Flea Markets

Flea markets are the cemetery of our culture, and the ghosts of the past sell themselves by advertising targeted at individual memory, or collective memory, like when a stranger the same age as you points at the Halloween costume of Donny Osmond, the one you are bargaining with the crotchety old man for.

“It’s never been worn!”

“Yes it has! The box is open.”

“No – that is mint!”

“There is lipstick inside the mask!”

“Oh my God! I remember those!”

I didn’t get it, even though the box had printed across the top “FLAME RETARDED.” Now I am thinking I should have.

Lurking around the vast and unfathomable corners of the free market of nostalgia, anything is possible. History happened, and here you cannot deny or revise a thing. The very best example of how shocking our own past was is the booth with all the World War II buffs milling around it. Here, a nice couple, in their autumn years, sell artifacts with swastikas emblazoned on them. Their glass cases are filled with the small necessities of life, for the masters of death. There is a tiny black beaded handbag, with a Baltic amber clasp and a large black swastika painted onto it. It looks like a prop from “The Damned,” but its real, and comes with a silver compact, replete with Nazi insignias. Imagine, makeup – all the things happening around you, and you reach in your purse to powder your nose. It is rumored to have belonged to Eva Braun, as it has a tiny “E.B” engraved inside, along with a delicate manicure set, silver nail clippers, file and something to push your cuticles down. The implements are wrapped in a cornflower blue carrying case, slightly faded, matching the watercolor patina of the enamel. It would be elegant, if it were not unmistakably from this time, this place, this Holocaust.

There is a small metal box containing two syringes, needles neatly capped and rolling against the sides of the glass. After looking at them in astonishment for several seconds, the woman behind the counter says, “At least they were health conscious. They took very good care of themselves.”

There are numerous items like these: an SS officer’s hip flask, another’s large black ring, a straight razor with the initials “A.H.” and on the blade, the name “Lindburgh” written in bold script just alongside the cutting edge. Gifts from one to another, little things for the living, left behind,
with monograms of infamous names, synonymous with genocide and terror.

Once on Ebay, I saw something listed as “Hitler’s Ice Cream Spoon!” It was a costly bit of dreadful preciousness, presented as a gag gift. But it is too serious to be a frivolous impulse “Buy It Now!” item. All these Nazi memorabilia has been removed from “The World’s Marketplace.” Anything with the markings of hate history and hate culture have been taken down.

The “Negro Shooting Gallery” is still available though. It’s a board game from the turn of the century, possibly created by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, when membership was considered something of an honor, and flaunted rather than hidden and denied. Their hoods were only to conceal criminal activity, but everyone back then knew who they were and what they were doing.

Some people vehemently oppose the commerce and trade of historical hate merchandise. I don’t. Simon Weisenthal said the worse thing about being in a concentration camp was the cruelty of the officers, who would laugh at the Jews, and say that even if they survived the Holocaust, no one would believe them, because it was too terrible to fathom, and that all evidence of their people would be erased. Many died from pure hopelessness. I believe these seemingly small frivolities, handbags, board games, pipes, pen sets, everything that comes with a swastika on it, the reversed kind, not the one found sometimes on antique rugs, the one that means life, not death, are important, not in their gruesome, lookie loo, crackpot collector quality, but for reasons that are far more ominous.

Everything is alarmingly new, nothing looks old or used, unlike the Georgian mourning jewelry I collect, rings and pins made of human hair, which are not grim reminders of death, as some would think. Rather I look at mourning jewelry as an uplifting talisman, a message from three centuries ago, that love never dies, that everyone may have forgotten you, but I don’t. I know that you were loved, and I will wear the symbol of that love until I can pass it along to another generation.

Nazis were part of our lifetime, and their ephemera exists, pristine and whole, not yet chipped or broken, faulty with age, and to me, they are proof positive that monsters are real. This happened, even if the victims who died because they thought they could be erased are indelible in my memory and that the true location of hell was a place on earth. It still is.