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By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO—Zachary Kucinski, an eighth grade student at San Diego Jewish Academy, has assembled an impressive collection of authentic Holocaust artifacts that he hopes someday will be the nucleus of a Holocaust museum in San Diego, where he lives, or in Seattle, where his favorite professional football team plays.
The 13-year-older (pictured at right) will give the public a taste of what kind of museum he has in mind when some of those artifacts, including yellow stars and concentration camp uniforms, go on display in November at the Lawrence Family JCC as part of the San Diego Jewish Book Fair.
After meeting Holocaust survivor Ela Weissberger at a previous book fair and seeing the Yellow Star that the Nazis forced her to wear, young Kucinski asked his grandfather, Robert Kucinski, about his experiences as a preschool and elementary school aged Jewish boy in Belgium masquerading as a Catholic orphan. The grandfather, who now lives in San Diego County, told Zachary that even though he was baptized, the nuns for his safety would send him upstairs to hide in the attic whenever Nazi officials were seen approaching the orphanage. He also told Zachary he still can remember the sounds of bombs falling near the orphanage.
The grandfather had no idea what might have happened to the Yellow Star he was required to wear before assuming a new identity in the orphanage, but Zachary was determined to locate and collect one. Eventually, through research on the Internet, he was able to locate one that was being sold by a French museum, and thus started his collection.
Why collect Holocaust memorabilia? I asked Zachary in a telephone interview on Monday afternoon. “I wanted to honor grandpa and keep the memory of the Holocaust alive,” he responded.
Bar mitzvah gifts and weekly allowances went into a fund that he assembled for the purchase of Holocaust items. He estimates that he thus far has spent approximately $9,000 assembling a collection that he believes could be resold—not that he wants to—for between $35,000 and $40,000.
In addition to yellow stars with the name “Jew” in various languages—such as “Jude” in German, “Juif” in French—Zachary’s collection expanded to the striped uniforms that concentration inmates were required to wear, identification numbers they were required to sew onto their uniforms, a wallet that was made from panels of a Torah scroll; the soles of German military boots, also made from looted Torahs; calipers that Nazi doctors used to measure the size of Jewish inmates' heads; and labels identifying products as made by Jews and therefore not fit for “Aryans.”
“I also have a ketuba (Jewish marriage contract), one that was written May 8, 1945, about two weeks after Dachau was liberated. “This lady was liberated and she decided to handwrite her entire ketuba,” he said.
Zachary cautions others who might also want to assemble such collections that there are many fake Jewish stars and other bogus memorabilia being sold on the Internet. Before purchasing anything, he said, people should study pictures from archives, and, in the case of the Stars, “look at the stitching.”
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 Zachary said he has picked up a mentor in the field of collecting – an Ohio man named Steve Cassidy, who regularly makes presentations at schools. An unabashed admirer of Cassidy, although they've never met except by correspondence, Zachary says Cassidy knew some things about the Holocaust “that even Steven Smith of the British Holocaust Museum” wasn’t aware.
Smith, a Christian theologian, incidentally is one of the f
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eatured speakers at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair. He and author Francine Prose will be joint presenters at the Lawrence Family JCC on Wednesday, Nov. 11. Smith will discuss his book Making Memory, Creating Britain’s First Holocaust Centre and Prose will discuss her book, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the After Life.
Although only 13, Zachary has strong opinions about various Holocaust issues and is not at all shy about expressing them.
For example, one day while scouring the internet, Zachary found a man who was selling what clearly were counterfeit Jewish stars. He emailed the man telling him that it was wrong to sell fakes, as it dishonored the memories of everyone who died in the Holocaust. For his trouble he received a terse and obscene reply: “F__ Y___,” wrote the anonymous correspondent, “You must be one of those hook-nosed Jews.”
Kucinski’s mother, Debbie Sweet-Kucinski,promptely deleted the message. “Imagine,” she told San Diego Jewish World, “a 13-year-older receiving something like that!”
Zachary has visited some Holocaust museums and said he was disappointed that the larger ones keep many artifacts in boxes rather than shipping them to rural places in the United States—perhaps where anti- Semitism flourishes—so that citizens in those areas also can benefit from the lessons of the Holocaust.
He even has criticism of San Diego Jewish Academy’s butterfly project—in which the school is attempting to collect 1.5 million ceramic butterflies to represent the estimated 1.5 million Jewish children who died at the hands of the Nazis.
Not only Jewish children died, he stressed in our interview. The Nazis also murdered many people who were homosexuals, or who had physical deformities, or were Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or homeless, he said. There were 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and although there is no estimate of how many of these were children, he said, the butterfly project should aim to collec t sufficient ceramic butterflies to memorialize those children as well.
I asked Zachary what he wants to do in life, expecting that like many young teens he might have only the vaguest of notions. Instead, I learned, he has a whole program laid out for the rest of his life. He wants to go to the University of Michigan and get a bachelor’s degree in history, then he wants to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, and following his hitch, he wants to return to university to earn an advanced degree in history, while also pursuing archaeology. Then he wants to open a Holocaust Museum and as a sidelight operate a restaurant specializing in hamburgers and steaks. “I love to eat,” he explained.
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