What should you do with a Nazi eagle?

When my mother, who was an army nurse during World War II, returned from Europe she brought home a Nazi eagle sculpture as a souvenir.

My mother told my sisters that she had taken the Nazi eagle from the rubble of a bombed-out office building in Berlin. It must’ve been a desktop ornament. And she cautioned them, telling them it was a reminder of the evil that can be brought against others.

Mounted on a marble base, the eagle is made of a silver metal and stands with outstretched wings. Clutched in its talons is a blazing swastika.

It is very ugly but it is also historical and I don’t know what to do with it.

When my mother died in 2006 at the age of 87 she left a huge clean-up job to me and my older sisters. Since I live in this area and they do not, the bulk of the job fell to me.

There were two houses to sort through and an old, dilapidated barn to burn in addition to the usual divvying-up of photos and silverware.

To be sure most things in our house had always existed in a surreal jumble and that made the sorting all the harder. Upstairs in the large room called the library there had been a drafting table my father hauled home from his work. It was always covered with clutter and if you dug even a little you might turn up a piccolo, a fossil, or parts of an old milking machine. Even my mother’s Dionne quintuplet scrapbook that she had kept as a little girl appeared.

There seemed to be no telling what could surface then disappear never to be seen again. Until we started cleaning it up.

My mother kept a detailed scrapbook of her life in the army and wrote many letters home. She brought back the Nazi eagle just as others returned with antique Japanese swords or might today bring back a piece of crystal from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

I know from her scrapbook that she worked as a surgical nurse in a mobile field hospital. She told us that she had also cared for survivors of concentration camps.

However, despite my mother’s meticulous record keeping, she never seemed able to keep her Nazi eagle story straight and through the years it took some absurd turns. Perhaps this was due to her apparent embarrassment at having stolen it in the first place. There it sat in the corner on the bottom shelf of an old china cabinet.

One time my mother told me it was a statue of an American eagle triumphing over the Nazis. But even as children we knew there was something definitely evil about the thing and I recall me and my cousins being superstitiously afraid to touch it. It was only years later when I saw this “Nuremberg eagle” in a book that I fully realized that her explanation made no sense. It came with a jolt and smack of memory that made my hair stand on end.

When my sister, Andrea, came back from California for the funeral we talked about the Nazi eagle. She remembered Ma telling her that if the house were to catch fire they could tie a rope to the eagle and hurl it out a window to escape the house and save themselves. (An image that reminds me of the sort of insane plans concocted by the cartoon character Wiley E. Coyote). If we saved ourselves this way at least the Nazis would have done “one good thing in the world,” my mother said. Later, when the house did burn in the mid-80s, the Nazi eagle came through intact.

I have written to two Holocaust museums to ask for advice on what to do with the eagle but have gotten no response. The Internet has a number of sites for collectors of World War II artifacts. And, judging from the recent controversy over the Nazi items owned by Human Rights Watch’s Marc Garlasco, these objects continue to carry a potent meaning. There is even a chatty website dedicated to determining if you have an authentic eagle or a reproduction. There seems to be plenty of both.

I don’t know what I want to do with the eagle but I do know what I don’t want to do with it.

I don’t want to make any money with it. I don’t want to try to sell it on e-Bay. I don’t want it to fall to the hands of some skinhead kid. I don’t want it plucked from the trash heap again.

Perhaps its best use is for education. My husband, who is a high-school history teacher, has taken it to school when his classes are talking about World War II.

Every year there are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses to the Holocaust who remain with us. But their stories and the artifacts of that terrible time are still here—to be found even in an abandoned farmhouse on a dusty road high above the Delaware River. It’s our responsibility to understand and preserve what they’ve left behind.

- Kristin Barron