Wedding Dresses: Soft Landings, a Ritual Garment, and the Promises and Perils of Life After

In 2014 when I first visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s original offsite storage facility, I saw a semblance of a series wedding dresses under wraps, too delicate to be on display. In that dark space, I came to learn about how one of these wedding gowns was made out of a repurposed parachute. I was so enchanted and intrigued by this story, I 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. 

As I return to these wedding dresses, the memory of how I first saw them continues to shape this telling. And so, I begin by considering the way that first dress, the remarkable parachute wedding dress worn by numerous Jewish brides in a Displaced Persons camp after the war, and its accoutrements, speak to that promise even in the very material, the object that was chosen or available—a parachute—to make it.1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) a parachute is "something which inflates to control the descent of a falling body."2 I am moved by all those women who, having left the horrors of the concentration camps and became Displaced Persons, marked their landing into new life wearing this dress or others like it in the liminal spaces of those camps.3 This singular dress made out of something originally constructed for such soft landings seems to tell us something about all these dresses and what they came to mean. As the OED goes on to explain, a parachute is "a protective or compensatory measure offering security in the event of a sudden misfortune." The Holocaust is a catastrophe, hardly a misfortune. But in what follows I tell the story of this dress and then turn to some of those other wedding dresses in the museum’s collection to appreciate what else these garments tell us about these landings. Not all of those who wore these dresses experienced soft landings. Wedding dresses never come with guarantees.   

• 1 I was struck to find that there is also a parachute wedding dress in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. This dress has a decidedly American story even as it comes from the same period as the dress I am focused on here. The “Parachute Wedding Dress, 1947” was “made from nylon parachute that saved Maj. Claude Hensinger during World War II.” This object narrative from the Smithsonian is quite brief, in sharp contrast to the object narratives provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Along with a picture of this beautiful dress, the narrative explains that “In August of 1944, Hensinger, a B-19 pilot, and his crew returning from a bombing raid over Yowata, Japan, when their engine caught fire.” The crew was fortunate. Forced to bail out, they survived with minor injuries. “Hensinger used the parachute as a pillow and blanket as he waited to be rescued” and then kept this life-saving parachute. He then gave the parachute to his girlfriend Ruth for her wedding dress. She imagined a gown in the spirit of Gone with the Wind and had it made. “Hilda Buck . . . made the bodice and veil. Ruth made the skirt herself; she pulled up the strings on the parachute so that the dress would be shorter in the front and have a train in the back.” The copy continues, “The couple were married July 19, 1947. The dress was also worn by their daughter and by their son’s bride before being gifted to the Smithsonian.” The only other thing we learn at this link is that this dress is “one of 137 million artifacts, works of art, and specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection.” We are also told that it is not on display.  “Parachute Wedding Dress,” Smithsonian, accessed February 15, 2025, https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/snapshot/parachute-wedding-dress. I also found this online story about WWII era parachute wedding dresses, Rose Heichelbech, “The Parachute Dresses of the 1940s Really Were Something Else,” https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30090171. I am grateful to one of my anonymous readers for explaining the larger prevalence of parachute wedding dresses that were made during and after the war and for pointing me to this dress in the Imperial War Museum’s collection, “Dress, Wedding, Parachute Silk: Woman’s, Civilian,” Dusty Old Thing, accessed February 15, 2025, https://dustyoldthing.com/wwii-parachute-wedding-dresses/. We learn in this catalog entry that this wedding dress was made during the war “for (the then) Miss Jean Neville. Miss Neville (a theatrical artiste, and later, after the war broke out, a member of ENSA), was due to marry a Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force, but sadly that was not to be.” Although there were it seems many such parachute wedding dresses, what distinguishes this particular dress and the other wedding dresses worn in DP camps is that these women had lost everything as Holocaust survivors, their homes, their possessions, their families and friends, in many cases their former husbands and children. It is remarkable that they decided to marry and that in these camps after the war with so little, they insisted on being married in traditional white wedding dresses and figured out how to make this happen. As such, Lilly, this particular parachute dress, is a kind of relic as it attests to the remarkable stories of these particular women and their survival. 
• 2This definition raises questions as well about “control” which is not always as positive as my reading here suggests. If a wedding dress “inflates to control the descent of a falling body” whose body is falling and who is in control? If in this case a wedding dress stands in for the institution of marriage, how does it break and how does it produce that fall? And how much control does the institution demand? I thank Kristin Bloomer for thinking with me about this essay and for pointing out the challenges around control. Private conversation, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, January 2024.  
• 3According to the USHMM’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “From 1945 to 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) lived in camps and urban centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy. These facilities were administered by Allied authorities and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).” “Displaced Persons,” USHMM Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, accessed February 15, 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/displaced-persons. See also, “DP Camps,” The Holocaust Explained, The Weiner Holocaust Library, accessed February 15, 2025, https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/survival-and-legacy/survivors-and-dp-era/dp-camps/.

