“The book is small so it can be hidden.” How, could such a small item have survived the conditions of the camp? And why was it preserved? What did its survival mean? A book is generally considered a non-essential personal item. That is, unlike clothing, or artifacts related to food, shelter or safety, books do not appear to fulfill essential human needs. And yet, even within the extreme conditions of life in the camps, people chose to keep and—in some cases—create books. Leia Kreimer’s tiny book, made for her as a gift, is one example. Its production, exchange, and ultimate survival illuminate the enduring resilience of the book as a cultural form that is both text and object.

In 2014, when the author first visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s original offsite storage facility, they saw a semblance of a series of wedding dresses under wraps, too delicate to be on display. In that dark space, the author came to learn about how one of these wedding gowns was made out of a repurposed parachute. So enchanted and intrigued by this story, the author vowed to return to these dresses and their promise of renewed life at least for some of those former concentration camp inmates who survived and were able to wear them.

This article conducts a codicological analysis of Szegö’s Holocaust diary written in a holy book, examining the manuscript as an object and the significance of its material features. While the diary entries are a rich text that deserve more scholarly attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries is equally important. Doing so foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

In comparison to the considerable scholarship on drawings, prints, and photographs of Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners, the jewelry that prisoners created for themselves or other prisoners remains less investigated. Covertly constructed from scrap or excess metal in forced labor factories and workshops, pendants, pins, bracelets, and other metal objects were largely given as gifts to friends and family or exchanged for food or other resources. This essay is a survey of select jewelry objects constructed in the ghetto-camp Terezín of the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (current-day Czech Republic) and the Łódź ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland. Using a bracelet owned by Terezín prisoner Greta Perlman, jewelry constructed by Terezín prisoner David Grunfeld for fellow inmates, and various link bracelets and pins found in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto after its liquidation, this essay examines how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted some form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated; they also wrote to a relative, Ludwik, whom they hoped might deliver Dziunia’s letter. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper, a list no larger than 11 x 15 cm. The size of the two letters and the reuse of scraps of paper speak to the desperation, violence, and urgency of the genocidal context in which they were penned as well as the severe material shortages in the ghetto.

Looking at Indigenous bannerstones from what is known as North America, their unique shapes and symmetrically drilled holes carved from an array of lithics, from sedimentary stone to quartz, I wonder what stories they are telling. Do their stories begin with the sculptors who made them east of the Mississippi Valley in 6,000 BCE or do they begin four billion years ago when volcanic heat from the earth’s core melted and congealed minerals to form the oldest terrestrial rocks?