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Oct. 28, 2005
Questionable currency exhibited
Unique scrip represented economic culture inside the camps.
PAT JOHNSON
The culture within the concentration camps of the Nazi regime has
been subject to extensive investigations across varied disciplines.
Acts of unspeakable inhumanity took place in the confines of the
camps, but there are also redemptive tales of life-affirming selflessness
among inmates. In addition to the social culture that developed
within the camps, there was an additional factor that has not received
as much attention, but which is the subject of an exhibit on now
at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Questionable Issue: Currency of the Holocaust is an exhibit of banknotes
that were used as cash within the confines of the camps. While distinct
social environments developed in the camps, there was also an economic
culture, developed in an environment of deliberate scarcity and
perverted value.
The notes in this exhibit come from 13 different Nazi concentration
camps or ghettos. Some, like the notes created by Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto, are crude proximities of currency. Others, such as many
of the ones created by the Nazis for use within the camps, are as
complex and formal as any national currency.
Most of the Holocaust currency in this exhibit – and most of
those in private collections worldwide – entered the collector's
circuit via the Allied soldiers who discovered the unique scrips
when they liberated the camps at the end of the Second World War.
The items on display come from the collection of a Louisiana numismatist
(collector of currencies) who donated these artifacts to the permanent
collection of the Houston Holocaust Museum.
One of the pieces in this exhibit, from the Natzweiler camp in German-occupied
French Alsace, is the only known remaining example of its kind in
existence today. Other items are almost as rare, including examples
from Dachau, Ravensbrück and the Sokolka Ghetto. The curators
note that the Dachau scrip is particularly exceptional, because
it had space for handwritten notations, including the inmate number
and date of issue, making each piece entirely unique.
From Theresienstadt, the "model" camp that was the Nazis'
showcase to the outside world including the International Red Cross,
come examples of ghetto money that offer rich historical meaning.
As part of the Nazis' international public relations efforts, the
Czech town of Terezin, called Theresienstadt by the Germans, was
turned into a model ghetto-cum-concentration camp, which international
observers were paraded through in what remains one of the darkest
aspects of the era. The camp, which was a way-station en route to
the extermination camps of the east, was the one chosen by the Nazis
when the Red Cross requested a tour of the camps that were an open
secret in the international community by the early 1940s.
By delaying the visit of the Red Cross for several months, until
the summer, the Nazis were able to employ slave labor to turn the
camp into an idyllic town of Jews, with pleasant playgrounds, recreational
facilities and windowboxes. Part of the façade included a
bank, which issued the ghetto money now seen in the current exhibit.
Despite the external appearances, only 17,320 of the 140,000 people
who passed through the gates of Theresienstadt made it out alive.
The Theresienstadt scrip was designed by Czech artist Peter Kien,
who would later die in Auschwitz. The picture on the money –
Moses holding the Ten Commandments – was altered by the artist
after the second-in-command of the SS noted that Moses looked too
Aryan. The final version depicts Moses with gnarled bony fingers,
one finger obscuring the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill."
Bronia Sonnenschein, a Vancouver woman who survived the Lodz Ghetto,
spoke of her recollections with the Nazi currency in an article
accompanying the exhibit.
"We used ghetto money to get our rations and to buy our allotted
bread from the ghetto stores," Sonnenschein said. "We
called the money "Rumkies" after [Mordechai Chaim] Rumkowski,
the Jewish administrator of the ghetto. I worked in the Jewish administration
office and I received Rumkies as my weekly salary for my work. If
you didn't work, you didn't get Rumkies. You could only use this
money on the inside. Ourtside of the ghetto it was worthless –
like Monopoly money."
The imagery on the money, created by Nazis for use by Jews, can
strike contemporary viewers as particularly jarring. On one note,
adjacent Stars of David form barbed wire. The Warsaw Ghetto cash
has Stars of David behind a fence being guarded by an SS logo in
flames.
The exhibit, which originates from the Houston Holocaust Museum,
runs until Dec. 15 at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre,
on the lower level of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.
More information is online at www.vhec.org.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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