Irena Klepfisz, poet, activist, and child survivor of the Holocaust, writes about what it is that survivors mourn and what she hopes that those of us who come after will remember about the Holocaust. She explains that it is not abstract ideas or the numbers of the dead, but rather the loss of everyday life. Her words come from a talk Klepfisz gave in April of 1988 at an event among survivors commemorating the 45th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Uprising in which her own father lost his life. As she explains:

Perhaps this is obvious. And yet, I sometimes think this most obvious fact is often forgotten in the whirl of rhetoric and research by political scientists and historians. Too frequently the Holocaust is spoken of in statistics, in analysis of power and powerlessness, too often evoked by photographs of lines of anonymous naked men and women or mass graves. Yet der khurbn that survivors experienced is not general but very specific. It is reflected in precious sepia photographs pasted into incomplete family albums. It consists of identifiable names, of familiar faces of family members, of named streets, stores, and schools, teammates, friends, libraries, doctors, hospitals, lectures, marches, strikes, political allies and enemies—the people, places, and institutions that make up the fabric of any human being’s ordinary, everyday life. It is these specifics and the loss of that ordinary life that survivors remember and mourn. And not just today, but during all those frequent moments when memory of childhood or ghettos or camps is triggered by something in the present—an angle of someone’s jaw, a special shade of color, a faint smell of a certain food, a dream. In those moments when the fabric of our present life tears apart, survivors mourn and mourn again.4

The everyday, the ordinary, is what so many whose lives have been stained by violence long for. They have, in Klepfisz’s rendering, a profound appreciation for the quotidian, the fabric and the rhythms of everyday life including the clothing, the objects that once animated their ordinary lives.   

I want to consider the significance of wedding dresses in the USHMM’s collection and what they tell us about ordinary life both before and after the Holocaust. Although these dresses are exceptional as ritual garments, they are also deeply familiar. The dresses occasion the stories of the women who wore them and the tales of those loved ones, family and friends who attended the wedding—and those absent, whole households and communities destroyed by the Holocaust. These garments bear witness to these stories, embodying the memories of the women who wore them.  

Turning to the catalog entries to learn the stories of these dresses, we find that these data overtake and postpone our access to information about these treasured garments and the promise that they embody. The museum’s catalog only ever belatedly attests to the care of every stitch that went into making these dresses and how much they meant to the brides. In the catalog, the detailed descriptions of these dresses come as an afterthought. In what follows, I want to honor the human stories, but also not forget these bridal gowns and what they unveil about the afterlives of these survivors and victims.

• 4Irena Klepfisz, “Yom Hashoah, Yom Yerushalayim: A Meditation,” in Jewish Women’s Call for Peace: A Handbook for Jewish Women on the Israel/Palestinian Conflict, eds. Rita Fabel, Irena Klepfisz, and Donna Nevel (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1990), 42. 

Wedding dresses are, perhaps, an unlikely set of Holocaust objects, but I am focusing on them to make clear the range of objects and stories that need to be told about the legacy of the Shoah. Most Holocaust artifacts attest to the horrors of the Holocaust and are especially painful because of their proximity to the human beings who once wore them and the atrocities that happened while they were being worn in camps and ghettos, killing fields, and death marches. Other such artifacts, vast piles or vitrines filled with eyeglasses, for example, often stand in for those who died so brutally—think of all those shoes, or the horrible collection of prosthetic limbs that had been made for specific long-lost bodies on display at Auschwitz.  

