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

THIRTEEN

For twenty years, I thought the opening line of Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” was “Seen the arrow on the dartboard, saying this land is condemned.” Then I found out that he’s really saying, “Seen the arrow on the doorpost…” The song was already one of Dylan’s most desolate, with that business about the “ghosts of slavery ships” and “power and greed and corruptible seed,” and the change only added to the bleakness. Since the next line, one I had right from the start, was “all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem,” “Blind Willie McTell” became the mournful soundtrack to the few weeks before I boarded a plane to Ben Gurion Airport.

I saw the story of the lampshade breaking down into three parts: A) getting it, B) having it (the attempt to understand the history and the nature of the thing), and C) getting rid of it. I was up to C, or so I thought after speaking to renowned Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer. In contrast to other Holocaust professionals, Bauer, former director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs, and Heroes, Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, senior adviser to the International Forum on Genocide Prevention, and winner of the coveted Israel Prize, said he was more than willing to entertain the possibility that the lampshade might be real.

“Why shouldn’t I believe the Germans made lampshades out of Jews?” said the then eighty-three-year-old Bauer when I reached him in his Jerusalem office. When it came to atrocities, “I wouldn’t put anything past those people.”

Dr. Bauer had arrived in Palestine in 1939 after his family fled Prague, and he fought in the 1948 War of Independence. He and I had been emailing each other for a few weeks, and after receiving a copy of the Bode lab DNA report, he pronounced himself “officially intrigued” by the Katrina lampshade. “These colorful details you describe, with these oddball characters, seem unbelievable, but it is not unusual that such things like this lampshade might appear in the wake of upheavals,” the historian said. “In any disaster, and this New Orleans flood is certainly a disaster, the foundations and the framework of a time or place become shaken, causing strange things to wash up.”

Bauer was “not surprised” at my difficulties in getting a major Holocaust institution to take the lampshade off my hands. Holocaust institutions did a wonderful job in the preserving of memory and raising consciousness regarding genocide in general, he said, “but they were still institutions, given to institutional thinking.” This meant “fitting things into categories. I am not certain this lampshade of yours has a category.”

I asked Bauer about the “ownership” of the lampshade. If it was made from a human being, as the science indicated, who did it belong to? Was it possible for anyone or any entity to claim title to something like the lampshade?

“Who does it belong to?” Bauer wrote back. “I am no expert on legal issues like that, but clearly it belongs to you, at the moment at least, and you are perfectly entitled to do with it whatever you think fit. However, if what we both fear—that it comes from a camp—can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, perhaps it can be said to belong to the Jewish people. And in that case it should be at Yad Vashem.”

On the phone Bauer said he had an upcoming dinner date with his longtime colleague Avner Shalev, the former Israel Defense Forces brigadier general and current Yad Vashem chairman. “I will talk to him about it,” Bauer said. If Mr. Shalev agreed, as Bauer felt he probably would, it might be possible for Yad Vashem to undertake some further testing on the lampshade. I could either ship the lampshade or, better yet, bring it myself. Jerusalem was quite nice in the fall, at least after the High Holy Days and the rest of the Jewish holidays, which Bauer, a noted atheist, called “endless.”

If I could see my way to bringing the lampshade to Jerusalem, Dr. Bauer said, we could discuss it over a cup of coffee. “I know I would like to see it.”

If Yad Vashem would accept the lampshade, that would be that. Who could claim that by handing the lampshade over to the ultimate Holocaust authority, headquartered smack-dab in the middle of the Holy Land, I had not fulfilled my solemn responsibilities? Yet as I packed my bags, cold feet set in.

There had been some changes regarding the lampshade, and my relationship to it. For one thing, it was no longer in the box with the Sugar Ray Robinson stamps. If I was going to travel sixty-five hundred miles with the shade as a piece of carry-on luggage, it would need a sturdier container. An antique and art shipper on the Brooklyn-Queens border said he could make a nice box with a foam-core interior. I brought the shade to his shop; he took one look at it and asked what animal it was. There were several new laws on the books pertaining to shipments of animal products; he was not interested in having anything to do with the skins that might have come from an endangered species. Not to worry, I told him, probably a tad too flippantly, this species was not endangered. Far from it.

“Not endangered—I was afraid of that,” the box maker said, turning a bit pale. After a pause he said that even though his services usually included packing the item, he could not do so in this case. He would make the box, that’s all. I would have to pack it myself and pay cash. A couple of days later the box was ready and I went to pick it up. It was snow white with a bloodred handle affixed to the top. Was this the only color he had, or was it commentary?

I never knew how people were going to react to the lampshade. I’d been talking with “Mr. Paul,” a high-end lighting designer from India, who worked with Hugo Ramirez, the Argentine-born owner of a marvel-filled antique lighting store on East Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan. Mr. Paul and Hugo Ramirez were fascinated by the human skin lampshade. They spent a good deal of time examining it, and had a few disagreements about its construction, notably whether the stitches that joined the skin panels together had been done by hand or machine. Ramirez felt a machine had been used. Mr. Paul, pointing to the varying spacing between the stitches in certain spots, insisted that the shade was hand-sewn. Their debate grew louder by the moment, causing uneasy looks among the browsers in Ramirez’s store.

In the cause of further research, Mr. Paul suggested we drive out to East New York in Brooklyn to talk to Eppie G., who learned to make lampshades from animal skins in her mountain village in Ecuador. A tiny, dark-haired woman in her fifties with a no-nonsense, market-lady demeanor, Eppie looked over the lampshade, noting the “greasy” feel of the panels. She wanted to know which animal it was made from. When I broke the news to her, she screamed and ran out of the house, leaving the front door wide open to the winter air.

It was several minutes before she returned. Now totally calm and businesslike, she said, in Spanish, “I would cut the pieces from the back and the belly, because you cannot use one piece. You tan it… in the sun, then you cut. With a big knife.” She went through the whole process with a craftswoman’s precision, as if it were just another job she’d done a dozen times.

If there was one thing everyone agreed on, it was that I was insane to keep the shade at my house. How could I stand to be around the thing? After a while, if someone asked where the shade was, I’d lie and say it was in a storage unit or a safe-deposit box. It was simply too hard to explain that after a while I wanted the lampshade around me. That being away from it didn’t feel right.

Doña Argentina, the Dominican medium in Union City, New Jersey, said the spirit of the lampshade “trusted” me, that “he” placed “his fate” in my hands. But how could you take this sort of talk seriously? Soon after receiving the lampshade from Skip Henderson, I’d stopped in at Priestess Miriam’s spiritualist parlor on Rampart Street in New Orleans. Miriam had a local rep for being able to contact the dead, so I thought I’d try her on the lampshade. The priestess’s storefront is right below the apartment where, in a frightening case, Zackery Bowen, an Iraq War veteran, murdered and dismembered his girlfriend with whom he’d ridden out Katrina. Bowen had kept the body parts in the apartment for days on end. I asked Priestess Miriam about that and she said, somewhat huffily, “That’s upstairs. I pay rent down here.”

In the months since seeing Doña Argentina, I’d grown closer and closer to the “spirit” of the lampshade. Like hurricanes, the shade had acquired a name. “Ziggy,” I called it, a nice German-Jewish name, American for Sigmund, as in Freud. Feeling nervous the night before leaving for Jerusalem, I put Ziggy on my bed and lit one of the candles Doña Argentina had given me. On cue, the flame lurched from a flicker to several inches high.

Watching the glow of the candle flit across the diaphanous surface of the skin shade was to allow the consideration of any number of intellectual and emotional propositions. To paraphrase the Russian “harlequin,” Kurtz’s disciple in Heart of Darkness, the lampshade had “enlarged my mind.” In his presence I was invited to ponder the most basic of Zoroastrian dualities, the distinction between light and dark, which made sense since what was a lampshade (lamp/shade) but a device designed to simultaneously shed and constrain illumination—an interplay of obfuscation and radiance that yielded, for lack of a better term, meaning. Goethe the polymath had tackled similar issues in his major scientific work, A Theory of Colors. Discussing his findings with his faithful secretary and biographer Johann Eckermann as they strolled the Ettersberg forest, the master said, “We see that darkness itself is part of light. It sounds absurd when I express it: but so it is. Colors, which are shadow and the result of shade, are light itself.”

From the beginning, the lampshade had been talking to me, making itself known in small and often oblique ways. It was a conversation I’d gotten used to, grown protective about. There was no way to banish the possible horror scenarios of how the lampshade came to be, the indelible images of the unlucky prisoner plucked from the Buchenwald Appellplatz by a former Dresden secretary on a white horse, the misery of being lain prone on the tiled tabletop in the pathology lab, the shearing blades ripping away skin in sheets, the weeping cobbler working deep into the camp night to add a bit of style to the frame as a loving, if perverse, tribute to a doomed friend who was now to be given as part of a birthday gift to a Nazi Kommandant. If this was the story of the lampshade, so be it. Yet eventually, inevitably, the revulsion, the fear, even vengeful anger faded away before a vast wave of sympathy. The thing had been a person. With the candlelight shooting higher, it was still a person. A human being who had asked me to look out for him and deserved no less.

So, with respect and as gently as I could, I placed the lampshade into its new, stark-white home with its bloodred handle. The customs people and the cops might order me to peel back the Velcro that held the box’s lid closed. They might demand to look inside. If so, what would they see? An old, torn lampshade. They were looking for bombs, C-4, pistols, box cutters, not souls.

A few days after landing in the Holy City, I was sipping a cup of tea at the Three Arches Restaurant inside the Jerusalem YMCA on King David Street, engaged in a conversation with Yehuda Bauer regarding particularism and universalism as it pertained to the lampshade found in New Orleans. Attired in a jaunty royal blue windbreaker with racing stripes down the arms and describing himself as “quite lively for a semiretired eighty-three-year-old with a foot and a half in the grave,” Bauer listened patiently as I made my case about how the Bode lab’s DNA test, which identified the shade as being of human origin but did not specify the kind of human, might place the object in “a no-man’s-land of murder,” belonging to no one and no group. “To me that makes it a potentially universalist object,” I said to the famous scholar.

Bauer’s own position on the issues of universalism and particularism are well known among Holocaust scholars. Speaking in front of the German Bundestag in 1998, he had asked, “How is it possible to compare the tragedy of a Jew, or a Russian peasant, or a Tutsi, or a Cambodian Khmer? It is, surely, impossible to say one mass murder is better or worse than another, that the suffering of one person is greater or less than that of another. Such a statement would be repulsive.”

Yet in the Holocaust, Bauer continued, “for the first time in the whole of history, people descended from a particular kind of grandparent—in this case Jewish—were condemned to death just for being born. This, the mere fact of their having been born, was by itself their deadly crime that had to be avenged by execution. This has never happened before, anywhere.”

At the Jerusalem YMCA, Bauer received my lampshade claims with the patience of a bemused elder, as if they were part of an overblown but not uninteresting grad student paper. He was willing to entertain the possibility that the lampshade might qualify as “an icon of genocide.” Likewise, the “tantalizingly inconclusive” DNA report was “intellectually provocative.” But as for what any of these notions proved, if anything, Bauer would not venture a guess.

Not that he had any doubt that the lampshade was real, Bauer said. When I took the shade out of its white box, he hesitated before approaching it. “A sobering sight,” he said. But if the science of the shade was a matter for the lab workers, what it meant—the position it might take in the Holocaust narrative or the wider discussion of human affairs—was a trickier business. “I think you should not worry too much about arguments about things like universalism and particularism. These discussions are for academics, people like me,” Bauer said, dipping a piece of pita bread into a plate of hummus.

“You are a writer, you tell stories. The meaning comes from the telling, and the retelling.” Not to make any comparisons, Bauer said, but this is what he often thought when he encountered Holocaust survivors: “Tell your story. Don’t stop telling it.” For Bauer, oral history was mutually beneficial to the teller and the listener. In the past decades, he’d heard so many stories. “Thousands of terrible stories, rattling around in my brain.” Some of these narratives were more revealing than others, but all of them, even the lies, had value. One day, however, the last survivor will die. Then, even though he and many other historians had written down the stories, finding the truth of things will become more difficult because the voices, “the sound of them, the voice of the teller, will never be heard again.”

