God Bless America

On Nov 1, this swastika celluloid comb sold on ebay for $85. You may refer to auction #270296247509. Someone made this is the late 30s or early 40s. A woman bought it and wore it. She must have valued it highly, as it was not worn very much. A dealer bought it at an estate sale.



I kept this photo a long time. Under ebay’s Judaica section, this was listed as a comb for the dead. It was used by Jews in concentration camps to comb the lice out of dead people’s hair. The dealer wanted $275 for it.  I couldn’t bear to buy it.



This is part of a page from “Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944” by Serge Klarsfeld. He won a Nobel Prize for this. The list of names takes up 645 “8.5×11” pages. When both my grandfathers escaped the Czar’s Cossacks in 1906, they chose to get on a boat to the United States, and when they arrived, they saw the Statue of Liberty. If my family had chosen another boat, I would have never been born.