Shoah, blocked auction stamps for tattoos Auschwitz

An Israeli court has ordered the suspension of the auction sale of some stamps for tattoos on the arm of inmates in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. The batch of 14 stamps, used to stamp the prisoners’ identification numbers, was to be auctioned on November 9 by the Tzolman auction house, but the sale raised a wave of indignation in Israel. The court decision was made known by Colette Avital, president of the Center for Holocaust Survivors’ Organizations, a body that had intervened to ask for the auction to be suspended. Meir Tzolman, owner of the auction house, defended himself by saying that he intended to ensure the sale “in good hands”, so that the stamps “did not disappear from the pages of history”. “I am the last person who wants to downplay the importance of the Holocaust,” he argued. Meanwhile Dani Dayan, president of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, has lashed out at the “selfish traders” who do business with objects of the Holocaust. Holocaust instead of handing them over to museums and other institutions of memory. More than a million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.