This was why he liked hearing about the lampshade from New Orleans, Bauer said, and why I should keep telling the story. “This Dominici, for instance, he is quite a fellow,” he remarked, leaning back in his chair. Bauer couldn’t hear enough about the former cemetery bandit. “The role of the thief is always interesting, the ambiguities of so-called good and evil in situations of extremis,” he said, captivated by the account of how Dominici had talked himself into the psych ward at the OPP by insisting on immunity from prosecution owing to his status as the locator of “the Nazi lampshade.”

“What a character!” the scholar exclaimed.

On the Dominici front, there had been some recent news. Since I visited him at the OPP, he’d been convicted on a number of charges and sent to the state pen in DeQuincy, in the swamplands near the Texas border. In a letter I received from him, Dominici maintained a steadfastly upbeat account of his life and times, reporting he was keeping his “nose clean and mouth shut,” promising to be “back-at-ya” in no time. DeQuincy was no picnic, but being locked up was “a blessing in disguise” since it gave him plenty of time to work on his autobiography, which he planned to call Or Else Is Here—Drugs, Money, Graveyard Robbery! A Drug Addict’s Insane Ideas to Keep from Being DopeSick!

“Or Else Is Here?” Bauer repeated, trying to grasp the gist of Dominici’s title. Then, looking up with a wide grin, Bauer, who purports to be “a world-class collector of Jewish jokes good, bad, and indifferent,” said, “Oh. Now I get it. Or Else Is Here. You either do this, or else. You didn’t do it, so now Or Else Is Here! A marvelous concept, I think. A very Jewish concept.” In a way, he said, Dominici’s title also described the history of the State of Israel. “Or else is always here.”

When I met Bauer at the Y, the Israeli invasion of Hamas-ruled Gaza was still weeks away but clearly in the wind. Hamas had been firing rockets into Israeli territory with increasing frequency. Reaction by the IDF was inevitable. “The Army will go in there because it will be seen as necessary and they will do it with great popular support,” Bauer said. Despite his long involvement with the now marginalized left-wing Israeli “peace” parties like Mapam and Meretz, Bauer could see no other way of looking at the realpolitik of the situation. He had no doubt about what he called the “genocidal mind-set toward the Jewish people” on the part of Hamas and other radical Islamic groups. “What do you say to people who claim to prefer you were dead?” he asked. This threat worked both ways, added Bauer. In 2003 he had caused something of a stir when he said that in the armed conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, “if one side becomes stronger, there is a chance of genocide.” Asked by shocked observers if he was really suggesting that the State of Israel might be capable of committing genocide against the Palestinians, Bauer, professor of the Holocaust, said, “Yes.”

Five years later, the Israeli situation was no better. Relations with the Palestinians had reached a numbing antipathy on both sides; the rise of Muslim fundamentalism with its eliminationist rhetoric had only grown louder and more dangerous. Ahmadinejad was hosting meetings in Tehran to deny the Holocaust. Throughout western Europe, hostility toward Israel, especially on the left, was often translated to mean anti-Semitism in many quarters. Inside Israel itself, the liberal, secular society envisioned by many of the yishuv, the early Zionist settlers, kibbutzim idealists who’d fought to establish a nation, was under siege. Many intellectuals had left the country. To live in Jerusalem now was “to be squeezed by various fundamentalists on all sides,” Bauer said, including the ever-growing community of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, members of the various Hasidic sects, each with their own rebbes, who would throw stones at your car if they saw you driving on the Sabbath.

One of Bauer’s most penetrating essays, “Theology, or God the Surgeon,” critiques Haredi attitudes toward the Holocaust, describing what he calls “the convoluted arguments” used by the ultra-Orthodox to explain how an all-powerful, all-merciful Lord could allow his chosen people to endure such a travail. Sweeping away the “elementary” notion advanced by some rebbes that humans are simply “too puny” to understand the methodology of the Deity, Bauer focuses on the often-voiced Haredi view that the Holocaust was God’s punishment upon the Jews for falling from the strict path of the Torah. As an illustration of this thinking, Bauer cites an “invented” parable employed by the late Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Schneerson, still thought to be the moshiach, or messiah, by many followers despite his death in 1994, characterized the Holocaust as an operation by God, “the specialist surgeon” who cuts off a “hopelessly poisoned” limb in order to “save the life of the patient,” i.e., “the Jewish people.” Bauer is disgusted by what he calls this mipnei khata’einu “because of our sins” explanation for the death of almost fifty million people in World War II, only 10 percent of them Jews. To conjure a God so obsessed with the fate of the Jews is, Bauer argues, to remove the Holocaust from the realm of human history, thereby “absolving” the Third Reich of its crimes and assigning Adolf Hitler, whom Schneerson refers to as “a mad goy,” the role of divinely appointed agent of mass murder.

It was in the context of talking about the Haredi influence in current Israeli society that Bauer broke the news to me that even with additional testing there was no chance Yad Vashem would take the lampshade into its collection or store it on its premises. “They are prohibited by law from doing so,” he explained, owing to an agreement with the religious community that holds that human remains must be buried according to the rituals that prepare the body for its final rest.

This brought me up short. I was aware of the Jewish law regarding human remains. It went back at least to the Pentateuch, with who knew how much halachic amendment since. Back in New York people were telling me not to worry about customs, the real danger were the ultra-Orthodox, who, as one friend told me, “will hit you over the head and bury the lampshade, and they won’t be sending it to any lab to see if it is real or not first.” But I had no idea this attitude would apply to a museum and learning center like Yad Vashem.

Noting my dismay, Bauer, while allowing that he might have mentioned this earlier, asked me what was wrong. Looking at me with a stern impatience that seemed distinctly rabbinical, he wondered if I’d really been listening when he was talking about the value of telling the lampshade story. Why had I bothered to go to Jerusalem in the first place? Was this all I hoped to get out of this journey, an opportunity to have people from a museum lock this “symbolic object” into a closet? Would that be a proper end to my inquiry regarding the lampshade, the best end of the story I was telling?

“Do you want some advice?” he asked.

“When you see Avner Shalev,” Bauer said, referring to my upcoming meeting with the head of Yad Vashem and the museum curators, “don’t bring up that business about seeing the spiritualist lady with the cigars and the rum in New Jersey. And don’t call the lampshade by a name. Things like that are all right for me. For me this is all part of the story. Mr. Shalev is an Army guy. He is very smart, but very practical. He will want to hear what you say, but certain things will make him wonder how serious you are. So be careful how you tell the story, you’ll get more out of him, believe me.”

Yehuda Bauer was right about Avner Shalev. Director of Yad Vashem since 1993, Shalev retained the brusque but not unfriendly aspect of a military man, a bearing no doubt honed while taking part in the negotiation of the peace treaty with the Egyptians following the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Now seventy years old, a blocky man in a blue suit, he sat at a conference table along with Yehudit Shendar, the museum’s senior art curator, and Haviva Peled-Carmeli, the senior artifacts curator. It was quite a high-level turnout to hear the story of a humble lampshade scavenged from a wrecked house in the aftermath of a New Orleans hurricane.

I gave them the whole spiel, from Skip Henderson’s purchase of the lampshade all the way through. We discussed the DNA report. Questions were asked and answered. The lampshade sat on the conference table, a mute, stoic sentinel. “It is larger than I imagined,” Peled-Carmeli finally said. Shalev was surprised at the design of the frame, which he called “somewhat artful.” No one wanted to touch the thing. When I put it back into the box, everyone appeared to breathe easier.

The meeting was largely transactional. I got to tell the story of the lampshade to a highly prestigious, respectful audience. They got to listen and explain why they couldn’t have anything to do with it. Yehudit Shendar said that while the lampshade was an interesting object, for Yad Vashem the most important thing was to follow good museum policy, which was based on solid research. “What matters is the provenance and dating,” she explained. “Where did it come from and when? Everything here has to be Holocaust-related and one hundred percent proven.”

Avner Shalev assumed the mediator position. While reiterating that there was no way Yad Vashem could accept the lampshade “legally or morally,” he wondered if there was some way the museum might be able to aid me in my inquiry. More testing could be done, said Peled-Carmeli, perhaps some carbon 14 dating. She gave me a small folder of materials she’d put together, some Nuremberg transcripts and a picture of the Buchenwald Table.

A few minutes later the meeting was over. We exchanged cards, Peled-Carmeli saying she would call a few people to see about some testing. Avner Shalev thanked me for my “curiosity and persistence,” wishing me good luck “in getting to the bottom of this lampshade story.”

If Yad Vashem was not eager to get involved with the lampshade, Avi Domb, chief of DIFS, the Israeli police Division of Identification and Forensic Science, thought he might be able to help. I was given Domb’s contacts by Joseph Almog, former head of DIFS and current director of the forensic chemistry department at the Casali Institute at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. I’d run into Almog, the inventor of a spray that turns red when coming in contact with urea nitrate, a compound often used in the construction of homemade bombs (“That way we catch them red-handed,” he said), a few months earlier at the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans, where the International Association of Forensic Sciences was holding its convention. By chance, we were seated next to each other at a talk given by Clyde Snow, the forensic anthropologist who, among many other high-profile cases, identified the bones of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

I told Almog about the lampshade, said I was planning to come to Jerusalem, and asked him whom I should look up. “That’s easy,” Almog said. “Avi Domb. Avi sits in my old chair. He deals with strange things every day.”

Domb came over to my hotel off Jabotinsky Street the morning of my meeting at Yad Vashem. A copy of Haaretz under his arm, Domb, fifty-five but tall and lean like a retired power forward, exuded that formidable action-hero model of Judaism not generally known back in the Queens of the 1950s. To us, Israelis, those unstooped sabras straight out of the Negev, seemed another species altogether with their sexy, hair-on-their-legs kibbutz girls and blazing Uzis. If Avi Domb did not present himself as a Promised Land hard-ass, you knew he could.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in my hotel room, Domb examined the lampshade with a wary confidence, then turned his attention to the Bode DNA report. He’d heard of the lab and knew they had done “good work” in the aftermath of 9/11. Still, it was possible to miss things. Perhaps “this lampshade has more to tell us about itself. Let’s see if we can make it talk,” he said.

“Give me a few days,” Domb said. I wasn’t in a rush to leave Jerusalem, was I?

No, I told Avi Domb: no rush.

The truth was, Jerusalem was giving me the heebie-jeebies. It had been going on for weeks, long before my arrival. The sensation began as a low-timbre but unmistakable uneasiness, a dull buzz, and slowly swelled to a borderline anxiety fit. It made no sense. After all, I’d been to Jerusalem before. I’d walked those ancient, narrow streets, been to the Western Wall, counted the Stations of the Cross, visited the Dome of the Rock. I knew the history, the six thousand years of possession and loss, during which the Holy City had been ruled, conquered, or occupied by Jebusites, Israelite kings, Arabs, Babylonians, Hittites, Persians, Philistines, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks, Crusaders, Ottomans, and Brits, to say nothing of Alexander the Great and the Frankish Crusaders. The place was a power spot, all right; whatever was here, people wanted more of it. They never got enough. The array of belief, sublimation, and desire was all crammed together in a few thousand square yards.

The last time I was in the Holy City, in 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, local officials expected a large outbreak of the so-called Jerusalem syndrome, defined by doctors from the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in a paper published by the British Journal of Psychiatry as “a psychotic decompensation… related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem.” From 1980 to 1993 more than twelve hundred people had been referred to Kfar Shaul for what were described as “severe, Jerusalem-generated mental problems.” The symptoms fell into three basic types, the report explained: 1) Jerusalem syndrome superimposed on previous psychotic illness; 2) Jerusalem syndrome superimposed on and complicated by idiosyncratic ideations—such as when already religious people undergo sudden and radical conversions to other creeds; and 3) Jerusalem syndrome in a discrete form, uncomplicated by previous psychopathology. Considered to be “perhaps the most fascinating” by the report writers, this final category described people who “fall victim to a psychotic episode” while in Jerusalem, including “the need to scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, or deliver a sermon in a holy place.”

Given this data, it made sense that in late 1999, with incessant chatter of Y2K, there would be a serious outbreak of the syndrome. However, despite the increased number of people converging on the Holy City at the eve of the new millennium, the Kfar Shaul Center reported no appreciable rise in the number of Jerusalem syndrome cases. As one doctor told me then, “The calendar, which is made by men, says one thing, but Jerusalem keeps a time of its own.”

