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I see no-one has taken up the baton and published a second lap of ‘Showcase Covers’. I surely can’t be the only one to own interesting covers that fellow collectors just might like to see and hear about? I’ll do one more, then if no-one shows interest the idea can die like so many others due to indifference.
The cover illustrated here was my very first purchase from an on-line auction -- for just $2, thanks to its being grotesquely mis-described as ‘1918 Lithuania’! In fact it was posted in 1944 in Eastern Hungary – old-style Hungarian postmarks have the year in first place in the bridge, ‘1944’ being expressed as ‘944’ or, here, just ‘44’; the ‘19’ is the day of the month, ‘18’ the time of day of postmarking.
The letter was sent by an SS Rott(en)führer with the IIIrd (Germanic) SS-Panzer-Korps in Narva, Estonia (Feldpost-Nummer 27016), to a friend serving as an SS guard in the concentration camp at Kovno, Lithuania (Kowno in Polish = Kaunas in Lithuanian = Kauen in German). Though not inscribed ‘(SS) Feldpost’ its transmission unfranked and SS-censor-marked ‘As’ clearly shows that it was treated as such. The stain looks suspiciously like blood.
Presumably the sender was on leave in his native town of Torzsa (in Hungarian, = Torschau in German = Savino Selo in Slovak, the current name), since the poor German of both sender (‘Kompani’ for ‘Kompanie’) and addressee (hand-written note ‘von Famielije Wirth’, instead of ‘Familie’) suggests they were from the Volksdeutsche minority of north-eastern Hungary.
The Kovno ghetto, brutally exploited by the SS as a pool of cheap slave labour since 1941, was officially transformed into a concentration camp in November 1943 and liquidated in early July 1944, just a couple of weeks after this letter arrived (see Avraham Tory: ‘Surviving the Holocaust: the Kovno Ghetto Diary’ published by Harvard in 1990 and by Pimlico in 1991, and ‘Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto’ published in 1997 by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum).
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