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

Mark Jacobson

Sep 2010 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Few growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prisoners to makes common, everyday lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark Jacobson tells the story of how he came into possession of one of these awful objects, and of his search to establish the origin, and larger meaning, of what can only be described as an icon of terror.

Jacobson’s mind-bending historical, moral, and philosophical journey into the recent past and his own soul begins in Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans. It is only months after the storm, with America’s most romantic city still in tatters, when Skip Henderson, an old friend of Jacobson’s, purchases an item at a rummage sale: a very strange looking and oddly textured lampshade. When he asks what it’s made of, the seller, a man covered with jailhouse tattoos, replies, “That’s made from the skin of Jews.” The price: $35. A few days later, Henderson sends the lampshade to Jacobson, saying, “You’re the journalist, you find out what it is.” The lampshade couldn’t possibly be real, could it? But it is. DNA analysis proves it.

This revelation sends Jacobson halfway around the world, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where the lampshades were supposedly made on the order of the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch. From the time he grew up in Queens, New York, in the 1950s, Jacobson has heard stories about the human skin lampshade and knew it to be the ultimate symbol of Nazi cruelty. Now he has one of these things in his house with a DNA report to prove it, and almost everything he finds out about it is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information.

Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility.

One question looms as his search goes on: what to do with the lampshade—this unsettling thing that used to be someone? It is a difficult dilemma to be sure, but far from the last one, since once a lampshade of human skin enters your life, it is very, very hard to forget.

Ratings and reviews

It's hard to imagine that there has been, or that there ever will be, another book like this and that alone sets it apart. The meaning of human relationships, man's inhumanity to man, and the cultural importance and persistence of symbols all figure into this wandering narrative. It could be stated that Mr. Jacobson's style is sometimes reminicent of Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld's idiot savant, in that he can't resist a side story no matter how unrelated or seemingly trivial, and the cast of characters is way beyond something out of Hollywood, but somehow Jacobson makes it all fly. In the end, and this is the key, the book passes the test of "heart's intent", the Hebrew philospher Maimonindes' criteria of truth and meaning. The author obviously took his subject very personally and the effect shows through in his years of work writing "The Lampshade". Although the many parts are thrown together like a gumbo recipe that includes psychedelic mushrooms as a key ingredient and the subject matter isn't exactly suited for an Oprah selection, it will often amaze the reader. This isn't a book you will soon forget.

This never happened....a fairy tale!

Look up USSR crimes and GulagMagadan.

About the author

Mark Jacobson, a contributing editor at New York magazine, is a frequent contributor to The Village Voice, National Geographic, Natural History Magazine, Men’s Journal, Esquire, and other publications. He is the author of 12,000 Miles in the Nick of, The KGB Bar Nonfiction Reader, and Teenage Hipster in the Modern World, and the novels, Gojiro and Everyone and No On. He lives in Brooklyn.