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.
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