Ask the pilot

Souvenirs from hell: The keepsakes we most treasure don't always come with a clear conscience.

By Patrick Smith

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Sept. 28, 2007 | Something different this week.

There's a new book out. While it has nothing to do with flying, I can't help giving it a plug. "Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance" was published last month by Princeton Architectural Press. Says the cover blurb, "This is a book about the things that inspire all of us ... Artists, writers, designers, among many others, contribute their objects and ruminations that encourage, motivate, and energize their own creativity."

The editors are Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes. I've known Josh Glenn for more than 20 years, during which he has progressed from slacker Svengali to capo of the Boston literary mafia. (He was previously the creator of Hermenaut magazine and associate editor of the Boston Globe's "Ideas" section.) He knows that I travel a lot, and that I moonlight as a columnist. Apparently that made me a good candidate for inclusion.

My "thing" appears on Page 48, between a pencil sharpener and a cheese box. More correctly, there are two things -- a pair of ceramic insulator pegs that I appropriated from the grounds of the former Birkenau concentration camp, in southern Poland, during a visit there in 1995. The pegs, through which deadly wires were once strung, had been part of an electric fence. Each is about the size and shape of a salt shaker. When I found them, they'd broken from the stanchion and lay half-buried in the mud. I pried them out, put them into my backpack and carried them home. Today they sit on a bookshelf, inconspicuous and awful.

Birkenau is part of the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex, Europe's largest and most notorious death camp of the Second World War. Plenty of people visit the somewhat prettified Auschwitz portion, a low-rise complex of restored brick buildings and a tourist museum, where the impeccably manicured grounds are perversely reminiscent of a boarding school campus. Auschwitz will always be a place of intensely profound impressions, but just the same, they are reconstructed impressions. They are not always as emotionally or viscerally genuine as they could be. For that, one needs to make the mile-long trip across town to the staggeringly huge, mostly untouched remains of Birkenau, also known as "Auschwitz II." Birkenau is the place you see in the old newsreels and photographs, with its long lines of barracks and infamous boxcar depot. This is where the majority of prisoners lived and died, and it's Birkenau that will leave you with knees shaking, having glimpsed the ultimate scale of mechanized mass murder. And you don't merely see it through a glass-enclosed viewing platform. You touch it, breathe it, get it stuck in the soles of your shoes. Lonely Planet is correct when it states: "Tour groups who are shown only Auschwitz will get a totally false impression." Simply put, you have not been to Auschwitz unless you have been to Birkenau. You can crawl amid the ruins if you like, mingling with the ghosts of those million-plus victims. Later, you'll ponder the significance of the fragments of grit and mortar embedded in the treads of your sneakers.

Along with the keepsakes you've dug from the ground and stolen.

I mentioned my excursion to Birkenau in a column once before. For perhaps obvious reasons -- guilt, shame, regret -- I did not mention my theft of the cylinders.

For the same reasons, I at first balked at using them as my "Things" contribution. In the end, I'm somewhat surprised they were accepted. When you think about it, the pegs are not objects of "unexpected significance" at all. Their significance is pretty obvious -- which goes against the grain of the book. Worse, their meaning is easily misinterpreted. They become about me -- specifically, the story of my having pilfered them. (I already exploited this story years ago, in a small zine I used to write and self-publish.) That in itself makes their significance "unexpected," I suppose, as does their perverse anonymity, resting innocently on a shelf in Somerville, Mass., utterly out of context. But also wrong.

Or maybe not? Could the theft of these two tiny objects be anything other than blasphemous? Is it possible to deface or defame something so over-the-top sinister and beyond redemption? There are those who argue Birkenau should be torn down and bulldozed over, which in a way leaves the taking of a souvenir, if still a bit audacious, less ethically encumbered.

If you can't already tell, the psychology of souvenir collecting is something I've never totally understood. This might explain why my collection of travel souvenirs is, if not exactly limited, undeniably odd. Apart from a Moroccan kilim and a handful of inexpensive carvings, it consists entirely of small, idiosyncratic keepsakes: a black pebble of lava from an Icelandic beach; a section of newspaper (presumably radioactive) from Chernobyl, Ukraine; an acacia thorn from Botswana; a hunk of salt from Timbuktu. I prefer the sort of miscellaneous scavengings that are free, portable and pocketable. Most of this detritus rests on a bookcase in the converted bedroom where I write my columns. The pegs are perhaps the most profound item in this jumble of mysterious, vaguely scientific-looking knickknacks. But they are not the only ones acquired through dubious means. In fact, my backup submission for the "Things" project was yet another item carted home from abroad with a less than clear conscience -- a human jawbone.

The story of the jawbone doesn't carry with it quite as much baggage, and is one that I tell more freely. All things considered, I am lucky, if that is indeed the proper word, to have poached it successfully.

It comes from a place called the Cemetery of Chauchilla, located in the coastal desert along the shoreline of southern Peru. The area is best known for the famous Nazca Lines -- a series of giant, mysterious patterns and figures carved into the landscape thousands of years ago, some of them miles long and distinguishable only from an airplane. I'd been fascinated by the Nazca Lines since childhood, inspired by the voice of Leonard Nimoy in the '70s documentary show "In Search Of." In May 1994, during a weeklong trip to Peru, I went and saw them.

No less impressive than the Lines, albeit in a totally different way, was the nearby Cemetery of Chauchilla, a short taxi ride from Nazca town along the Pan American Highway. Set in a field of shallow dunes, the cemetery is a pre-Columbian burial ground, centuries old and badly ravaged by looters. I am told the looted area is closed to tourists now, but I can tell you how it looked 13 years ago.

Next page: I am approached by two policemen. "Would you mind coming with us," the taller one says