Turning the page on hate

                              The small, frail Jewish woman leaned forward in her chair and peered down at the table, her wonderful face mere inches from it.
                              More than 50 years had passed since she was incarcerated for more than a year in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.  For an hour several years ago, I listened as she picked figurative scabs off the unimaginable horrors she endured and recounted the fear and uncertainty of when her final moment might arrive at the hands of mad men whose souls had vanished.
                             Then I experienced a moment that has never left me.  I asked her about her family.  More specifically, if any loved ones were murdered in the camps.  She nodded.  As I asked about each of them, she looked at me, revealing a veil of sadness before bowing her head again.
                             Your father?
                             She nodded.
                             Mother?
                             She nodded.
                             Brothers?
                             She nodded and slowly unfurled her index finger.
                             When I asked about others, the woman slowly swung her head back and forth in the negative, a lifetime of tears dripping on the table.  She balled up a fist, gently dropped it on the table in a state of emotional exhaustion, lifted her head and whispered, "All gone, all gone."
                             I thought of that poor woman this week upon learning that two rare autographed copies of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" went up for auction online in Los Angeles on Thursday.  The two editions of the former Nazi leader's manifesto, which outlines his vision for a National Socialist movement and is considered among the most anti-Semitic and heinous screeds in modern history, were each said to fetch between $20,000 and $25,000.
                            What level of interest in the macabre must one reach to pay gobs of money for a book simply because a monster who ordered the murder of six million Jews and those of five million others signed one of its fly pages?  Why anyone would want Hitler's autographed memoir, much less pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, both startles and troubles me.
                            Historians may argue that regardless of the level of ruthlessness, all history is a slice of our past from which we can learn.  But why celebrate a megalomaniac with the extravagant purchase of his book of hate in which Hitler paired Judaism with communism as the world's twin evils?  He no longer belongs in the headlines.
                           Interest in Hitler isn't limited to this week's auction.  The Nazi relics trade has boomed for years in America.  A Connecticut auction house in 2001 sold the journals of concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele for $300,000, and plates bearing Hitler's portrait and an ink blotter he purportedly used to sign the Munich Agreement in 1938.
                          Last month, sales of "Mein Kampf" surged on the electronic book bestseller list.  Two versions ranked among the top 15 in the Politics & Current Events section of the iTunes book store, and was No. 1 in the Proaganda & Political Psychology section on Amazon.
                          Perhaps the spike in "Mein Kampf" e-book sales is tied to academic study.  Or maybe it's because folks are embarrassed to ask for it in a bookstore for fear of being viewed as a racist.
                          Or maybe it's something else.
                          "It likely comes from neo-Nazi and skinheads idolizing the greatest monster in history," World Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer has said.  "We think that responsible companies shouldn't profit from sales of hate books, or at least should donate the profits to help victims of anti-Semitism, racism and other like bigotries."
                          Don't hold your breath.
                          The world will become a better place when interest in Adolf Hitler is, and as a woman who forever bears the scars whispered, all gone, all gone.