I include this excruciating image (Fig. 1) from Auschwitz because I do not want to forget the nature of the vast majority of Holocaust objects that were made and worn by particular people whose lives were lost. In other words, I want to draw a sharp contrast between what we often expect when we think of "Holocaust objects" and the unusual objects I have chosen to focus on in this essay. As my title “soft landings” suggests, I want to turn to what might be considered a strangely joyous collection of garments held at the USHMM, sadly artifacts that are only rarely on display given their fragility. These wedding dresses in the museum’s permanent collection—what the textile conservator I met with at the museum in the summer of 2023 referred to as “the girls”—are personified artifacts that carry the names of the women who first wore them.5 Although not all of these dresses have hopeful stories to tell, some of them do, and these stories are also Holocaust stories. The post-war dresses, and especially the parachute dress, tell us something about the afterlives of the survivors who wore them, the hopefulness that shaped their desires to carry on. But even saying this is not so simple. The tender, fragile hope that marks these dresses and their stories is bound intimately to the horror that brought them to this place. This hope echoes what literary scholar and artist Svetlana Boym calls, “diasporic intimacy,” a tenderness that is “not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but constituted by it.”6

Boym goes on to explain that “Love at last sight is the spasm of loss after the revelation; the tenderness of exiles is about a revelation of the possibility after the loss. Only when the loss has been taken for granted can one be surprised that not everything has been lost.”7 Although Boym focuses on exiles of a different kind, survivors are their own class of exiles, most of whom could never return to the places, the communities, and the addresses they had once called home. Boym captures something of the precarity of the hopefulness of these dresses and those displaced persons who wore them in terms of a kind of tenderness. Many of these survivors had lost not only their homes, but their whole families, including spouses and children during the Shoah only to be surprised to have found each other, fellow Displaced Persons, DPs, after the war. In the face of displacement—not so much locked up in makeshift camps but with nowhere else to go—these couples decided to marry and begin again. They imagined new families as they continued to grieve all of those that they lost so brutally. Having lost everything, in some sense, some of those who survived were able to experience what I have described elsewhere as a kind of euphoria, an ebullience in the face of having overcome death and being able to carry on.8 These experiences are also a part of the story of survivors. 

• 5I was fortunate to be able to see three of these postwar dresses. I am writing about two of them here alongside a dress with a different story. I will not address the third beautiful wedding gown that I saw in this article. “Wedding dress with ruffle made for the marriage of 2 German Jewish DP camp aid workers,” UHSMM, accessed February 1, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn523779. I hope to come back to this dress at some other time.
• 6Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 252. 
• 7Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 234. 
• 8Laura Levitt, The Objects that Remain (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 10.

These are the bare bones of this dress’s story: the parachute dress, accessioned in 1999, Lilly Lax (see Figs. 2 and 3),  had this dress made for her in the German DP camp Celle, located not far from the former concentration camp, Bergen Belsen.9As the story goes, the bride longed to be married in a white dress and her fiancé Ludwig Friedman was able to barter for the parachute. With the parachute in hand, Lilly then found a seamstress who made not only the dress but a shirt for the groom out of this repurposed fabric.10 The wedding took place in a synagogue near Celle, in January 1946. After this first marriage ceremony, the bride’s sisters and cousin each wore the dress to their own postwar weddings, and following these celebrations the dress went on to be worn by over 17 other women in this camp.11

I came to Shapell, the museum’s state of the art Collections, Conservation and Research Center, to see these dresses having learned about Lilly years before at that first visit to the Museum’s former off-site facility, an experience that has haunted this telling. This time, I met Lilly as she was laid out on a large conservation table in a fabric lab at Shapell. In contrast to the catalog, seeing this dress in person, I notice how fragile she is. On her back there are delicate fabric-covered buttons with small thread loops. The conservator made a point of showing me these fine loops to help explain how challenging it is to bring Lilly out for display. For any exhibition she, like the other dresses, must be placed carefully on a made-to-fit mannequin. And once she is on the mannequin, each of these buttons needs to be hooked. This dressing up places a great deal of stress on those original loops. She was not alone on that table. There were two other dresses displayed alongside her, each carefully held by and laid out on a great deal of tissue paper.  

