A weapon with a hopeful message

A curious inscription on a Nazi dagger displayed in a Dublin museum is a legacy of Jewish brotherhood after the apocalyptic trauma of the Holocaust, writes Jon Ihle

Upstairs in the Irish Jewish Museum in Walworth Road, Portobello, amid the collection's Torah scrolls and religious items, in a case displaying artefacts of the second World War and the Holocaust, lies a Nazi officer's dagger. Such an apparently incongruous object presents itself with unexpected menace in this shrine to the history and continuity of Jewish life in Ireland.

The brass swastika emblazoned on the dagger's steel and ivory hilt would have the power to shock in any context, but juxtaposed with a yellow Star of David armpatch bearing the word "Juif" and a commemorative candle for Yom Hashoah, the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, it seems particularly sinister.

A closer inspection of the weapon, however, reveals precisely the opposite symbolic meaning. A rough engraving in German on the scabbard brandishes not a threat, but conveys instead a simple message of friendship: "Meinem Freund Moris Block zur Erinnerung A Fischmann" (To my friend Moris Block in memory A Fischmann). Beside this inscription is a small Star of David and the date, 1945.

The dagger came into the possession of the museum when Maurice Block, a Jewish Dubliner, offered it to the curator, Raphael Siev, in 1990 as a contribution to the growing collection of religious and historical material on display there.

Block had been a field security sergeant in an intelligence unit of the British army during the second World War. The Munich crisis of 1938 and the anti-Semitism of the Mosleyites spurred him to volunteer, only to be stood down when Chamberlain returned from Germany with Hitler's worthless peace guarantees. After being called up to the artillery at the outbreak of war in September, 1939, he went on to serve in North Africa, Iraq and Palestine before landing in Normandy on June 12th, 1944 and joining the final Allied push into Germany in the last year of the war.

A fluent German speaker, Block had applied for a post in the intelligence corps and was accepted. His job in the army was to follow the advancing front-line troops, interrogate captured German officers and decipher their documents. Immediately after the war, as a member of a de-Nazification squad in the occupation forces, he also carried out arrests of Nazi fugitives, famously nabbing the pyjama-clad Werner Carp, an industrial financier, after a melee during a night raid in December 1945.

Block was in Düsseldorf in the closing days of the war as the Allies flushed out the last pockets of German resistance. A British patrol in the city had turned up a group of three men, wearing only their underclothes, in the basement of a derelict building. The soldiers suspected these were members of the Wehrmacht who had shed their uniforms in an effort to melt into the civilian population. The men were arrested and brought to Block for questioning.

Block, who also spoke Yiddish, was able to ascertain in his interrogation that these three men were, in fact, German Jews who had been in hiding, incredibly, for the duration of the war.

The chances of finding a Jew alive in Germany in 1945 were small enough; that these survivors happened to be questioned by a fellow Jew to whom they could make their story credible was miraculous.

Not surprisingly, the men were in poor health. Block made sure they were transferred to an army field hospital, where he visited them regularly, developing a friendship.

Before they were discharged, the men wanted to present Block with a token of thanks. One, Fischmann, an engraver who would have been forbidden by the infamous Nuremberg laws from practising his craft during much of the Nazi period, suggested an engraving. Block managed to procure a requisitioned Nazi officer's dagger - not an uncommon item of war booty - for the purpose.

The engraving turned out to be both ironic and poignant. To reinscribe an instrument of Nazi oppression with a message of Jewish brotherhood after the apocalyptic trauma of the Holocaust represents the triumph of hope and redemption over nihilism.

Under the Nazis, the Star of David, the symbol of the Jewish people, had become a sign of subjugation, a mark of Untermenshlichkeit or subhumanity. Naziism had effectively robbed European Jews of their own meaning. In a perverse but characteristic twist of Nazi depravity, Jews were forced to make their own identifying yellow stars.

Fischmann's simple testament goes some way towards erasing or at least overwriting that appropriation of identity. The result is an artefact which bears the crowded imprint of history's tragedy and restoration.

From interrogator to Ring King

Born in London's East End around the time of the first World War to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Maurice Block married Marie Golding, a Dubliner, after he was demobilised.

In 1948 the couple moved to Stillorgan, Co Dublin, where they raised their two sons, Martin and Howard, who are best-known for their involvement in radio broadcasting.

Block came from a family of jewellers and watchmakers and was a commercial traveller in the jewellery business, eventually buying and selling for Ring King in South Anne Street, Dublin. Known as a great raconteur, Block had a wide circle of friends and was known for his storytelling and high spirits.

He died in September, 2002.