The curtain snapped open before I had decided to look.
I was twenty-one, alone, in Berlin for the weekend on my father’s arrangement—an Army officer determined to show me as much of Europe as he could that summer. That morning I had crossed at Checkpoint Charlie, out of the American zone and into the Russian one, and the change was immediate: hardly a car on the streets. You could cross without looking both ways. Ahead of me stood a large museum, given over to the history of Germany, and in 1964 the Soviets were still, in their way, fighting the war against the Germans, and seemed to want an American on hand to watch them keep winning it.
I went into the half devoted to the Nazi years. Down a row of glass-covered cases, I reached a corner and turned left. Another case stood there, curtained, nothing visible. I started around it, and a museum guard—a woman, stationed at the doorway—reached over and snapped the curtain open.
Inside was a shrunken head. And, worse, a lampshade—made, the placard said, of tattooed human skin, taken from a camp, or from some slave laborer worked to death and then put to one more use. I stood there for what felt like a long time, not moving. She had watched me turn that corner. She had wanted me, specifically, to see this. I turned to find her—to ask her why, or thank her, or something; I don’t know what I meant to do—but she had already turned away and was gone. I never got another look at her face. I have had sixty-two years to guess her reasons, and I still don’t know for certain, though I have my suspicions about what a museum in the Soviet sector wanted a young American to carry home in 1964.
Later that day, I went to the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1936 Games. Owens’s name was still there, cut into the stone: winner of the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the long jump. Nearby, as I remember it, was a patch of rough stone. I understood at the time that a Nazi eagle had once occupied it, torn away after the war.
Two kinds of skin, one day apart in the same city. One turned into an object behind a curtain, evidence of what men will do to a body they’ve already decided doesn’t matter. The other, Owens’s, cut permanently into stone that had once tried to prove the opposite, in a spot where the regime’s own emblem no longer stood.
I never worked out the guard’s motive. I have never stopped being glad she did what she did.
I’ve since learned that the lampshade’s authenticity, long disputed, was confirmed in 2023: microscopic and genetic testing found it was, in fact, human skin. Whatever else I remember imperfectly from that curtained case, I was not wrong about that.