In naming the dress Lilly, the identity of the woman and the story of the dress blur. In trying to offer an account of the dress, we learn a lot about Lilly and Aaron (Ludwig) Friedman.12 The USHMM’s catalog offers material information about the garment, its size, shape, unique attributes; only at the very end, almost as an afterthought. This information follows an extensive accounting of the bride’s genealogy with a nod to her husband’s family story. These harrowing details include a full cast of characters from the period before the Holocaust. In the catalog, the dress occasions these stories, becoming a reliquary, a container of the couple’s memories. Only at the end of the full entry do the details about the dress itself materialize, and as we will see, this is a pattern that shapes the entries for each of these dresses.13

Among the many things that I saw when I first visited the former storage facility were those draped figures, a few human forms in the shape of women. The chief conservator told me that these were wedding dresses and that one of them was made from a parachute. Hearing how delicate these dresses are, I assumed that what I was seeing were custom-made boxes specially made to hold them. I was enchanted by the idea of these exquisite vessels, containers that held these dresses. Even as these dresses themselves had become a kind for reliquary for the women who wore them and their memories, the dresses each needed their own special containers. In this vision, the dresses were themselves relics held in what I imagined as beautiful reliquaries made just for them. And in this way the nested quality of relics and their containers was exquisitely apparent. The powerful stories of the women who once wore these dresses was transferred to these garments and as the gowns each touched their respective containers, they too became secondary relics while the museum’s storage facility itself would become a larger reliquary structure.14

What I came to learn at Shapell this time, however, was that I misremembered what I had encountered. In the dim light of that storage facility, I assumed that what I had seen were shapely custom-made boxes. I now realize that this memory was a wish, my own desire for an exquisite array of cases carefully made to follow the contours of the bodies of the women who once wore them. I had conflated what I had learned about the special human-shaped hangers that were made to preserve fragile, blue-striped concentration camp prisoner uniforms, with these figures. Taken by the idea of a parachute made into a dress, the intricacy and fragility of its rayon fabric sensitive to both light and touch, I imagined these containers themselves as reliquaries.15  Instead, it seems that the “girls” were quite popular at the time of my initial visit and were often kept dressed, poised and ready to be moved from one exhibit to another. As I have come to learn, the girls are now only rarely if ever on display and aside from arranging a research visit to Shapell to see them as I had, the only access to them is through the catalog.  

• 9The dress is named for Lenka (Lili) Lax who became Lili Frydman, then Lilly Friedman. Not only is it difficult to identify objects in the USHMM and other Holocaust collections, but it is also challenging to find particular survivors because their names shift and change over time. Not only are there issues around women’s names, their “maiden names” and married names, but often after the war, survivors of various genders changed or modified their names, or the spelling of their names. Lilly Friedman’s husband Ludwig (Aron) Frydman became Aaron Friedman. These variations mark the names of many of the people I discuss in this essay. Oddly, Lilly is only referred to as “Lenka (Lili) Lax” in the USHMM catalog under the entry for the pair of white gloves the bride wore at her wedding. “Pair of 2 button gloves worn by multiple Jewish brides in DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13650. To add to all of this, as I have suggested, at the museum, the dresses are often referred to by the names of the women who wore them. Following this practice, I refer to the dress Lenka/Lili//Lilly Lax had made and wore to her wedding as “Lilly.” 
  
