hen I was a little girl, I inherited a stamp collection from a distant relative. Neatly organised in Stanley Gibbons albums and stock-books on a country-by-country basis, my mother and I spread the lot out on our dining-room table and began leafing through them.
I’d spent most of my life in rural Australia and the UK’s Home Counties, with brief interludes in New Zealand. I was really only interested in stamps from those three countries, and whiled away an hour or so counting how many had kangaroos on them and working out if I had the complete set issued for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
It took time for me to notice that my mother was sitting at the table, ashen-faced, holding the “Germany” album open at a particular page.
“Harry,” she said to my father. “We should get rid of this one. I don’t want it in the house”. My father — streaked with dust and sweat from a day on the tractor — scraped his hat off and looked over mum’s shoulder. I stood up, moved around the table, and joined him.
Together we beheld a single stamp, set in what I later learned was called a miniature sheet, featuring what I thought was a sculpture of a lean-faced man with a short, blond aureole of hair. His eyes were shut. Next to the image was the double-lightning standard of Hitler’s SS. Even ten-year-old me knew this.
“It’s Helen’s,” my father said. “She decides whether she wants to keep it or not.”
The man on the stamp was Reinhard Heydrich, and it is item number 86 in Roger Moorhouse’s Hitler’s Third Reich in 100 Objects, a book that somehow manages to be attractive and disturbing at the same time.
Read Full Article »
