Nazi “Blood Order,” indicating party membership dating back to the days of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Other camps had songs, so Buchenwald should have one as well, Rödl declared, offering ten marks to any prisoner writing an acceptable tune. Many proposals were turned down before an entry submitted by a “green” criminal but actually written by a pair of Austrian Jews was accepted. Apparently either unaware of or unconcerned with the underlying subversiveness of lyrics like “O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you/For you are my Fate… We will say yes to life/For the day will come when we are free!” Rödl ordered each prisoner to learn the song. Appearing at roll call “stinking drunk,” he would snap, “Sing ‘The Buchenwald Song’!” He’d require the inmates to stand for hours in driving rainstorms until the piece was rendered to his satisfaction.

The Jews had their own song, which they were forced to sing repeatedly, often at the command of the SS officer Hermann Florstedt, who, after the transfer of Karl Koch to Lublin, was widely reported to have been Ilse Koch’s lover. Entitled “The Jew Song,” it went, “For years we wreaked deceit upon the nation/No fraud too great for us, no scheme too dark/All that we did was cheat and swindle/Whether with dollar, pound, or mark/But now, at last the Germans know our nature/And barbed wire hides us safely out of sight… And now, with mournful crooked Jewish noses/We find that hate and discord were in vain/An end to thievery, to food aplenty/Too late, we say, again and yet again.”

At one time, anyone standing on the Appellplatz could have seen most of the camp. It would have been possible to scan the array of prisoner barracks, small wooden shacks called “blocks,” fanned out in lines of eight and ten, the “children’s blocks” set behind them. To the side would have been the medical experiment blocks, with their tile-topped tables on which Nazi doctors went about their harsh rounds of yanking gold teeth and stripping skin from the dead. Also visible, of course, would be the crematorium and its squat smokestack, where, prisoners grimly joked, the exhaust of their existence would soon be rising.

I thought that seeing these things would provide context, a way to collate the experience of standing in the cold wind with what can be read in books and seen in movies. It was in and around those doom-laded bunkhouses that Margaret Bourke-White, traveling with Patton’s army, took her famous photos of the bodies that Edward R. Murrow, in an anguished on-site radio broadcast, said were “stacked like cordwood.” But most of the camp structures were torn down by the Soviets in the early 1950s before they turned the place over to their East German clients, who, in the interests of their “antifascist” cause, memorialized the vanished buildings by filling their footprints with piles of stones.

On the day I arrived, I saw nothing from the Appellplatz. The winter Ettersberg fog had descended and was so thick I could barely make out my feet. The last, sparse tourist group had long since filed onto their bus and gone down the Blood Road, and I was alone, marooned on the Appellplatz, enveloped in the fog like a gauze-wrapped mummy.

Years before, in Phnom Penh, I’d visited Tuol Sleng, a former high school that became the notorious S-21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge tortured and murdered more than fourteen thousand people between 1975 and 1979. What happened at Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees” in Khmer) was as hideous as anything ever attempted by the Nazis. The chilling photo gallery of the victims and the list of “security regulations” still hang on the wall: “4: You must answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.” “6: When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all.” Still, when the harrowed visitor leaves Tuol Sleng, he steps back into the world. On the other side of the fence, outside the prison entrance, people bustle by, deliverymen go about their business, motorcycle taxi—men hang out beside their scooters smoking cigarettes, the bougainvillea blooms. The Buchenwald Appellplatz was not like that. Socked in by the fog, it was as if the end of the line had been reached, with nothing but abyss ahead.

Who knew what manner of ghosts lurked out there in the gray swirl? So many had died here. At any moment I expected them to assemble in their striped pajamas for yet another roll call. I could join right in, singing “The Jew Song.”

I’d lived a charmed life, I knew, growing up in America, removed from the terror of my roots. In Romania, where half my family comes from, they didn’t even need Nazis. The Romanian army competed with the Einsatzgruppen, SS “mobile killing teams,” to see how many Jews they could murder. It was in the blood there, too. But I’d been spared, much as I’d gotten out of so much other misery, the Vietnam War included. Past sixty now, and they hadn’t laid a glove on me. Yet here I was, at long last, the gate that declared Jedem Das Seine shut behind me.

And what had brought me here? The stupid lampshade. A few weeks before I got on the plane to Berlin, Skip Henderson called me in his special kind of panic to tell me about a dream he’d had. It was the lampshade, hovering, against a black background. That was it, his entire dream. The shade never moved, just stayed there, blocking his view of anything else in life. This was when he realized something about the tassels, the little Hershey Kiss bobs everyone I’d talked to was certain had been added years, perhaps decades, after the construction of the shade itself. The guy from Sotheby’s had told me: “Beaux arts, central European, midcentury, fringe added later.” Hugo Ramirez, who owns a classy antique lighting shop on Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan, had agreed: “Definitely central European, maybe thirties or forties; someone put those tassels on later.”

“Take the thing out of the box,” Skip demanded. “Look at the tassels.”

“What about them?”

“They’re Mardi Gras colors, aren’t they?”

It is remarkable what you don’t notice. Skip was right. The tassels were faded, not garish and plastic-bright like the beads the masked men throw at you from passing floats. But they were definitely green, gold, and purple. Green, gold, and purple, in that order, all the way around. So what did that mean? That the unknown individual, the surreptitious stitcher, the one who put the tassels on, had a really sick sense of humor? Who knew? If anything did seem certain, however, it was that Dave Dominici was right when he said the lampshade came “from the storm,” that without Katrina it would have never come to light. It took the churn of Katrina’s double, double, toil and trouble to dredge the Nazi lampshade up from the underground.

As I stared off into the Buchenwald fog, I felt a connection between this place of terror, where the lampshade supposedly had come from, and where it ended up, in the New Orleans flood. The lampshade had its secrets, things I needed to know. Perhaps Goethe, poet of the Walpurgisnacht, would have had an answer. But even that was far from clear, as I knew from my copy of Faust, inside my shoulder bag even as I stood amid the murk on the Appellplatz. In the dedication, the poet, with “a shudder that shakes my frame” writes “the firm heart feels weakened and remote. What I possess, mine, seems so far away from me, and what is gone becomes reality.”