  This dress is found in the catalog in two places. One reference is to the dress itself and this is the one I am referring to here, “Wedding Dress made from a white rayon parachute worn by Lili Lax Friedman and many additional Jewish brides in a DP camp,” UHSMM, accessed August 21, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13648. The second reference is to a photograph of this dress which has a similar but different label. The photograph is “Wedding dress made from a parachute worn for a wedding in a displaced persons camp,” USHMM, accessed November 4, 2023, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1135918.  
• 10The shirt is beautifully described as follows: “Hand sewn, loose fitting, hip length, peasant style blouse made from a white rayon parachute. It has a small pointed collar and a partial front opening with plackets, 4 finished buttonholes, and thread where buttons were attached. The opening ends midchest with a center pleat. It has a straight bottom and side slits with small gussets. The full long sleeves are gathered, with wide cuffs, a finished buttonhole, and thread from a missing button. The back has a wide center box pleat. The cloth is discolored, stained, and repaired.” “White shirt made from rayon parachute for a Czech Jewish man for his wedding in a DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13545.
• 11For more about the story of this dress including details about all of the people who walked in the snow on January 27, 1946 to attend this first wedding, see, Helen Schwimmer, “The Dress that Made History: A Glimmer of Joy in the Displaced Person Camp,” Chabad, The Jewish Woman, accessed  December 22, 2024, https://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/839778/jewish/The-Wedding-Dress-That-Made-History.htm.  I thank an anonymous reader for this reference.
• 12I am grateful to the professionals who work at the Shapell Center for sharing with us the challenges they face in accessioning, testing, conserving, and cataloging all the distinct items in the Museum’s vast collection. My close reading of these catalog entries is especially indebted to former chief archivist Colleen McFarland Rademaker who described the challenges of creating what is now the USHMM’s single database of the museum’s holdings. Colleen helped me appreciate how difficult it is to amass and formalize this data, the narratives, the cross-references, and the tags. This essay is indebted to her insights.
• 13The museum’s catalog goes into great detail about both Lilly Lax Friedman and her husband, Aaron Friedman. We learn about their experiences before and during the Holocaust. Although my focus is on the wedding dress, I want to acknowledge the rich stories that are in the catalog entry and that are also found elsewhere online, not only in Schwimmer’s “The Wedding Dress that Made History,” but also as a part of an exhibit at Yad Vashem, “Weddings During the Holocaust.” One portion of this exhibit is devoted to the story of this marriage and this dress, “Weddings after Liberation.” See “Weddings During the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem, accessed December 22, 2024, https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/weddings/liberation.html. Again, I thank my anonymous reader for this reference.
• 14For more on relics and reliquaries in the context of Holocaust objects, see the final chapter of Levitt, The Objects that Remain, Chapter 6, “Tending to Sacred Objects and Their Afterlives.” And for more on what I write about as a contemporary Holocaust reliquary, Robert Jan van Pelt, Anne Bordeleau, and Donald McKay’s The Evidence Room (2016), see Laura Levitt, “The Evidence Room as Contemporary Holocaust Reliquary,” in The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture, eds. Gabrielle Berlinger and Ruth von Bermuth (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2025), 95-116.
• 15As noted above, in a note late in the final chapter of Levitt, The Objects that Remain, Chapter 6, “Tending to Sacred Objects and Their Afterlives,” I write about the forensic architectural memorial, The Evidence Room, as a kind of Holocaust reliquary and insist that the beauty of the piece matters as a container of this brutal memory explaining that beauty can be a sign of reverence and respect and then go on to draw connections between the beauty of The Evidence Room and some of the containers of precious Holocaust objects in the USHMM’s permanent collection. I write that I was “reminded of the magnificent boxes at the USHMM designed to hold the extremely brittle wedding dresses made of nylon parachutes in the displaced persons’ camps just after the war. These hopeful repurposed garments, created by survivors in order to celebrate life after the horrors of the Holocaust, to ritually enact the promise of a future, of love and family, are themselves kept safe in those reliquaries'' (Levitt, The Objects that Remain, 149n129). Taken by the very idea of these dresses. I seem to have imagined them in the plural, “magnificent boxes'' my way of describing the woman-like figures I saw. I also seem to have been misinformed about the fabric calling it nylon and not rayon, although both are made of synthetic fibers, and both are sensitive to light and touch.

Lilly is a way into this collection of wedding dresses whose own stories appear and disappear in the form of the catalog entry. I call attention to the shape of these accounts in order to show how they often obscure the sensuous qualities of these garments. At Shapell, the dresses lie carefully stored flat in large textile boxes. I hadn’t wanted to see them deflated, lifeless and hidden away. What interests me now is the tension between the materiality of these beautiful dresses and the conflicted stories they come to tell about these marriages but mostly about the women who wore them. Fortunately, although tucked away, Lilly is not alone; she keeps company with Raya and Alice, other girls whose identities are bound up with the women who once wore them and their painful stories.16 Sadly, the only way that most of us can see these dresses is through the webpages of the catalog.17

