An art lecturer and collector from Singapore went on the journey of a lifetime to reunite World War II memorabilia with its owner after buying them at auction.
The grand adventure begin in 2022 when 39-year-old Wesley Leon Aroozoo bid on a collection of antique stamps, postcards, and articles that included an unmarked set of booklets which he discovered belonged to a pair of laborers in Nazi Germany.
The adventure ended 8 months later with a beautiful ending, that had a sort of “what goes around comes around” moral of the story.
Aroozoo loves vintage everything, and the story of his internet sleuthing, as recounted by Mothership.sg, centers around the incredible insight he was able to glean into a German family separated by a continent, 10k miles, 80 years, and a world war.
Using the information he found within the booklets, Aroozoo determined they belonged to two brothers: Wolfgang and Woldamar Scheck.
The booklets were principally sheets meant for collecting a stamp at the end of a workday to prove they were employed—some horrible relic of Nazism’s fascist central planning efforts—but they also contained immigration papers and other family documents.
“I think I’m a bit nuts when it comes to these things,” Aroozoo admitted to Mothership. “Most people would just look at it and go, ‘oh, that’s kind of cool’ and then keep it or sell it.”
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“[But] if it was me—if I had interesting family documents from my great-grandfather or something—wouldn’t it be cool if someone gave it back to me?”
Aroozoo’s own family history is fairly impermeable, and would take a team of geneticists and bureaucrats to illuminate because in the misty past of poorly-managed government records, his surname had been misspelled; a hard end to all his attempts thus far to learn more about his own origins.
Tracking down the Schecks
The immigration papers contained within the booklets showed that Woldamar had immigrated to Australia in the 1950s. Aroozoo scoured social media for Australian residents with the surname Scheck, and sent messages gently explaining what he was trying to do.
After 8 months without any luck, Aroozoo came across an Excell spreadsheet that had made it onto Google and which contained the name “Michael Scheck” in the coding. He knew Michael was one of Woldamar’s 4 children, and so used a program to convert the code of the unopenable spreadsheet into a text document to try and confirm his findings.
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Buried in code inside, he found Michael’s name alongside the address of his place of work. Calling and getting notification that Michael was on holiday but would be told of Aroozoo’s request for contact upon his return, Aroozoo felt a rush of excitement.
“From that stage (of the search), it became a different battle, it became about convincing the person that I am not a crazy person,” Aroozoo told Mothership.
Eventually, he did earn that trust, and Aroozoo and his wife flew to Brisbane to meet Scheck in a public place to reunite the man with his family heirlooms.
The collector and now one-time successful sleuth is fairly philosophical about the strange dedication he bent toward the effort of finding Michael, believing it’s his own lack of ancestral context that sent him running after someone else’s.
WATCH the six-minute Mothership documentary below to see what happened next…
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