From a Proud Past, an Ugly Memento and a Tough Choice

By ARDITH HILLIARD

Aug. 22, 1998 12 AM PT

The voice on the other end of the phone gasped.

“Oh no! You must not destroy it!”

Relief flooded me. The woman had an answer--an answer I could accept--to the quandary my father left me: what to do with a symbol of hate while meeting the obligation Dad’s legacy carried.

Fifty-three years ago, a skinny sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 1,468th Engineer Maintenance Co. reached out and plucked a souvenir from a building somewhere in Germany.

It was a common act for the citizen soldiers of World War II who had fought their way across northern Europe foot by bloody foot. Now, in early March 1945, his unit had taken part in the crossing of the Rhine--the climactic battle of the U.S. Army in Europe. And like victors throughout time, they wanted trophies of their triumph.

Sgt. Albert Franklin Rudinger, 34, my father, was relatively modest in his acquisitions: A set of binoculars from a German tank, postcards from the Nazi era taken from bombed-out houses, someone’s pass, written in German.

And a Nazi flag.

He brought the flag home that fall, after the war ended, one of a few mementos of his Army time, packed in a briefcase-sized Army shipping case, bound by canvas straps. Into a closet it went, buried with the past.

Over the years, the ex-sergeant didn’t mess much with his souvenirs, except for the binoculars from the German tank. He’d take me out to the backyard and we’d gaze at the moon through those heavy binoculars as he explained the vastness of space, about light years, about how the star images we were seeing originated millions of years ago and were just now reaching us.

My dad died in December 1997, just a month after his 53rd wedding anniversary. In our last talks together, he never mentioned the war.

After a memorial service in St. Petersburg, Fla., where my parents had retired, Mom found the old Army case as she sorted his things, brought it into the living room and asked if I wanted it.

I unbuckled the straps and there was the Nazi flag. Bright red, with a black swastika, it assaulted our eyes, an ominous, unwelcome presence in the room.

My daughter would not touch it.

“Maybe we should destroy it,” Mom said.

Confused as we were by this repugnant object, my daughter and I were reluctant to destroy it. To my father, it had been a symbol of his part in his generation’s defining moment, their victory over the Great Evil.

But how should my daughter and I treat it? To keep it was unthinkable; I couldn’t bear to have it in my house. To sell it was to chance its falling into the hands of some loathsome neo-Nazi, an insult to my father’s memory. To destroy it seemed like a rejection of his legacy, a waste of something of historical worth that he valued enough to keep until his death.

So, I brought it back to California with me, wondering all the way home on the plane: What is the right thing to do?

I tried to think of who would have the standing to help me with this decision. I thought of the Pressmans, the Holocaust survivors who were friends of my family growing up. I thought of what that flag represents--the greatest crime in the history of humankind.

Months later, I picked up the phone and called the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Masha Loen, originally from Lithuania, answered in her warm, rich, accented English. Stumbling through a confused explanation of my problem, I got to the possibility of destroying the flag.

That’s when she gasped.

“I am a survivor, and I tell you, do not destroy the flag,” she said. She had been a child in the Stutthof Camp.

She put me through to Marcia Reines Josephy, the museum’s director. Josephy seemed to instinctively understand feelings that I had a hard time articulating.

Do not destroy the flag, she said. “It is very important. It is important for the family. It is important for history.” The museum would take charge of it.

“We will accept it, preserve it, but not display it.”

Josephy, a Columbia University graduate in anthropology who has worked in several museums, remembers her father’s desperate attempts to raise money to get people out of Europe during World War II.

“I had no grandparents on that side of the family,” she said, a devastatingly understated comment on the Holocaust. She mentioned her own family’s past only at my prompting, but that background is one reason she now works for the Holocaust Museum. The first of its kind in the United States when it was established in 1964, it is supported by the Jewish Foundation, grants and donations.

The baby boomers, born in the renewed hope of the postwar era, should talk to their fathers and mothers before they die about the history their attics hold, she said. They should seek out advice on how to preserve artifacts like my father’s.

In fact, Josephy said, her museum hopes soon to hold a preservation workshop to instruct people in how to keep fragile objects from disintegrating.

I marveled at her calm detachment as she handled the flag and the other articles that bore the swastika. She meticulously gave me a receipt--one Nazi flag, one postcard, one ID card, three Nazi insignia--and relieved me of my burden.

I know that skinny sergeant would have approved.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How to Donate

Those with World War II artifacts that they wish to give to a museum may contact:

The Jewish Federation’s Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Martyrs Memorial

5700 Wilshire Blvd.

Los Angeles 90036

Contact: Marcia Reines Josephy, director

Phone: 213-761-8170

Fax: 213-761-8174

The Simon Wiesenthal Center