With the comparatively quiet state of Palestinian-Israeli relations in 1999, it was no problem for the visitor to enter the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, the spot from which Muhammad is said to have risen to heaven, or even walk among the faithful inside the massive Al-Aqsa Mosque. Crowds were everywhere, but after midnight, with the metal shutters of the candy and T-shirt merchants drawn, you could hear the sound of your footsteps on the ancient stones. Above, the stars were still there, fixed in the sky just as they were when King David viewed them nearly three millennia before.

A decade later, however, following Ariel Sharon’s famously provocative visit to the Temple Mount in 2000 that helped spark the Second Intifada, 9/11, worldwide terror attacks, wars between Western and Muslim nations, Hamas in Gaza, the collapse of the “peace process”—the list goes on—Jerusalem seemed a far more forbidding place. In the Old City, pairs of IDF soldiers, rifles at the ready, patrolled the Beit Habad Road inside the Damascus Gate. The Islamic sites were off-limits; the Al-Aqsa, built in 705 CE, was no longer considered by many in the city a religious building but regarded as the headquarters of the Martyrs Brigade.

The Jerusalem syndrome was now pandemic. On Friday night, at the Western Wall, the young men davened, paises flying, black hats a blur. A Lubavitcher man had his cell phone pressed to the wall; over the phone speaker you could hear several voices, as many as a small congregation, praying. The people on the other side of the line could have been anywhere, as far off as Australia or Paraguay: like the Jesuits, the Chabad, the Lubavitch outreach project, was all over the globe now. But via satellite phone, their voices, the force of their devotion, coalesced in this spot.

The modern city was no more serene. All over were half-finished construction projects, stalled in the economic turndown. Buses were shrink-wrapped with the dour countenance of Arcadi Gaydamak, the self-made Russian oligarch who was running for mayor of Jerusalem. Best known for his alleged role in a gun-smuggling scandal in Angola, Gaydamak was spending millions. He barely spoke Hebrew, hence his campaign slogan, “He doesn’t talk, he acts.” When the buses covered with his ubiquitous ads sideswiped cars, as they often did, enraged drivers screamed they’d been “Gaydamaked.” Even the weather was out of whack. One morning it snowed, not all that much, but it was only October.

“Chaotic times produce chaos,” said Farid Abu Gosh, as we drove past the last checkpoint out of the city. Chairperson of the Trust of Programs for Early Childhood, Family and Community Education, Farid, a neatly attired man of sixty with an urbane, friendly manner who has been involved in “the social aid business” for going on three decades, had offered to give me “a short tour” of the West Bank.

I met Farid at the American Colony Hotel, the still elegant outpost in eastern Jerusalem. He had a “sentimental attachment” to the place, Farid said. “I used to come here when I was young, hopeful, and had some hair on my head… I could not afford it then and I cannot afford it now, but it brings back memories.” The Trust works almost exclusively with West Bank Palestinians attempting to deal with rampant problems such as abuse of women and violence in schools, but Farid has always identified himself as “an Israeli Arab,” an accurate description of his status as an Israeli citizen of Arab descent. He was born in 1949 near Abu Ghosh, the only Arabic-speaking town in the so-called Jerusalem Corridor, the disputed stretch between the coast and the Holy City, to remain neutral during the 1948 war. It is for that reason, most say, Abu Ghosh, where King David is said to have once abandoned the Ark of the Covenant, was not attacked by Jewish forces during the Israeli independence war and still exists today while surrounding Arab towns have long disappeared.

“Neutrality in the cause of survival is not to be underestimated,” Farid said of his namesake hometown with the weary ease of a character in a Sidney Greenstreet film. “But it can be difficult to maintain, harder every day.”

Fox News likely wouldn’t refer to Farid’s West Bank tour commentary as “fair and balanced,” but the sights spoke for themselves. There were so many places like this, favelas in Rio, the slums of Mumbai, Central City in New Orleans—ramshackle pits of misery so close to yet so far from centers of great wealth. The West Bank, or at least the parts Farid chose to show me—the battered, unmaintained dirt roads, the abandoned buildings in Ramallah, the piles of garbage picked through by children and old men—was a derelict society, living on the margin. The new Jewish “settler” communities that continued to be built with their freshly paved blacktops and gated access only made the contrast more extreme.

Looming above it all was the wall, what is euphemistically known as the “West Bank Separation Security Barrier.” Projected to stretch more than four hundred miles when finished, twenty feet high in some spots, with Sing Sing—style watchtowers, the wall was shockingly awful, a far more formidable and depressing presence than one might imagine from reading the New York Times. Plotted along the jagged, gerrymandered Green Line, one minute the wall was in front of you, the next it was behind. It surrounded you. If graffiti is defiance, there was plenty of that. Somewhere near East Jerusalem, “CTRL + ALT + DELETE” was scrawled in ten-foot-high letters, as if cosmic reboot were the only solution.

Farid and I drove through this ravaged zone talking of the lampshade. The lampshade story was “incredible,” he said, yet here, on the edge of Ramallah, it made perfect sense to him.

“You know, I have visited Yad Vashem. Some years ago, as an Israeli Arab, a secular man, a nonpolitical man. I thought it the right thing to do.” Farid described how he went through the exhibits, seeing “the terrible, terrible things the Germans did to the Jews.” One thing that stuck with him was “how, in the end, after you have been through all that misery, you come out onto a patio where there is a fine view of the countryside. It was as if to say, we have suffered, the Jewish people have suffered the worst crimes, yet here is the reward, what God has promised us: the State of Israel, a land of milk and honey. What I want to know is, where is the Palestinian reward for this suffering? Where is our view of the Promised Land? This wall?

“People are always asking me how the Jews can act in such a way after what the Germans did to them. How can they do this to us? I understand what they are saying, but what gives anyone the idea that being brutalized teaches people not to brutalize others? It is too bad, but this is not human nature.”

Farid said he often saw graffiti in which swastikas were painted inside Stars of David. “This is a tragedy. It is wrong to equate these two circumstances. But this is a violent place; the parents are disaffected. The children grow up angry, confused. When I hear them say the Jews are Nazis, I say calm down, I have been in this country my whole life, dealing with Israelis since birth. I have many good friends. The goal is to stay rational, do your job, provide some help. It can be a trying experience.

“But when you bring up this lampshade—making a lampshade out of a human being—this is an act of gratuitous cruelty. It is outside the general program. It is terror. Sheer terrorism. It makes me think of the stories one hears from Lebanon, the reports that the IDF places bombs inside of toys, which explode when the children pick them up. This is a similar thing.”

I had heard these same stories, how bombs were secreted by Israeli forces inside soccer balls and dolls, but I thought that they had been proven to be false, a bit of heavy-handed propaganda.

“I didn’t say this was positively true,” Farid replied. “How would I know? I am not there. I am only saying that this is what many people believe. It is difficult to stand in the way of that. You know how these rumors start and become more powerful than the truth.”

The ride back to Jerusalem was quick. It is barely a half-hour drive from Ramallah back to Jerusalem, and with Farid’s blue teudat zehut ID card, getting through the checkpoints was a breeze. If his ID were green and his car had a Palestinian license plate, the same trip could have taken hours, if we’d have gotten through at all. “Another benefit of neutrality,” Farid said.

Back at the hotel I fell asleep in my clothes before the sun went down and woke up at three in the morning, sweaty and jangled. The situation called out for Xanax but the six-foot walk to the bathroom seemed way too strenuous. I stayed in bed, scanning the room. I could see the lampshade sitting on the desk beside the television cabinet: Ziggy, in his snow white box, the crimson handle grayish in the gloom.

At Yad Vashem they wanted “provenance and dating,” but this was a dodge; there was no way I would ever be able to trace the lampshade back to a specific concentration camp at a specific time. I had asked Yehuda Bauer if the murders of Ed Gein could be connected to the Holocaust, if the Wisconsin fiend got the idea to make human skin lampshades from reading articles about Ilse Koch. The professor said it would be “a persuasive argument.” Not that this sort of cultural studies analysis was likely to pass museum muster. It was fine to adhere to strict standards of provenance and dating, but museums made mistakes all the time; the Museum of Natural History in New York had the wrong head on the Apatosaurus skeleton for fifty years. Besides, why should the lampshade be subject to more stringent proofing than some of the most famous pilgrimage spots in Jerusalem?

It was a city of fakes, full of the unreliable, the unprovable.

One afternoon I went up to the Chamber of the Holocaust, a small museum on Mount Zion at the southern edge of the Old City, where I’d been told they had a lampshade on display. Among the first assemblages of Shoah-related objects in Jerusalem, the “Chamber” lived up to its name. A dank series of cavelike rooms below an Orthodox yeshiva, the place had a musty, subterranean feel, as if the Golem were crouching in the next passageway.

“You want what?” came the voice from behind me. It was Aharon S., a pasty-faced man wearing the sort of wide-brimmed fedora usually associated with the Lubavitch Hasidim. Formerly of Brooklyn, Aharon, who could have been any age under fifty, identified himself as “the only watchman and curator” currently employed by the Chamber of the Holocaust. I asked him if he had a lampshade in his collection.

“We don’t have the lampshade. We have the soap.”

“You have soap?”

“Soap from Jews. Soap and ashes. From the Holocaust. It is in there.” He put down the old-style heavy black telephone receiver he’d been screaming into and pointed to the dark hallway leading to the exhibit halls. “I cannot accompany you to the soap. You will have to go alone. I can’t go into that room. I am a Kohen.”

This meant that, as a Jew whose patrilineal line could be reputedly traced back to Moses’s brother Aaron, Aharon was a member of Judaism’s priestly caste, descended from those who were thought to have conducted services in the Temple. The Kohanim are subject to a vast number of rules and practices aimed at preserving ritual purity, including a prohibition of proximity to the dead. They must not touch the deceased or enter any space in which a dead body or part of a dead body may be found.[23]

I wandered through the mazelike rooms of the museum. The place felt like a cluttered basement, a scary place down creaky steps filled with piles of regrettable things better kept from the light of day. Devoid of the professional curatorial hand, the exhibits had an uneven, homemade quality. A series of famous photos from the camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, cut from magazines and haphazardly taped to poster board, sat beside remarkable items such as a jacket made from Torah parchment, supposedly fitted by Jewish tailors on the orders of a Nazi officer. A number of grotto-like rooms contained marble tablets commemorating the names and places of shuls and congregations destroyed by the Nazis. There were hundreds of these irregularly sized plaques with names of vanished, forgotten communities like Abgustov, Adalin, Adan, Bacav, Backa-Palanka, Bacsalmas, Cakovec, Chamatiz, Chanuzev. It went on and on, a succession that numbed the mind with loss and sorrow. Here, in the claustrophobic chambers, with the unswept floors, broken pipes, and mildew, you returned to a sort of Jewishness that must have haunted Kafka, with all the poverty, superstition, fear, and unwelcoming strangeness typically edited out of museums set in buildings designed by I. M. Pei.

Finally I came around to the soap and the ashes. Bearing the inscription “From Jews whose dying words proclaimed their faith in the Almighty,” the soap, surrounded by a dozen or so striped porcelain urns affixed with a red star, was piled up inside a long-unwashed glass cabinet about a foot high. Dark gray, the stuff looked petrified. It could have been chunks of anything. I took a picture and went outside, where Aharon sat talking with a few old men.

“The soap,” I said. “Did they ever have that tested?”

Aharon squinted. “Tested? What for?” he asked.

“To see if it is real.”

“Of course it is real. The rebbe says it is real.”

“The rebbe is a scientist? You know, they say soap made from Jews is a myth. That there’s no such thing.”

“Who says that?”

“At Yad Vashem they say that. I was just there.”

“Yad Vashem! Don’t talk to me about Yad Vashem!” He got up and summoned me to follow him. He led me out the gate and into the vestibule of the yeshiva around the corner.

“I can’t talk in front of those people,” Aharon said hurriedly. He had some things he wanted to tell me but first needed to know whom he was dealing with. Examining my card, he placed his fingertips against his forehead, marshaling his thoughts.

