Man returns Holocaust book, 40 years overdue

A New York man returned a library book about the Holocaust to his hometown library in Massachusetts more than 40 years after checking it out.

Shimon Pepper returned “While Six Million Died,” by Arthur Morse to the Fall River Public Library last week, the Herald News reported. Its due date was June 19, 1971.

Pepper had visited his hometown to retrieve Torah scrolls and religious books from his boyhood synagogue, which no longer used the religious objects, in order to donate them to synagogues in Israel, New York and New Jersey.

At the 1971 rate of 2 cents a day, Pepper owed about $271 in fines, though the library allowed borrowers to pay $50 for a lost book. Pepper made a donation to the library, which could not track the book since it did not have bar codes in the 1970s, according to the newspaper.