When Karla McCabe was a child in East Germany in the 1970s and ‘80s, she knew her grandfather had been a German soldier in World War II. But exactly what he did during those years was not a topic of discussion in her family. Nine years after his death, when McCabe was 18, she inherited part of his proud stamp collection. She rifled through relics of a lifelong hobby, including his first stamp album from 1926, an assortment of envelopes and, finally, 36 postcards that made her shudder. Though she could not read them, she recognized Hebrew letters and Jewish names. All the postcards were addressed to one place: The Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva.
McCabe didn’t know it at the time, but the yeshiva was a famed Jewish house of study in Poland before the Holocaust. And there in her hands, she held rare fragments of a world ruptured by her grandfather’s army. She soon learned that as the Jews of Lublin were murdered, her grandfather — stationed in the district until 1941 — fished some of their letters from a trash bin to augment his stamp collection. On April 11, more than 80 years later, McCabe finally returned the postcards to their home in a ceremony at the former Lublin Yeshiva. Before an audience of about 25 people, she handed the collection to Iwona Herman, coordinator of the city’s Jewish community, along with directors from Lublin’s State Archive. Some 40 Jews live in Lublin today and a handful attended the event.
In a speech that turned shaky and trailed into tears, McCabe said, “These cards are neither a gift nor a donation. I am simply bringing home Holocaust loot.”