“You are Jewish, so I will tell you. You cannot listen to what Yad Vashem says. It is full of Germans.”

I wasn’t aware of the German influence at Yad Vashem.

“Who do you think gives out all the big grants for Holocaust research? Germans. The Germans decide what will come out and what won’t. Not everything. But a lot. A lot. That’s why they say what they say about the soap and other things. I have done a lot of research on this. I could send it to you. You could write an article. An exposé.”

Aharon scribbled his email address on the brochure for the Chamber of the Holocaust, placed it in my hand, and ran back inside. Without him, he said, no one was available to watch the museum.

Almost directly across the narrow Mount Zion Street, a busload of English tourists was queued up in front of the Tomb of David. A staple on sightseeing tours, the tomb, formerly used as both a Byzantine church and a French monastery, is an old building even by Jerusalem standards. It was in the twelfth century CE, during the Crusades, that the place was first declared to be David’s tomb, in other words, about two thousand years after the erstwhile shepherd boy supposedly killed Goliath. However, there is no proof as to the veracity of this claim. No scientific documentation has been attempted on the contents of the coffin, nor is there any definitive evidence that any body, let alone David’s, was ever buried here. But that does not stop the crowds from filing into the building, pausing to deposit a few shekels into the venerable tzedakah donation box, and snapping copious photos of the blue-velvet-draped sarcophagus.

This was the syndrome throughout the Holy City, where the dialectic between science and belief, truth and faith, went blooey. The sacred, supposedly absolute, eternal, unchanging I Am was instead a movable, protean thing. It was in the eye of the beholder, expanding like air to fill the space. What, for instance, are the chances that the so-called Stone of the Anointing inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is really the same rock where Jesus’ body was prepared for burial? The church itself was severely damaged in a fire in 614 and again in 966; the present stone only appeared in its current spot in 1808. Yet people still come, they still lean over the rock, shed their tears upon it. How much of that belief has to be directed before a regular rock, a dumb piece of geology, is transformed into a holy slab, floating through outer space like the monolith that ennobled the tribe of apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

I looked at the lampshade, sitting in its box on the desk in my darkened Jerusalem hotel room. Since the thing had arrived at my door in Brooklyn, I’d been attempting to find out who and what it was. And now that I was in a place where a rock can be said to become divine simply because enough people wish it to be so, I could feel the questions I’d been asking about the lampshade turned back on myself. Was this part of the Jerusalem syndrome, to imagine that a human skin lampshade was capable of administering the third degree to its supposed keeper? Who knew, but certain questions of identity suddenly felt unusually pressing.

Farid Abu Gosh, the Arab Israeli, said there was no getting around it: when there’s a wall, inevitably, no matter the color of your identity card, you will be asked which side you are on. Years ago the late Jack Newfield, a treasured friend and mentor who in his reportorial calling lived by the Old Testament credo “An eye and an ear for an eye,” said, “Don’t back down, speak your mind, but when the topic of Israel comes up, play dumb, because whatever you say, it just won’t be worth it.”

This remains good advice in Greenwich Village. Except here I was, in Eretz Yisrael, and a surprising thing had happened. I’d gone to the West Bank, found conditions there to be more miserable than I had imagined—more miserable, in fact, than many of my sweet liberal, Palestinian-supporting buddies back in New York had presented them to be—and I returned to Jerusalem with a newfound sympathy for the Israelis.

This didn’t mean I wanted to move into a settlement financed by some Bokharan oligarch, vote for Benjamin Netanyahu, or become an acolyte of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, who said Hurricane Katrina was “God’s retribution” for a lack of Torah study in the area and because black people “have no God.” But I did attend a pleasant Shabbos lunch at the home of Robby Berman in the nice proto-yuppie neighborhood off Emek Refaim Street.

I had met Berman in New York at a lecture he was giving on behalf of the Halachic Organ Donor Society (HODS). A Harvard Kennedy School graduate who prefers to ride a bike and doesn’t mind sleeping on floors, Berman, HODS founder and president, is engaged in a campaign to encourage religious Jews to donate vital organs despite the widespread teaching that Jewish law forbids the practice. He also seeks to alter religious thinking on the moment of death. Many Orthodox rabbis maintain that the body can only be said to be dead when the heart stops beating. Berman counters by saying this is often too late to save other organs, arguing instead that “brain stem death”—the moment when the body stops functioning of its own accord—should be accepted as the end of life. Another issue that came up all the time, he said, was who should get these donated organs. “People say they’ll donate, but it has to go to a Jew.” These were thorny problems, Berman said, but what it came down to was “when is a Jew dead, and who should control his body when that occurs.”

These questions seemed intriguing, so when Berman called me to say he was inviting me to Shabbos lunch and that several interesting people would be there, it was easy to say yes. It was a good thing, too, being at Robby Berman’s house for Shabbos and spending several hours talking to Uriel Simon, the seventy-eight-year-old professor emeritus of biblical studies at Bar-Ilan University and longtime peace advocate, about whether God’s obsessive call to Saul to kill all the Amalekites and “to blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” constituted true genocide or not. It seemed a perfectly normal conversation to be having on a Saturday afternoon, pretty much the conversation I would be having at Shabbos lunch if I were a liberal-minded Israeli, hard-pressed to keep morally and politically sane in present-day Jerusalem.

Yeah, I said to myself later on, in my hotel bed, when people are building walls, barriers that must be adhered to regardless of what you might think of their legitimacy and legality, choices eventually must be made. Perhaps it was cowardice, or sheer convenience, but you go where you’re wanted. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine a Palestinian inviting me to lunch, even Shabbos lunch. It just didn’t seem like it was going to happen, not here, not now.

But was that really enough? “What do you think, Zig?” I addressed the lampshade. “That enough to make you draw the line, between us and them?”

It was such a drag the way particularism had all the logic on its side. This was just the way things worked. But I didn’t like it. To accept a wall was to accept the iron gate shutting behind you at Buchenwald: Jedem Das Seine, to each his own. But you didn’t have to give in, did you? No, you didn’t. You could keep yourself open, a citizen of the universe.

“Isn’t that right, Ziggy?”

I don’t know how long this went on, but I must have fallen asleep eventually because the sunlight was streaming through the curtains when the phone rang and woke me up. It was Avi Domb. His forensic people hadn’t been able to find out anything new about the lampshade. “I’m sorry about this,” Domb said. “I honestly thought we could make some progress. But apparently we can’t beat what you already have. Your lab is good. My person said, ‘If this was our case, we might have had to send it someplace like that ourselves.’ So it looks like the lampshade will have to remain a mystery a while longer.”

He apologized again, wished me a good trip home, and hung up.

A couple of nights later, having purchased a number of “Guns and Moses” and “Uzi Does It” T-shirts in the Old City market, I was at the airport with the lampshade. It was the usual Israeli security question-and-answer period. A sweet-looking woman in her twenties asked me where I was from, if I was bar mitzvahed, and at what temple. Then she handed me off to another group of officers who did their visual scans of the luggage and asked if I was in the antique business. I told them no.

“You always travel with lampshades?” one officer asked, with a smile that told me lying was useless.

“Just this one.”

FOURTEEN

The idea that the lampshade should be buried in New Orleans took hold in the days before the third anniversary of Katrina’s landfall.

After months of delay, the city was rushing to finish a memorial to the hurricane victims at the north end of Canal Street, in the section of the old Charity Hospital Cemetery formerly used as the municipal potter’s field. It was here, at the last stop of the streetcar marked “Cemeteries,” that the last eighty-two unidentified or unclaimed storm victims would find their final rest.

The journey “home,” as they say, had not been easy or quick for these mostly anonymous souls. In early 2006, five months after the storm, the dead were stored inside refrigerator trucks at the large federal morgue near St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish, seventy miles west of New Orleans. The feds were pushing to bury these bodies in a four-acre field out in the Cajun countryside, but Mayor C. Ray Nagin protested. “I told them we cannot be burying New Orleanians outside of New Orleans,” Nagin said. Turned over to the city, the unclaimed corpses were moved to a downtown warehouse where they would remain for the better part of the next two years. Eventually, after much discussion and alleged foot-dragging, enough public and private money was raised to build the Canal Street memorial, which consisted of six black granite mausoleums arranged about a central circle built to represent the eye of a hurricane.

The burial ceremony, timed to coincide with the Katrina anniversary, would be split into two sections. On the first day the vast majority of the bodies, seventy-five of them, would be interred. According to the planners, primarily a consortium of largely black-owned funeral homes in conjunction with Frank Minyard’s coroner’s office, this was to be a “semi-private” occasion. Local press were not invited. The next day was scheduled as the public section of the program. The remaining seven bodies would be laid to rest amid solemn municipal fanfare under the banner of the “One New Orleans,” a city hall initiative largely deemed to be a government-funded promotional vehicle for Mayor Nagin, who was scheduled make the keynote speech.

Aimed at providing what the mayor called “some closure to this challenging chapter in the history of our great city,” the memorial was subject to last-minute uncertainty. This being the season, another storm, Gustav, was making its way into the Gulf of Mexico. As Nagin made clear, the new tempest had the potential to make Katrina seem like a mere capful of wind. Calling Gustav quite possibly “the storm of the century, the mother of all storms,” Nagin announced that he would be ordering a mandatory evacuation along with a dawn-to-dusk curfew. With reminders of the Katrina disaster still present throughout the city, few residents, even those prone to drunken bravado, were talking of riding out this new storm.

“Katrina and Gustav, together again in unholy matrimony,” Skip Henderson cried out as he went about triaging his dwindling number of prized possessions in preparation for fleeing the beloved city yet again. “Why don’t they just call them Adolf and Eva? Nazi hurricanes!”

As Gustav’s deadly vortex churned northward through the Gulf, August 28, 2008, dawned clear and hot in New Orleans. It was barely seven a.m. and the temperature was already past eighty. On upper Canal Street, lined up as far as the eye could see, sat long, black hearses, idling in the early morning sun, air conditioners humming. The few drivers standing outside their vehicles, attired in their black funeral suits and peaked caps, dabbed away sweat with oversized white handkerchiefs. An edge was in the air, with everyone anxious to send these last victims of Katrina to a better place before the next fresh batch of Hell hit. Yet there was a holdup. The landscapers hired to prepare the memorial weren’t quite finished. They’d worked through the night, under floodlights, but there was still plenty of sod to lay.

That was post-Katrina New Orleans for you, said Stephanie Rhodes-Navarre, as we sat talking in her charming apartment on upper Esplanade Avenue. “Poor souls out in the wilderness for three years, and these fools are putting down grass.”

Sharp as a tack and stylish with a blond rinse on her short-cropped Afro, Ms. Rhodes-Navarre, along with her three sisters, Sandra Rhodes-Duncan, Joan Rhodes, and Kathleen Rhodes-Astorga, own the Rhodes Funeral Home. Founded by Duplain W. Rhodes, in 1884, operated by their father, Duplain W. Rhodes Jr., for five decades, the Rhodes Home remains among New Orleans’s most iconic family businesses, thanks in no small part to the status of the funeral home in the African-American community. In places like New Orleans, death was as segregated as everything else, making undertaking a singular pathway to social and monetary success for an ambitious black businessman.

“The fact is,” Stephanie said, “black people just don’t do death like white people. A white person dies, and at least as far as the funeral part is concerned, it is a two-day thing. Black people need more than that. They have to have a week, even more. In New Orleans it is more complicated. There are all kinds of special family requests. Some might need a jazz funeral. This isn’t just for show. They need these things and it is our job to give it to them. That’s why we have to have a closer relationship with our clientele. People know us and we know them, for generations. We’re not just someone you get out of the phone book at the last minute and we show up at the door with a shovel.”

This was why, Stephanie said, the Rhodeses and the other famous funeral families, the Charbonnets, the Labats, the Glapions—a large portion of the “aristocracy” of Creole New Orleans—banded together with other black undertakers around the state to “make sure this Katrina burial happened, and it happened the right way… because this has been a nightmare, from even before the storm came ashore.”

