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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been a disturbing but rewarding experience. The goal was to look at a frightening object from as many angles as possible and try to make sense of it. But you have to start somewhere, and that would be with Skip Henderson. As noted, I’ve known Skip for some time, but our friendship was probably always pointed toward the moment he purchased the lampshade from Dave Dominici. It is something about Skip: He has the air of destiny about him. No one else I know could have found the lampshade and known, immediately, of its importance. His sensibility, however cockeyed, informs these pages.

This said, to write such a book—or rather to simply see it as a book that could be written—one needs early supporters, trusted fellow travelers who know you, know what you can do, what fears you must confront to do good work. I have been lucky in this regard to have friends like Michael Daly; my longtime running mate Jonny Buchsbaum; Lou DiBella, the world’s greatest Harvard-educated boxing promoter; the nonpareil Steve Earle; and the fabulous Zarela Martínez (whose hospitality and margaritas were most welcome).

Encouragement is nice, but one cannot proceed without a more tangible kind of faith offered in the form of business acumen and a checkbook. I consider myself very fortunate to be a client of my agent, Flip Brophy, of Sterling Lord Literistic. Flip knows a good idea from a bad one and doesn’t mind telling you so. Flip deserves credit for demanding we take this idea first to David Rosenthal, then the grand poo-bah at Simon & Schuster. I knew David would understand what I was hoping to accomplish. We have, after all, done business before, coming up together through the old magazine jungles of the 1970s. He was very smart then, even smarter now, but still very hamish, certainly for a poo-bah.

This book would not exist without the participation of the major “characters” I write about, people like Farid Abu Gosh, Andy Antippas, Doña Argentina, Yehuda Bauer, Bob Bever, Denier Bud, Avi Domb, Dave Dominici, Dr. John, David Duke, Skip Henderson, the brilliant and thoughtful Ken Kipperman, Volkhard Knigge, Frank Minyard, Cyril Neville, Stephanie Rhodes-Navarre, Wolfgang Röll, Albert Rosenberg, Aharon Seiden, Avner Shalev, Harry Stein, Daniel Strauss, Dyanne Thorne, and Rabbi Uri Topolosky. All these people contributed to this book in ways I could not have imagined before I spoke to them. In this cast, I’d like to single out Shiya Ribowsky, the forensic cantor, who sent the samples of the shade to the Bode lab and advised me on a number of seemingly indecipherable issues. A rabbi of the best sort, a mensch of epic proportions, Shiya will someday be offered the job of running the world but will be too smart to take it.

This would have been a different book without the efforts of Anetta Kahane, founder and chairperson of the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation. An indomitable neo-Nazi fighter, Anetta’s scholarship, hell-bent attitude, and voluminous Rolodex opened many corridors of investigation that would have been shuttered to a non-German-speaking American reporter. She is a wonder. I must also thank Andrés Nader and Heike Radvan, also of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, for their assistance. Others who must be mentioned are Joseph Almog, Alvin Babineaux, Michael Berenbaum, Robby Berman, Micha Brumlik, Melvin Bukit, the Bywater Bone Boys, Dan Christian, Rabbi Edward Cohn, Joe Coleman, the mysterious D, Dani Dominici, Patsy Dominici, Lawrence Douglas, Gaynielle Dupree, Steve Fishman, Terry Fredericks, the late Jamie Gillis, Sallie Ann Glassman, Gitty Grunwald, Rio Hackford, Taylor Hackford, Joe Hargrave, Deborah Harris, Baruch Herzfeld, Werner Herzog, Lance Hill, the late Khalil Islam, the late, much-missed Bob Izdepski, Susan Izdepski, Cathy Kahn, Ben Kiernan, Paula Kipperman, Yaakov Kleiman, Antonin Kratochvil, Anne Levy, Wynton Marsalis, Guy Martin, Steve Mass, Michael Melnitzky, Dr. Charles Melone, Terry Melton, Case Miller, Priestess Miriam, Captain Frederick Morton, the Mütter Museum, Aaron Neville, Art Neville, Charles Neville, Levi Okunov, Mr. Paul of Bon-Bon Lighting, Lawrence Powell, Hugo Ramirez, Walter Reich, Plater Robinson, Thane Rosenbaum, Diane Saltzman, Dr. Raynard Sanders, Barry Scheck, Isaac Schoenfeld, the late Budd Schulberg, Tom Segev, Bob Shaller, Uriel Simon, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Christy Smith, Clyde Snow, Sabine Stein, Steve the Biker, Michael Taussig, Scott Thode, Ed Ward, Allison Wells, Denis Woychuk, Peter Zeitlinger, and Sylvia Zeitlinger. Extra shout-out to Roi Melech for being in the right place at the right time: keep shaking and baking, baby. Special thanks to James Hamilton, my longtime colleague and treasured friend who took the lampshade photo on the book cover.

Since living is important when writing a book, I must offer fond gratitude to Adam Moss, my boss at New York magazine, for allowing me to write this and not firing me. My good friend John Homans, who edits my magazine stuff at New York, read an early draft of this book and, as always, had a few, but decisive, comments. Editors are really the writer’s friend, except when they’re not. Ruth Fecych at Simon & Schuster is a friend indeed. She fine-toothed through this pile of pages with rapier zeal and much-appreciated good cheer. I don’t know how she turned out to be right about so many things, but she was. Adam Parker helped with some nifty fact checking. Beyond all that is the family, my ever-lovin’ wife, Nancy Cardozo, and der kinder, Rae, Rosalie Sue, and Billy Jacobson. They’re older now, in college and through it, and have gotten used to snarly ol’ Dad typing away. They humor me; they weren’t crazy about having the lampshade in the old homestead for two years, but were good sports. Love to them, always.

In the end, though, there is the lampshade itself: anonymous soul, surviving memory of terror, mute redeemer.