Peculiar Sensibilities

Patrick Blaizel says the objects that he thinks contain fossilized remains of Nazi death camp victims should be used to raise awareness of the horrors that took place in Treblinka, where nearly 900,000 people, mainly Jews, were executed. Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, THE GAZETTE

Displaying fundamentally and amazingly poor judgement, a Montreal-based auctioneer has raised a storm of controversy over his stated intention to place on the auction block for his next auction, several artifacts he recently came in possession of. The individual from whom Patrick Blaizel claims to have purchased the artifacts informed him that they were what remained of human beings after their corpses had gone through the furnaces at Treblinka, a Nazi death camp.

These were, then, purportedly what remained of human beings whom the Nazi Final Solution to achieve an extermination of Europe's Jews managed to achieve when it consigned six million to death. It really does not matter all that much whether these truly were what they were represented to be, or simply objects difficult to identify but defined by unscrupulous people as remnants of death camp victims, retrieved from the ashes of the ovens.

Mr. Blaizel insisted that his intentions were honourable; he set out to put the pieces of oven-glazed bone up for auction, so that someone could own them and in this way honour the memory of the dead. A truly disingenuous explanation for a truly despicable set of circumstances. When the story was published it generated so much criticism and scorn that the auction house curator, Mr. Blaizel, decided not to place them on auction, after all.

He would, instead, donate them to a local Jewish congregation for burial. He had formerly stated that it wasn't his intention to hand them over to a Holocaust Memorial Centre, for example, because, he said, "I think they would end up in a drawer somewhere ... forgotten." The value in the objects, if they are indeed what is claimed they are, is solely as poignant remnants of a time of unspeakable horror.

The place for them obviously is within a Holocaust Remembrance Museum, where they would rest in peace and with all respect due them. Mr. Blaizel's intention was to give them a starting bid of $10. And then see what bidders would be inclined to do from there. Of course their value is inestimable for entirely other reasons than Mr. Blaizel could imagine.

And of course, Mr. Blaizel realized an entirely different value from temporary ownership of the objects, and the publicity he was able to raise by claiming them to be remnants from Treblinka, which he was prepared to make available to the highest bidder. He and his business received a lot of attention, none of it admiring, but as the old saying goes, for those wishing publicity, there is no such thing as 'bad' publicity.

He might have aspired to become famous in some circles, while simultaneously becoming distastefully infamous in others.