Three years on, the episode continued to haunt and infuriate her. “We had twelve funerals booked for those days, which meant there were several bodies already in house, aboveground. But once Katrina came, we couldn’t get them buried. Everyone—the grave diggers, the cemetery people—were getting out. Then came the floods. What were we supposed to do then? But when people leave their loved one to you, that is a bond that must be taken seriously. When everyone was running for their lives, we were trying to save the dead.”

This meant, Stephanie said, keeping the bodies out of the water and transporting the ones who couldn’t be buried in New Orleans to the Rhodes Facility in Baton Rouge. “We stayed in the funeral home for twenty-one straight days, my family and our staff. Every day we dressed in our normal business clothes because you’ve got to provide confidence, make people understand that no matter what happens, you are going to remain professional, that we are going on.

“What I’m talking about here is not just business but continuity between life and death. You can’t separate those two things. If you ask me, that was one of the main things that went wrong during Katrina: making everyone leave, keeping them out of town for weeks. It was that displacement that cut the cord a lot of people had with New Orleans. There’s lots of people who now live in Atlanta. Ask them where’s their home and they’ll say New Orleans, but they’re in Atlanta. That’s the real disaster, because things like Katrina had happened before, maybe not as bad, but we never left, and we survived. We would have survived this, too.”

It was during this period that the Rhodes family and others in the New Orleans undertaker community met with state and federal officials in Baton Rouge to talk about what to do with the Katrina dead, several of whom were still locked in attics or floating in the floodwaters.

“We sat down with people from Governor Blanco’s office, and Louis Cataldie, the state medical examiner,” Stephanie said. “It was like talking to the wall. I thought it would be obvious: we’re from New Orleans, we know New Orleans, we’ve been dealing with New Orleans dead for a hundred years. Once we tried to explain what could be done and how much it would cost, they threw up their hands and said, ‘Oh, so this is about money.’ I was shocked that they would think that. As if we were trying to make a buck off the misery of people we grew up with. The next thing I know they’ve hired Kenyon, from Houston, it’s a done deal. What a mess. In Iraq they might have had Halliburton, but here in New Orleans we had Kenyon.”

Stephanie Rhodes-Navarre was alluding to charges of cronyism involving Kenyon International’s then parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), the Texas-based “end-of-life” concern, which under its various “Dignity” brands owns more than half of all funeral homes and cemeteries in America. This success has no doubt been aided by the political connections of Robert Waltrip, the longtime (four decades and counting) CEO of SCI. A venerable member of the Bush family inner circle of financial backers, Waltrip has contributed mightily to the presidential library of George H. W. Bush as well as the gubernatorial and presidential campaigns of George W. Bush. Despite this access to power, many claimed SCI’s performance during Katrina left much to be desired.

In the fractious two months of Kenyon’s employment by the State of Louisiana, the company recovered a total of 535 bodies, for which it charged $6 million, or over $11,000 per body. Expensed items such as $14,000 for beef jerky raised eyebrows. According to many relief workers, Kenyon’s $800-a-day “search and recovery specialists,” while expert in such incidents as plane crashes, were unfamiliar with New Orleans; mistakes in noting where bodies were found made identification more difficult. There was also the question of why the state would do business with SCI to begin with, or if it was even aware of Kenyon’s parent company’s legal troubles. In December 2003, the firm agreed to a payment of $100 million to settle a case involving mishandling of the dead at two Jewish cemeteries they owned in Florida. According to the suit, SCI employees routinely buried people in the wrong place, broke open vaults, and in some instances removed bones from gravesites and tossed them into maintenance yards.

On August 28, 2008, with the Rhodes family running things, the burial of Katrina’s last victims came off without a hitch. One by one the hearses pulled up to the arched wrought-iron gateway of Charity Hospital Cemetery and dispatched their cargo. The metal caskets, each topped with a single red rose, were wheeled up the bank of mausoleums. Behind the pallbearers marched a six-piece brass band led by local legend Lionel Batiste, a sticklike man of indeterminate age wearing a sash saying “Jolly Bunch” and twirling a cane. When the coffin was positioned in one of the drawers of the mausoleum—a modified version of the “oven vault” tomb often accorded poor people in New Orleans—the band began to play the spiritual “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Once the coffin was pushed into its space, a board was affixed to the open end of the mausoleum, the seams caulked with plastic sealant pumped from industrial-sized tubes. The board was then covered with a granite slab, which was screwed into place.

When the last of the bodies were pushed into the mausoleum, Stephanie Rhodes-Navarre’s sister Joan, who’d been up since four in the morning, took a deep breath. “It went good,” she pronounced, looking exhausted. “Everyone got their flower, everyone got their music.”

As people were packing up, I chatted with the trumpeter from the band, whose standard brass band cap was emblazoned with the word TREME above the visor. Asked how many times he’d played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” in his life, he said, “Damn, I just done it a hundred times today. Altogether, might be a million.” Did he ever get tired of it? He shook his head.

“Why should I get tired of it? If you’re playing funerals, sending people home, what would you play but ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’? That’s the gig, man.”

Now that Washington and Jerusalem had rejected the shade, there was a case to be made that it belonged in New Orleans, along with the rest of the unclaimed. This topic had come up earlier in the day, when I ran into Frank Minyard, the parish coroner, who was serving as the president of the Katrina Memorial effort. Scheduled to speak and play his trumpet the next day at the public ceremony, Minyard had come over “to pay my respects.” Attired in an electric blue shirt and baggy nautical pants, the coroner had a wraithlike aspect to him as he beckoned me toward a lone gravestone just inside the cemetery’s iron gate.

“I have often wondered, for fifty years I wondered,” Minyard said in his slow drawl, “whatever happened to those cadavers we used to dissect back in school. You know, a cadaver is very important to a young medical student. Sometimes you’d take a piece home. A hand, or even a whole arm, so you could look at the insertion of the tendons, things like that. You didn’t want anyone to see you on the streetcar with it, but you cared about your cadavers. You became attached to them, even gave them names. And now, I see, here they are.”

Minyard pointed to a monument erected by the Bureau of Anatomical Services honoring those “who have donated their bodies to science.”

The coroner took a moment before asking, “So did you ever find out more information about that lampshade?”

I briefly filled Minyard in on all that had happened since we’d last talked, and I told him that with so many other options off the table, I was thinking of burying the lampshade in accordance with Jewish religious law.

“Burying it here in New Orleans?” Minyard said, rolling the idea around in his head. “Well,” he said, “this is the end of the river. Biggest river system on earth, things carried along with the current from as far off as Montana. A lot does get buried here.”

Then Minyard spoke of the coming storm, Gustav, remarking that the weather reminded him of the days immediately before Katrina. He asked me if I was getting out of town. I said I had a flight back to New York, but if the airport closed, I’d drive to Houston and fly from there. Minyard said that sounded all right. “Just make sure you go.”

It was something to think about as I walked across Canal Street to the old Jewish cemetery, called the Dispersed of Judah, a phrase that appears often in the literature of exile, most prophetically, according to many Christian Zionists, in Isaiah 11:12, where God, after speaking metaphorically of an anointed “branch” that will grow from the roots of the tree of Jesse, informs the prophet of his plan to “assemble the outcasts of Israel,” to “gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.”

Opened in 1846, the cemetery differs from the other, better-known New Orleans Cities of the Dead in that the bodies are buried in the dirt rather than in aboveground crypts and mausoleums. Like using biodegradable, nail-free pine boxes as coffins, this Jewish practice, devised in a desert land many thousands of miles from the soggy swamps of the Mississippi Delta, is based on the notion that the body, like dust, should eventually return to the earth from whence it came.[24]

Even with Gustav still two hundred miles out into the Gulf, the gravestones at the Dispersed of Judah, mute witnesses to so many storms, had a forlorn aspect. A few flowers might have spruced things up, but not many people place flowers on the graves of people who died in 1867. Certain names came up again and again on the lichen-stained headstones. Present were several members of the D’Meza family, who like Judah Touro were descendants of the first waves of Spanish and Portuguese Sephardim expelled from Europe during the Inquisition. There was the large monument for Abraham D’Meza, dutifully noted as the “president of this congregation,” and his wife Zipporah, dead within two months of each other in 5632, or 1872. A far smaller stone marked the grave of Estelle D’Meza, aged ten months, who succumbed during the influenza outbreak of 1878, or 5640. Also well represented was the Marks family, once of the London Jewish community. Monuments noted the graves of Joseph Hart Marks, David Hart Marks, Theodore Marks, Edwin Marks, Marion Marks, and Washington Marks, all of whom enlisted on the Confederate side during the Civil War. Washington Marks, a colonel and later a Democratic party politician, so distinguished himself at the Battle of Vicksburg that a statue was erected in his honor.

So this was where these Jews, these particular dispersed of Judah, their families hounded across the globe, residents of the Louisiana once governed by le Code Noir, which decreed practicing Hebrews be banished, had found their final rest. If Jews turned up in the most incongruous places in the world, so did their dead. Yet, after Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the rest, it is a blessing to see the graves of a thousand Jews who weren’t dead from violence between 1933 and 1945. Confederate or not, these Jews, like my dead relatives in Elmont, New York, had gotten through an entire lifetime without being murdered by a Nazi.

Yes, I thought, if I were a human skin lampshade who might or might not have been constructed by a doomed Jewish shoemaker at the behest of a mad red-haired woman on a horse, and then found sixty years later by a dope fiend in an abandoned house after the worst storm in United States history, there could be worse places to return to the earth than inside the gates of the Dispersed of Judah. Being right across the streetcar tracks from the monument to Katrina’s unclaimed, the spot made a good deal of sense.

Shiya Ribowsky, the forensic cantor and my adviser on Jewish clerical matters, told me that if I truly wanted to bury the lampshade, I might as well find an Orthodox rabbi “just to be on the safe side.” Who knew what the Reformists and the like believed in a place like New Orleans? They were probably holding crawfish boils as some kind of Lenten ecumenical outreach program. If the Orthodox rabbi had any Halachic issues, Shiya said, I should inquire about the possibility of burying the lampshade along with shaymos—sacred ritual objects like tallis prayer shawls and tefillin phylacteries that, being inscribed with the name of G-d, were to be interred with the same respect as the human body.

“Ask them if they can put it in with the shaymos, mention the building fund, and you should be fine,” counseled Shiya, offering to fly down to New Orleans to sing the mourner’s Kaddish at the burial ceremony.

The Orthodox rabbi selection in New Orleans is not extensive, but the choice of Rabbi Uri Topolosky, the energetic thirtysomething installed as the spiritual leader of the Beth Israel temple in 2007, was obvious from the start. For one thing, Beth Israel was the congregation most affected by Hurricane Katrina. Founded in 1904, it was once the largest Orthodox temple in the South, observing the High Holy Days in a lavish Byzantine Revival synagogue on Carondelet Street. The congregation moved to the “safe” Lakeview section in the 1960s, where temple membership had declined to a hundred families by the time the storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain left ten feet of water in their Canal Boulevard shul. Fearing for the fate of its seven Torahs, the temple contacted representatives of ZAKA, the Jerusalem-based emergency response unit (the name in Hebrew stands for “Disaster Victim Identification”). In Israel, ZAKA volunteers have become a familiar sight in the aftermath of terror attacks and other disasters, collecting body parts and spilled blood of Jews to ensure they receive a proper religious burial. (In Jerusalem I’d called them to see what they had to say about the lampshade and was told, “If it is Jewish, it should be buried. If it is not Jewish, it can also be buried, but we’re not involved.”) The group, which also rescues sacred materials, arrived in New Orleans via National Guard helicopter to retrieve Beth Israel’s holy scrolls, which they whisked away in motorized inflatable boats. Its temple ruined, Beth Israel, minus nearly half its congregation, had no choice but to accept temporary quarters at the Gates of Prayer, a Reform temple in Metairie, the district David Duke had once represented in the state legislature. It was then, their rabbi opting to remain in Tennessee, that Beth Israel hired Uri Topolosky, who had been an assistant rabbi in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

I first saw Rabbi Uri in a picture on the Internet. Kippah on his thick mat of black hair, his young son in his arms, a huge smile on his face, Topolosky was talking with a full-headdressed Mardi Gras Indian. They seemed a good match, since the Mardi Gras Indians—black people dressed as Indians who famously sing and shout on Fat Tuesday—were, like Topolosky’s congregation, a dwindling bunch. With 30 percent of the Jewish population gone following the storm, Beth Israel was participating in an appeal to get Jews to move to New Orleans. Thirty thousand dollars in interest-free loans and half-price tuition at Hebrew school were among the financial incentives offered newcomers. Meanwhile, the Mardi Gras Indians, key to the town’s carnival tradition, were suffering demographic problems of their own. Between hip-hop and the crime situation, fewer and fewer young people wanted to spend the twenty weekends or so it took to sew the ornate parade costumes that when finished weigh as much as seventy-five pounds. Many Indians had died recently. Just months before Katrina, Allison “Tootie” Montana, the eighty-three-year-old leader of the Yellow Pocahontas “tribe,” the Big Chief of all Big Chiefs, appeared at the New Orleans City Council to decry what he called the NOPD campaign to “wipe out” the Indians, just as the real Native Americans of the area—the Chitimacha, the Acolapissa, and the Atakapa—had been wiped out. Chief Tootie barely got the sentence “This has got to stop!” out of his mouth when he suddenly clutched his chest and died of a heart attack on the spot. The Rhodes family handled the funeral, one of their biggest ever. As a musician himself who likes to call attention to the similarities between the raucousness of Mardi Gras and Purim, Rabbi Uri said he was “terribly saddened” to hear of Chief Tootie’s passing.

