'Hitler's Hat'

Years ago my brother gave me the three-volume Heritage Press edition (1963) of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It’s a handsome trophy on the shelf. I own two other editions and usually rely for general reading and allusion-hunting purposes on my Everyman’s Library copy. Impulse on Tuesday sent me to the third boxed Heritage Press volume and inside I found a memory-dense piece of the past:

 

That’s me as a newspaper reporter (note the notebook and pen on the table) seated beside an old friend, the late Richard Marowitz. The scrawl on the back of the photo tells me it was taken December 16, 1997. I don’t recall the occasion but Richard must have been the speaker at some event. I first met Richard at his home in Albany, N.Y., around 1990, when I interviewed him while a reporter for another newspaper. At the time he was about to sell the women’s coat factory founded by his father, Cohoes Garment Corp. Richard was an amateur trumpet player, magician and comedian with a tummler-like drive to entertain people. He loved getting laughs and was good at it.

 On April 29, 1945, as a member of the Army’s 42nd Rainbow Division, he was among the first American soldiers to enter Dachau. The next day he got a tip about a house in Munich rumored to have been owned by Hitler. On a shelf in a bedroom closet Richard found a silk black top hat with the monogram “A.H.” embroidered in gold on the lining. In a kneejerk act of rage, Richard stomped on the hat but kept it. That same day, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.

 

In his later years, after I first met him, Richard started speaking at schools and Jewish community centers, telling the story of the hat and urging young people to remember the Holocaust. He was interviewed for several oral history projects, including the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He and his souvenir were the subject of a 2003 documentary, Hitler’s Hat, directed by Jeff Krulik.

 

Richard died in 2014 at age eighty-eight. I claim no special insight into his psyche. With me he was always funny and quick-witted, seemingly more alive than other people – excellent company. The fact that he didn’t publicly acknowledge the existence of the hat for more than forty years may reveal something but it would be indecent to speculate.

 

In the book-length interview Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 1999), the poet recounts the atrocities he witnessed while serving with the U.S. 97th Infantry Division in Europe during World War II. He was among the troops in April 1945 who liberated the extermination and slave-labor camp at Flossenbürg, an annex of Buchenwald, where 500 prisoners a day were dying of typhus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unknown to Hecht at the time, had been hanged there for “antiwar activity” a few days earlier. (His final words, as the executioners took him away: “This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.”) Hecht says of the experience:

 

“The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.”