This introductory essay presents the origins and aims of the special issue. It examines how objects marked by violence and loss acquire dimensions of sacrality and affect, and highlights the essential—often invisible—professional labors of care and conservation in sustaining historical memory.

Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. They are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of violent and traumatic pasts.

An exploration of how Holocaust museums and archives confront and contextualize perpetrator materials, addressing the ethical challenges of exhibiting “disgraceful” objects, this essay examines curatorial and archival approaches to preservation, interpretation, and display, and reflects on how these materials shape public engagement, historical understanding, and moral responsibility.

This article presents four objects, all relating to the Treblinka death camp, that would have been worn on the bodies of Holocaust victims. Each one, however, illustrates differences in the journeys, uses, spatialities, and temporalities of proximity. These items give pause to reflect on how value and sacrality are affected when objects have been in extremely close physical contact with the (living or dead) human body, and how the context in which they are found may affect their perceived status.

Through war, ghettoization, deportations, and forced labor, Judy Lachman carried and protected from harm photographs of friends and family members, mementos of her life before and during World War II. One of these pictures depicts members of the youth Zionist organization Akiva. This article examines the photograph’s visual and material qualities, the transformations it underwent during the war, and its mediation and remediation after the war. 

This essay examines Hedda Sterne's 1941 Romanian passport and her little-known photomontages from Life magazine as parallel "documents of exile." The passport traces her perilous flight from Europe, serving as an unintended autobiography of survival. Her photomontages, composed from magazine clippings, became visual testimonies that confront the dissonance between American popular culture and her feelings of anxiety as a refugee. This study uses a conservation and art history lens to explore how paper, in both bureaucratic and artistic forms, mediated Sterne's identity and experience of displacement.