From his “Okay, let’s tee it up” invitation to his tiny congregation to begin the somewhat laid-back but still stirringly pious Friday-night services, where a Walmart-style screen separates the bare minyan of older men from the ladies, there was a lot to like about Rabbi Uri and what he called “modern Orthodoxy in the context of New Orleans lagniappe.” Rejecting the Shas Party idea that God had unleashed Katrina on New Orleans because of its paucity of Torah readers, Rabbi Uri said, “If Katrina is a divine disaster, then there is nothing to be done about it because we, as people, cannot know why God does what he does. Only a maniac would claim to know the mind of the Creator. But this was really a human disaster. The levees failed; they failed for several reasons, human reasons, which is why we are in control of how to respond.”

This sounded like someone who might consider presiding over the burial of the human skin lampshade. When I went to visit Rabbi Uri in his Metairie office, after a momentary shock he said, “I don’t see why I couldn’t do it. It is a probable body remnant. I’ll look over the texts to see if there is anything preventing it.” The shaymos idea was a potentially good one, Rabbi Uri said, “but I don’t know about a second line. I’ll check into the Halacha on brass bands to see if it is appropriate. I kind of doubt it, but you never know.”

Standing amid the graves of the Dispersed of Judah Cemetery, that more or less settled it, at least for a moment, I thought. Intellectually and practically, the lampshade could pass back into the earth in this place. I’d been halfway around the world with it. I’d done my part.

That was the working plan: to bury the lampshade in a Jewish cemetery, have Rabbi Uri and Shiya Ribowsky do the service, invite those who wanted to be there, and create the sort of “closure,” however artificial, that Mayor Nagin and every other politician liked to prattle on about when it became obvious that events were out of control and they had no clue what to do next. Skip Henderson, as part owner of the shade, was okay with the idea as long as the thing wasn’t buried in his backyard for his dog to dig up. “I can’t have Tina coming over in the middle of the night panting with it between her teeth like ‘Look what I found.’” A New Orleans funeral wasn’t a perfect end, but it was an end, and if the lampshade was more of a story than anything else, as Yehuda Bauer suggested, it had to stop sometime.

But there were snags, loose ends that couldn’t be ignored, which Dr. Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald Memorial, pointed out to me when I went to see him on a cold winter day in early 2009. Born in 1954 in Westphalia, son of a Lutheran priest, Dr. Knigge described his childhood surroundings as “a kind of deadening boredom, full of oppressive piousness.” The atmosphere changed during the 1968 demonstrations, when all of Europe “seemed to come back to life.” Seeing young people in the streets, saying what was not supposed to be said, convinced Knigge that “there were other kinds of angels in the world, another kind of heaven.” He went off to the university, where he studied Lacanian psychology, began to travel, married an Israeli artist, worked with Lutz Niethammer on an extensive German oral history project, and became the director of the Buchenwald Memorial in 1994. Owing to his longtime involvement with the camp, along with his customary attire of a black hat, long black coat, black shirt, and black jeans, Knigge has a reputation as something of a melancholy fellow. At least this was the impression I’d gotten from Hans Ottomeyer, the general director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

I’d spoken to Professor Ottomeyer, a robust, red-faced man with a grand helping of metallic gray hair, on the recommendation of a friend who had met him at a gala in Berlin. According to my confidant, when the conversation turned to the matter of Third Reich—era artifacts and their proper representation in the museum context, Ottomeyer mentioned that he’d heard a rumor that a human skin lampshade had been found in America. Thinking this had to be the New Orleans shade (and marveling at the remarkable spread of such memes), my friend replied that Professor Knigge at Buchenwald had expressed interest in the object. “Well,” said Ottomeyer, “we can do whatever Knigge can do. I wouldn’t mind looking at that myself.” By the time I arrived in his sumptuous office on Unter den Linden with a grand view of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Berliner Dom, however, Professor Ottomeyer seemed to have changed his mind about the German Historical Museum’s involvement with the lampshade.

“There is an undue concentration on the darkness of the German history,” Ottomeyer said. “This is not to say there is not darkness. But there is light as well, as I’m sure you know. This is what we try to do here at the museum, present a balance. So it is best that you take this lampshade to Professor Knigge. He deals with this sort of object, and to tell the truth, I don’t know how he does it. Every day in that gloom, surrounded by those terrible things. I have a lot of respect and sympathy for him.”

Listening to this as he sat in his office in the former SS barracks at Buchenwald, Knigge sighed. “Well, he does have Hitler’s desk in his museum, but it is a very nice, very well made desk, I can assure you of that,” he said. Knigge did, however, agree with Ottomeyer’s assessment that Buchenwald was the proper place for the lampshade, at least at this moment, better than the German Historical Museum, better than a hole in the ground in New Orleans.

“It is too early to bury this lampshade,” Professor Knigge said during our first meeting. “It is not ready for the earth.” He ran his hand over the graying fuzz on his head and looked out the window. It had begun sleeting. Rain, sleet, snow—this was how it was in the Ettersberg in February, especially at the end of the Blood Road.

“How can I explain?” Knigge said, cursing his English. “You say the lampshade is a story, and I would agree, but what kind of story do you want to tell? When I first came here, there was nothing that could be depended upon to be the truth. When the GDR decided they wanted to memorialize the camp, the first thing they did was tear the place down and reconstruct it in the image of what the state wanted it to be. This wasn’t Auschwitz, not a death camp, so it was important to make Buchenwald more horrible, more bloody, because the GDR wanted to tell the story of the antifascist heroes, what in German is called Heldengeschichten.

“But now the GDR is gone, the Cold War is gone, and so are these stories. What are we left with? We have what the survivors tell us, and we have the objects. For us it is daily life to be confronted by objects which we know to be part of the concentration camp but in most ways remain silent. Did the Nazis shrink heads at Buchenwald? We have evidence that they did. Did Ilse Koch conspire to make lampshades out of human beings? We cannot be sure. We keep trying to find out because by confronting these atrocities, we hope that it will change the minds of people and, in a way, perhaps make the world a better place. So now we are in a different situation because you have this lampshade that is made of human skin. This mythic object that is suddenly real. And because it exists, there are new questions to ask. We may never get an answer, but we continue to ask. That is why it is too early to bury this lampshade. It is still asking questions.”

Knigge acknowledged that the lampshade held for him a personal “fascination.” Myth or reality, reality and myth, the lampshade was inextricably tied to the history of Buchenwald. For many people, it was all they knew of the camp. There was no tossing it out of the narrative here. If I wanted, he suggested, I could ship the lampshade from Brooklyn to the Ettersberg. Some further scientific investigation could be arranged. Funds for this purpose were in the memorial budget.

This was the best offer I’d heard. So, yes, I told Volkhard Knigge, strange as it sounded, perhaps it was a good idea for the lampshade to come to Buchenwald. But I couldn’t ship it. I couldn’t take that chance. I’d have to bring it myself.

Some of Knigge’s unanswered questions came up as soon as I left the Ettersberg and traveled two hundred kilometers east to Dresden. The very next day was the sixty-fourth anniversary of the February 13, 1945, firebombing during which Allied aircraft destroyed the previously untouched city, considered by many to be the most beautiful in Europe, the baroque “Florence on the Elbe.”

Like most Americans, most everything I knew about Dresden came from Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, the odd tale of Billy Pilgrim, the optometrist of Ilium, New York, who, after being captured by the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, is sent to work in a Dresden slaughterhouse. Surviving the attack by hiding in a meat locker, Billy emerges to a ruined world, the shock of which causes him to be “unstuck in time,” a mystic state that enables him to travel to various periods of his life and eventually leads to communication with the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians, a race of mostly all-knowing two-foot-tall aliens Vonnegut describes as looking like upside-down toilet plungers. It is from the Tralfamadorians that the eternally traumatized Billy learns that time, which includes life and death, is basically subjective, part of an unbroken continuum, any segment of which can be revisited over and over again.

I always liked Slaughterhouse-Five, a perfect book for the smart fourteen-year-old, for the way it breaks through the usual jingoist stuff about which side you were on and in its own fabulist way attacks the human condition of killing other humans, even Germans. Few books rail against the finality of death with such passionate invention. The fact that it is based on Vonnegut’s own experience as a witness to the Dresden firebombing (Billy Pilgrim is the author, up to a point) only deepens the reader’s appreciation for the work.

Yet to be present in Dresden on the anniversary of the bombing, with the church bells ringing at 9:45 p.m., the moment the RAF wing commanders in their Lancasters and Mosquitoes began the attack, is to be confronted by unsettling events that Vonnegut couldn’t have foreseen when his book was published in 1969.

On the Ammonstrasse, the Nazis were marching. In fact, these members of Germany’s more visible ultraright wing have been marching in Dresden on the anniversary of the bombing since reunification. For them, the Allied firebombing of the city during which untold thousands of civilians were incinerated in their wood-frame houses—Vonnegut, using figures cited by the then not-so-controversial David Irving, placed the death toll at 130,000; most historians now estimate the dead at 20,000 to 40,000—was nothing less than Massenmord, mass murder, a Bombenholocaust on a par with anything that happened to the Jews.

Dresden, capital of Saxony, hometown of Ilse Koch, has always been a right-wing stronghold. The NSDAP was dominant here and the present-day hard-right NPD, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, also does well, outpolling the old-line left-of-center Social Democrats (SPD) in local parliament races. This local sentiment, along with the ongoing controversy over the attack, which many regard as an unnecessary act of revenge on the part of the Allies (during the GDR it was presented as an instance of Anglo-American imperialism), has turned the bombing anniversary into a rallying point for the nationalist movement in present-day Germany. With each passing year the demonstration has grown. The night I arrived there were several thousand in the streets, taking part in a silent torchlight procession. It was part of the largest such gathering in Germany since the end of World War II.

Deep into my second year on the lampshade beat, I had a more nuanced critique on the German right wing than during my early visit to Weimar, when I couldn’t tell the difference between an antifa and an anti-antifa. The people walking down the Ammonstrasse in silence with their candles and signs in Reich typeface about how the Heimat (homeland) was reduced to schutt und asche (dirt and ash) by the verbrecher (criminal) Allies were the Kameradschaften, the “Society of Comrades.” These were the mostly young, often violent “autonomous” nationalists who took their inspiration not from the “führer model” of Hitlerism but rather from the brothers Strasser, Otto and Gregor, the intellectualized, ultranationalist racialists who broke from the NSDAP in the early 1930s to follow their own doomed, anticapitalist path to German hegemony.

Not content to fall in line with the dreary old farts of the top-down NPD and their tired Reich-nostalgic rhetoric, the Kameradschaften were anarchist, antiglobalist, kaffiyeh-wearing neo-Nazis, mostly East German youth who understood the duplicitous ways of the overlords and believed the true threat to the purity of the Volk lay not with the Jews in the classic “bacillus” sense of their mere existence but rather with the ever-encroaching modern world—that bastardized, one-size-fits-all-consumerist, Internet-addicted culture with no moral or physical barriers, where everything was for sale, including blood and honor. The new enemy was not the Jew himself but rather the identity-free, self-perpetuating quicksand of existence that at its core was Jewish, whether individual Jews like myself, paying off their credit cards at 30 percent like any oppressed Gentile, knew it or not.

