Anita Marshall and Rev. Sidney Tompkins have spent hours combing through boxes upon boxes of decades of church archives and found a box that held a jaw-dropping discovery.
They found a railroad spike preserved in Lucite, presented to PCC by the Temple Beth El. As you can see, the spike reportedly came from a Holocaust concentration camp at Treblinka, Poland.
Treblinka was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. Operating from July 1942 to October 1943, it was the second-deadliest killing center of the Holocaust, where an estimated 800,000 to 925,000 Jews and thousands of Romani people were murdered.
The Florida Holocaust Museum was founded in 1992 by Walter P. Loebenberg, a businessman and Holocaust survivor who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and later served in the U.S. Army. Originally established in Madeira Beach, the museum quickly expanded, relocating to its current 27,000-square-foot downtown St. Petersburg space in 1998.
Here is the mystery that perhaps you can help with. We cannot find any record of PCC’s involvement with the museum, except for a loan of items related to a visit to PCC by Coretta Scott King. Neither Temple Beth El nor the Holocaust Museum could shed light on PCC’s involvement in establishing the museum. The museum confirmed that railroad spikes were given to key supporters years ago. But there is no record of who they were given to or why they were presented.
SO, if you have knowledge that would help fill out this page in our history, send it to Al Tompkins along with details about how you know what you know, and we will report what we learn in a later post!
In the meantime, the spike is being stored safely at the church and we will consider how to appropriately use it to fulfill the statement on the base of the display- “Never Again.”
pccforward.org 