Yet what was one to do as the young flag-wavers passed by, Wagner music blaring from the DJ speakers? Point out that many military historians think the Dresden attack was actually the correct decision, given the city’s industrial capacity, which included vast factories of slave workers manufacturing bombsights for the Luftwaffe? Was it the time to split hairs over where “legitimate” wartime destruction ends and criminality, even genocide begins? The fact remained that people had been killed here, burned to nothingness, leaving no trace by which scientists could run the DNA to see if they were members of the Nazi Party or not. As Yehuda Bauer had told me, in such matters “dead was dead.”

It was all so familiar, I thought, as the Kameradschaften walked by, heads bowed in the appearance of solemn prayer. Dead might be dead, but playing dead also looked the same the world over. The way these Nazis, in their black hoodies and skull masks, skeletons painted on their chests, came out of the torchlight murk, they would have fit right in on a hazy Mardi Gras morning at the corner of Clouet and Dauphine streets marching alongside the Bywater Bone Boys. That was the essence of Mardi Gras: behind the mask, when you’re just a bag of bones, you could be anyone.

But who exactly were these Kameradschaften passing in silence on the Ammonstrasse? There were statistics on neo-Nazi violence: how many Turks and Africans they had attacked over the years, in how many murders they had taken part. A day later a bus carrying trade unionists, in Dresden to protest the right-wing march, was stopped by nationalists; several of the union people were badly beaten. The left-wing blogs said, “Nazis attack bus.” Still, lots of people get called Nazis—terrorists, totalitarians, idiot gay-baiters, gangsters. When crystal meth freaks in Idaho are drawing Hitler mustaches on Barack Obama, who is to say who is a Nazi and who isn’t? But this obfuscation is unfortunate, because there are real Nazis out there, and it is good to know who they are, what they’re capable of.

Could they, for instance, make a lampshade from a human being?

Professor Knigge suggested that the lampshade was not finished asking questions, and here was one: given the chance, would these teenage torchlight marchers, in some distant racially pure future they claimed to long for, find it within themselves to capture large numbers of human beings whom they’d labeled the enemy, murder these people, strip the skin from their backs, tan that skin in the sun, order prisoners skilled in leatherwork to fashion the skin into a lampshade, attach the shade to a fixture wired for electricity, bring the finished project home to the house where their beloved children played, put the lamp on a bedside table, and pass a pleasant evening reading by the lamp’s light, and then flip off the switch to get a sound night’s sleep?

Did these Kameradschaften, these skeletal mourners, these antiglobalists in their Pali scarves, have the stomach for that?

How does one know when one is confronted by true evil? The Talmud says there are 7,405,926 demons, or mazikin, in the world. Seems as good a number as any; I’m not going to dispute it. I am also grateful that Hashem, in his infinite mercy, is said to block from us the sight of these ubiquitous demons, for as Abba Benjamin, sage of the Babylonian captivity, says, if their multitudes could be seen, no creature could endure knowledge of their presence. Seeing too many demons could drive you crazy, and if Jerusalem has its own syndrome, for someone like me, Germany does, too. It is an ingress of paranoia, a shadow that follows each smiling beer maid and train conductor, a miserable, unshakable slime trail of the past. And standing on that Dresden street watching Kameradschaften “dead” walk by, I could feel myself becoming “unstuck in time” just as Billy Pilgrim had before me. Likely this sensation was cued by one of the banners being held by the marchers, which translated from the German read “worse than Hiroshima.” It was, as I recognized, a paraphrase of a line in Slaughterhouse-Five, where the narrator, named “Kurt Vonnegut,” says that “not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima.”

Worse than Hiroshima… The word itself is enough to cue the newsreel inside the brain, the series of slow dissolves set to musical portent: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi. Paul Tibbets and the B-29 named after his mother, Enola Gay, the kiss she gives will never fade away. And then the wide-open sky, the blinding light brighter than a thousand suns, a pan across the shattered landscape, the woman crawling through the wreckage, her arm upraised to the sky, beseeching heaven, as if that would help.

“Worse than Hiroshima.” What could be worse than Hiroshima? Who was qualified to make such a declaration? Not “Kurt Vonnegut,” not these masked neo-Nazis, not me. The world was full of victims and perpetrators. Every so often the victims and perpetrators would change places, as if in some vicious, unending square dance. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say. The duality was present in the lampshade. On one hand there was Ziggy, the victim, the poor schmuck who got turned into a lampshade, and there were the awful people who’d done it to him. Sometimes it was one thing, sometimes the other. Only the Nazi stayed the same. Him and Hashem, immortal, immutable opposites, who deserved each other.

The rumor on the Ammonstrasse was that the antifa had arrived to take on the Kameradschaften, but the Dresden cops, in full riot gear, had the leftists bottled up inside the train station. In Dresden the cops were like that, people said, bent on attacking the leftists, protecting the Nazis. That was too bad, I thought, because I wouldn’t have minded some action, a little duke-out between the true believers. As it was, I almost got to throw a punch myself, and take one, too, no doubt. What set me off was another of those Nazi banners being held by four or five skeletons. It read “10.5 Million Germans Ask Why?”. The statistic was the reputed number of German citizens, soldiers included, who met their death during World War II.

Reading that, I might as well have been back in the old Queens schoolyard, with the sons of sanitation workers shaking their fists, claiming that if I didn’t shut up they were going to turn me “into a lampshade.” In this case it wasn’t the threat that ticked me off. It was the plaintiveness, the earnest, weak whine of the appeal, exactly the sort of sheep-to-the-slaughter attitude the Übermenschen Germans attributed to the lowly Jews, that alleged pathetic helplessness that only triggered more Blutrausch, the frenzy of killing that once begun could not be stopped.

“10.5 Million Germans Ask Why?”

“Why? You want to know why? I’ll fucking tell you why!” The voice was mine but it might as well have come from the lampshade itself.

A few months later, into the fall, I again found myself riding the number 6 bus up the Blood Road, to Buchenwald. On my lap, having once more flown across the ocean in an overhead rack, was the lampshade. If you want, you could call it a homecoming of sorts.

Volkhard Knigge was waiting in front of the old SS barracks. In his customary all black, he looked like a taller Johnny Cash as he stood under a large umbrella in the sharply falling freezing rain. Since our last meeting, Knigge had become what he called “a little famous,” owing to the worldwide coverage of President Barack Obama’s visit to Buchenwald in July 2009. Knigge could be seen on websites everywhere chatting with Obama, as well as German chancellor Angela Merkel, Elie Wiesel, and Wiesel’s fellow survivor Bertrand Herz, as they walked across the Appellplatz.

Obama’s Buchenwald stopover was foreshadowed by a misstatement he had made during his generally impeccably modulated presidential campaign. During a speech to a veterans’ group, Obama said his great-uncle Charles Payne, a member of the Eighty-ninth Infantry Division of George Patton’s army, had assisted in the liberation of Auschwitz. This was incorrect. Actually, Payne had taken part in the liberation of the Buchenwald satellite camp at Ohrdruf, where General Eisenhower first saw sights that “beggar description.” Obama’s error recalled the flap over the 1992 documentary Liberators, which portrayed the segregated, African-American 761st Tank Battalion as the first U.S. Army unit to reach Buchenwald in April 1945.

Nominated for an Academy Award and seen by almost four million people on NET public television, Liberators was given a special screening at the renowned Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem on December 17, 1992, in the wake of the Crown Heights riots. Sparked when an ambulance accompanying the motorcade of the Lubavitcher rebbe Schneerson ran over and killed a young Guyanese boy, an incident that led to the murder of a yeshiva student by a group of black youths, the riots threatened to destroy whatever remained of the old liberal black-Jewish voting coalition in New York. The screening of Liberators was supposed to help begin the healing process. David Dinkins, New York’s first and only African-American mayor, then running for reelection against a fully locked-and-loaded Rudolph Giuliani, addressed an audience that included Jesse Jackson, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, Congressman Charles Rangel, and Elie Wiesel, as well as many rabbis and church pastors. Liberators should be seen as “a step along the road to mutual understanding and respect,” Dinkins said. “When we see those brave African-American soldiers freeing Jewish prisoners from the concentration camps, let us remember all that binds us together.”[25]

Unfortunately, as NET officials would later admit, the film’s version of the liberation of Buchenwald was “seriously flawed.” The 761st may have landed on Omaha Beach, punched a hole through the Siegfried Line, and risked their lives for their less-than-loving country many times during the push through Europe, but they had nothing to do with Buchenwald’s liberation. They weren’t even in the area at the time.

“I think it is somewhat like the GDR, another of those Buchenwald stories that are difficult to resist telling—black people from America, suffering from discrimination, oppression, coming here to save the Jews. It is an instance of something we perhaps wish was true but is not,” Knigge remarked. As for the visit of Barack Obama to Buchenwald, during which the president spoke of the “need to reflect on the human capacity for evil and our shared obligation to defy it,” Knigge remained thrilled, albeit in his sober way.

“He is very impressive,” he said. “We spoke for almost two hours. He is very interested in making a museum about slavery in Washington and was asking about that.”

The Buchenwald Memorial offices were undergoing renovation, so we entered the old SS building through the basement. It was dank and cold and Knigge pointed out the boilers where forced laborers once shoveled coal around the clock. We went up the staircase, the same stairs used by officers of the Death’s Head order, strode past rooms once inhabited by vicious camp overseers like Martin Sommer, who, according to the Nazi judge Konrad Morgen, kept a secret compartment for his torture instruments and slept with dead bodies under his bed. Kommandants Koch and Pister, and likely Ilse Koch herself, used these hallways.

A few more doorways and we were in the room where Herr Röll had first shown me the contents of his cabinet. It being late Friday afternoon, Knigge’s staff—Röll, Harry Stein, Sabine Stein, and the rest—were already gone for the day. Dr. Knigge placed the lampshade on a table where Herr Röll would be certain to see it and wrote a note. “Herr Röll, this is the lampshade made from human skin. Please handle it with the utmost care.”

The plan, as Knigge outlined, was to take the lampshade to the offices of the Landeskriminalamt Thüringen, which he described as the Thuringian office of “the German FBI.” They had a copy of the Bode lab DNA report and had agreed to give the lampshade a forensic workup, including testing the frame, the tassels, and the threads used to attach the panels. If no meaningful results were obtained, Knigge said, there was a possibility of sending the lampshade to a genetic testing lab in Leipzig.

The professor wrote out a receipt, acknowledging that I had dropped off the lampshade at Buchenwald for “further examination” and that it would be returned to me “upon request.” I insisted on this last phrase. Bringing the lampshade to Buchenwald, to the scene of the alleged crime, was bothering me. To leave it here any longer than necessary would have been an unforgivable betrayal. I couldn’t let that happen, not on my watch.

Knigge and I drove down to Weimar, had a bite to eat. The rain had turned to snow. “This is the perfect weather for this place, every day more of the same,” Knigge said.

It took until the new year before I got Knigge’s email with the results of the German forensic testing, which were the same as I had gotten from Avi Domb in Jerusalem. The German FBI had tried but could not find anything more than what was already in the Bode report. They did, however, ascertain that the Mardi Gras—colored tassels were a later addition to the shade, but that was no news.

“Now we come to the end,” Knigge’s email said. “The police research confirmed what we already know. To get further technically isn’t possible. Sorry about that… So there will be no last certitude about the object for now. That’s how history works. Here it’s snowing heavily which fits the issue at hand. Have a happy New Year anyhow, yours, VK.”

Six weeks later, Fat Tuesday came again, the fifth time since Katrina. We Bone Boys were out there, at Clouet and Dauphine, nice bunch of white homeowners in the tentatively stirring Bywater real estate market, augmented by a few of the post-Katrina social justice types, some St. Claude Avenue guerrilla art gallery owners, and a couple of stray gutter punks, ready to wake up the town for “da holiday,” as Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias sing in “Meet Da Boys on Da Battlefront.” When we started marching, in the antediluvian days of 2005, there were twelve Bone Boys, “no dues, no officers, no meetings, not bound by circumstances.” Now there were more than a hundred Bones, every one playing some version of dead. With a picture in the Times-Picayune, us Bones were a coming krewe, a staple of conversation in the hipster downtown bars and coffee shops. In the manner of New Orleans, where everyone thinks they own the town and its legacy, there were grumbles that things were getting too big, too full of Johnny-come-latelies. Being unbound by circumstance was cool, but like the old-line krewes uptown, you couldn’t be parading with just anyone, you know.

If the storm had laid a brutal kind of poetry on New Orleans, created a one-of-a-kind landscape of desolation in the country’s most romanticized city, a new vibe was in the air. According to the papal calendar, Mardi Gras fell on February 16 this particular year, and only a few days before, the city had been turned upside down in a single weekend. On Saturday, February 6, with Ray Nagin prevented from running again by term limits—and his own 20 percent approval rating—Mitch Landrieu had been elected the new mayor. Brother of Louisiana U.S. senator Mary Landrieu, Mitch was the son of Moon, the last previous white New Orleans mayor. After thirty-two years of black clubhouse leadership and nepotism dominated by the Morials, Dutch and Marc, along with Nagin—a period of population loss, financial decline, rampant (but hardly unprecedented) corruption, and off-the-charts murder—it was considered time to make the only political change that the majority of people recognize down here and to let the whites back in at the trough. Not everyone was happy about this (Landrieu received barely 28 percent of the eligible vote), as the hosts on WBOK, a black talk station, made clear. Hour after hour the airwaves were rife with fulmination against the so-called Shadow Government, the white, uptown ruling class that had been calling the shots for centuries and would continue to do so. It was important for blacks to control the mayor’s office and the patronage it offered, people said, as a counterbalance. No one doubted the soundness of this analysis, but cooler heads agreed that, given a chance to do something truly heroic both during the storm and beyond—to at least pretend to, like Giuliani did in 9/11—Ray Nagin had blown it, big-time. Besides, as one WBOK caller said, “White people are like the weather. You can’t get away from them. You just got to figure how to work around them, like we been doing here for the past four hundred years.”

But this chatter was mere background noise compared to what happened the next day, Sunday, February 7, when after four decades of mostly miserable football, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. By the final gun, grown men were crying in the street, people were drinking and partying so hard that it was a wonder they could manage to get out for Mardi Gras only a week later to drink and party some more. The town was still pretty much a disaster area. The Army Corps of Engineers was probably screwing up the levees worse than ever. Buildings two blocks north of St. Claude Avenue had three walls or fewer, the murders kept coming every day. But, who dat! The Saints won the Super Bowl! It was a gift only the most churlish could refuse.

This was the mood as the Bone Boys stepped off to wake up the town for Mardi Gras 2010, rattling our dead man shovels on the uneven pavement behind us. It was time to remind the predeceased that their days were numbered, to assault the vain fetish of living flesh with this year’s slogan, “Tomorrow, your face!” Skulls painted on mirrors were held aloft in case anyone missed the point. The route had been expanded to include the streets closer to the Industrial Canal: Mazant, Alvar, Pauline, Lesseps, Bartholomew, all the way over to Poland. This was where, according to Dave Dominici’s instructions, I had spent several days knocking on doors to see if anyone knew anything about a lampshade made of human skin. That was in 2007. Back then half the houses were boarded up, wrecked. In 2010 some ruins remained, places with the once-ubiquitous Gas Off signs, but much of the neighborhood had “come back.” Houses were painted in those marvelous wack-job parish colors, offset by magenta shutters. Businesses like the Jesus Is Lord Plumbing Company had popped up.

It was the coldest New Orleans winter in three decades, so everyone was extra-fortified by Jack Daniel’s behind the skull mask. Stumbling through the neighborhood, I had the thought that perhaps the lampshade wasn’t man-made after all but rather an organic bit of hybrid plant/animal matter that germinated in places where terrible, willfully forgotten things had occurred—like, say, maintaining one of the world’s largest slave markets for a hundred years. Maybe the shade had grown in the same way that nooses had appeared like strange fruit one day on the branches of a tree in front of a high school in Jena, Louisiana, which shares a name with Jena, Thuringia, where Nazi Hans F. K. Gunther once headed the Department of Race Sciences (work that was honored by a Goethe arts and sciences medal in 1940) at the same university where Volkhard Knigge teaches the psychology of history today. A noose, after all, isn’t all that different from a lampshade, being one more innocent-seeming household object, a neutral piece of rope, until coiled into a certain shape and knotted. In my tipsy botanical conception, these malicious blooms were widely occurring, their habitat just about anywhere, but they weren’t necessarily perennial. At some point the curse could come off the land from which they sprang and they might wither and die, at least this was the hope.

The Bone Boys were making a joyful racket by the time we turned on Royal Street and, following the vanished tracks of the streetcar named Desire, came to the corner of Piety, where Skip Henderson had bought the lampshade from Dave Dominici. The year before, the house had had the look of one more abandoned structure. Now Dominici’s daughter had moved in, along with her boyfriend and their two children, Dave’s grandchildren; they’d fixed the house up, brought it back to life.

I talked to Dominici a couple of days later when he called up his ever-loving, endlessly patient seventy-eight-year-old mother, Patsy, at her house near the Metairie/Kenner border. It was the only way to talk to Dave, said Patsy. Dave would have loved to contact me directly, but he was still locked up, this time near Shreveport, and prisoners are not allowed to call cell phones. “Wouldn’t you know it,” Patsy said, “just about everyone David knows has a cell phone. So he rings me, like, ten times a day, with the charges reversed, of course.”

What a great stroke of luck it was, getting to talk to me, Dominici said, now “totally clean” but sounding the same as ever, not counting the occasional clunk of AA phraseology. He’d just put the finishing touches on his autobiography, Or Else Is Here, and I’d be doing him a great favor if I would “grab the bull by the horns” and “get the ball rolling” by calling up the Oprah show because he was certain the talk show host was going to have her socks knocked off by the book and make it a major selection of her literary club. After his release, which he said would be any day now, pending a few hearings, he planned to buy a new suit so he’d look good for his TV appearances.

It wasn’t the money that he wanted, just the opportunity to show how sorry he was for his “previous screwups,” and to prove it, he was going to take only 50 percent of the profits from Or Else Is Here, leaving the rest to the fund to save New Orleans’s cemeteries and to “the members of my family that I have let down.” He was a new man, he said, I’d see that soon enough. Until then, Dominici said he wanted to thank me for taking the lampshade “to the next level” and continuing the work he started by “bringing this thing to light.” He got in one last “Back at ya” before the electronic voice said, “Five seconds,” and terminated the call.

The morning after Mardi Gras, I always go with Skip Henderson to 7:30 mass at St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, which was first constructed in 1718 and remains the oldest continually operating church in America. First we drive over to Bourbon Street to see the trash. This is the only time of the year Skip intentionally goes to Bourbon Street. The city used to make a big deal out of weighing the trash picked up in the French Quarter the morning after Mardi Gras; the more garbage, the better the party. Everyone was always trying to throw stuff away to beat the record. When Ray Nagin, the technocrat, was elected, trash weighing and the bets taken on the final poundage were considered déclassé, so the practice was abandoned. But you could still eyeball it, estimate the drift-size of the detritus, assign a degree of wretchedness to the pooled bodily fluids. This year’s Mardi Gras had outtrashed any other since the storm. Did this mean Katrina was finally over? I asked Skip.

“Katrina will never be over. Not until the last person moves back. Not until the last X is off the last house,” he answered, melodramatically. After all, Skip knew that for every one resident who’d returned since the storm, two had stayed in Houston or Atlanta. As for the X’s, the so-called Katrina tattoos painted by the National Guard during their body search, several residents, certainly those in Bywater, were keeping them as souvenirs. Many of the new people regarded the tattoos as badges of honor, hard-to-come-by authenticity in an ersatz era. At the end of Montegut Street a sculptor had enshrined his building’s X in bronze. You wanted one on your house, just in case the angel of death came this way again. The marks had become part of the city, like the storm itself, one more personality-building scar.

What Skip really wanted to know was what I was going to do with the lampshade; it was still half his, he had a right to know.

“If you’re not going to bury it, then what?” Skip half pleaded. “What?”

We were in the cathedral now, the mass under way, the priest quoting Genesis 3:19: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” It was as Skip always said: there could be no Fat Tuesday without Ash Wednesday, the gorging of carnival being incomplete without the spare reminder of life’s fleetingness. The bead-decked yahoos drinking themselves into oblivion on Tuesday who didn’t show up to mass on Wednesday, whatever religion they were, were clueless as to the real meaning of Mardi Gras.

The lines to receive the ashes were long, probably twice as long as in the past couple of years, another sign that the town, the Big Easy once more, was back and open for business. It was going to take Skip at least twenty minutes to receive the sacrament. This gave me plenty of time to think things over, which was a good thing because I like to be in churches, especially ones as handsome as St. Louis Cathedral. It is good to be surrounded by the sacred mumbo jumbo, especially when it isn’t your sacred mumbo jumbo. Sitting in a temple, even a fancy momma like Emanu-El in Manhattan, was never so relaxing. In temple there were issues, questions of childhood, history, tradition, faith. In church none of that applied. Whatever was stirred up here was Skip Henderson’s problem, not mine.

The lampshade had opened a special portal, all right, I thought, recalling a story told to me by Plater Robinson, who ran the Holocaust education seminars at Tulane. It was about Henry Galler, a New Orleans Holocaust survivor and longtime proprietor of Mr. Henry’s tailor shop on Jackson Avenue. Henry and his wife, Eva, also a survivor, were forced to evacuate to Dallas during Katrina. They lost almost everything, including a piece of soap Henry said he’d gotten at the concentration camp. Soap supposedly made from Jews, kept all these years, dissolved in the flood.

The connections piled up. One morning I heard from Shiya Ribowsky, who sounded excited. Most of the time, if you ask Shiya how well he sang at Shabbos services, he’ll say he was awful, that he had a head cold or phlegm in his throat, something that kept him from being the greatest cantor west of Galicia, which, in his heart, he knew he was. This past Shabbos, however, Shiya said, “I was on. Smoking.” After the service ended, a large black man “with these gigantic biceps” came up and shook his hand. “Really dig your music, man,” he said.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Shiya said. “We have some black congregants, six or seven, but I’d never seen him before. Then he tells me he’s Aaron Neville. He came over to the shul with a friend. I said, ‘Well, thanks, dig your music, too.’”

I’d even talked to David Duke from time to time, most memorably on the morning after the 2008 election. He was driving to Memphis to address a long-planned convention of his “white rights” group, the European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), and I asked him what he thought of the presidential results. “It is an Obamanation! It is the nadir of the country. The end of America as we know it,” Duke said before shouting, “My God, I think my front tire is coming off. I’m going to have to call you back.”

After receiving the German FBI report on the lampshade, I called Volkhard Knigge to tell him I’d pretty much decided not to bury the lampshade. “This is the way it is with these kinds of objects; a historian is always lingering between the realm of hope and disappointment,” Knigge said, with the curious cadence that sometimes made him sound like he was talking in an ethereal blank verse. “You are forced to accept the idea of limits. There are things you will never know. It can be frustrating to be confronted by these structures of silence and the fantasies they produce. This is why it is helpful to be organized in your approach, to establish frameworks for thought.

“With this lampshade you can say it had a first history, which is that identification with the Buchenwald camp and people like Ilse Koch. The lampshade on the Table with people passing by. Then there is the second history. The history with you. Your adventures and your thoughts. There is the strange and frightening idea that someone would make a lampshade out of a person and it has arrived in New Orleans after a storm. This interests you, so now the first history becomes infused by the passage of years and a new context. Then we would come to a third possible history, one we cannot guess. Who gives us the right to close the book for the future? The questions must be kept open. The best thing to do is treat it with respect, and we will see what happens next.”

That was probably good advice, I thought. If the lampshade was a story, I was only writing one part of it. The thing would continue on, like the line of people waiting to have a bit of ash smeared onto their forehead. It would stay in the world, as it should. Someone would find it again.