The entry for “Wedding gown made from a white rayon parachute worn by Lili Lax Friedman and many additional Jewish brides in DP Camp,” Accession number 1999.7.12a, begins with a photograph of the dress followed by an overview that includes: a brief narrative, the date of the creation of the garment, a geographical location, a credit line, markings, the name of the contributor, and what it calls a “biography,” that long genealogical account. It is only after this extensive section that the entry returns to the object at hand offering a concise description of the physical details of the dress including: its classification, “Clothing and Dress;” category, “Women’s Clothing;” object type, “Wedding dresses (aat);”18 the dress’s dimensions; and the material used to make it. There are also other tags, administrative notes that include the legal status, provenance, and funding with a space for related materials. Scrolling down to see if there might be other and related pieces of clothing included in the Lilly and Aaron Friedman family collection, we find an array of textile artifacts. “The collection consists of an apron, greeting cards, tallit bag, wedding dress, veil, gloves.19These links and related information begin to paint a picture not only of this dress but of each of these brides and their weddings. In this case there were delicate gloves, a veil and train that were also shared among the women who wore this particular gown.  

I am struck by how challenging it is to tell the story of such a compelling dress given everything else that this catalog entry needs to convey. I find it curious that we learn about “markings” early on, “sleeve cuffs, snap socket and prong, engraved: P/R/Y/M,” but that only at the end of the entry do we get a description of the dress itself, its dimensions, and its materials:

White gown made from a rayon parachute separated into 6 sections. It has a gathered bodice and a full, slightly flared, floor-length skirt. The standing, rolled collar has pointed ends in the back, and a 5 inch back opening with plackets and 4 cloth covered buttons and 4 thread loops. The long, full sleeves are gathered at the narrow cuffs, which have a hidden snap closure.20

This precise account with careful attention to detail concludes with an explanation for how this dress could have fit so many different women’s bodies:

It was originally fitted at the waist. The triangular waistband extends into a long, wide sash with angled ends to tie in a bow at the back. The seams are machine sewn and the hem is hand sewn and has been altered. The cloth is discolored and stained.21 

The versatility of this dress’s construction, the alterations and the traces of its wear, those places where the cloth is stained, witness to those wedding ceremonies and those brides. These details are all that the text provides about those jubilant occasions.  

When I first learned about these dresses, and this one in particular, I loved the story of their origins as well as their afterlives but as I went in search of more information, I discovered that there is little more to find. Here the fabric was crucial to the story, its sensitivity to light and touch, but I had not really thought about the other materials that were used to make it: the thread, the plastic, and the metal that helped transform the rayon parachute into a wedding gown. I had also not thought a great deal about its dimensions, the height of the dress and its waistline.22 The dress was small, only about 4.5 feet from top to bottom and the waist was tiny even with those alterations (See Fig. 4). 

As a Holocaust object, Lilly the wedding gown is made to do a great deal of work in the museum’s catalog. She becomes the container of the family’s legacy even as she has her own tales to tell about those marriages that can only be accessed through what we know about the dress itself. The careful, detailed description is as close as we get to the traces of those other weddings. I am struggling here to take account of both of these tasks. I find myself identifying with the challenges that the archivists face every day as they enter these precious items into the museum’s catalog. The family story needs the materiality of the dress, and this means that not only this dress but each of these dresses with their own tales to tell, have to do this kind of double duty. The comingling of these different accounts captures the status of Holocaust objects as always already having to do both these things. In these instances, we come to appreciate that even joyous objects are never really decoupled from the larger stories of loss that mark them and those who wore them.  

• 16I have followed the lead of the conservator who introduced me to these dresses describing them as “the girls,” personifying them in part because this tender regard echoes my own desire to treat them with a kind of affection, an intimate form of respect.  
• 17The USHMM’s catalog offers the most definitive account of this dress but as noted, there are other brief accounts including Schwimmer’s “The Dress that Made History” and Yad Vashem’s “Weddings during the Holocaust.” Schwimmer offers some more detailed information about how this wedding dress sat in Lilly Friedman’s closet for almost 50 years and how, before donating it to the USHMM, the essay explains that the dress was also part of a display at the then newly opened museum at Bergen Belsen in 2007.
• 18Here “aat” stands for Art & Architecture Thesaurus, which is a standard terminology for material culture run by The Getty Research Institute. It shows that the term being used is a commonly accepted category. See “Research Tools, Vocabularies,” Getty, accessed May 10, 2024,  https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/about.html. I thank Robert Ehrenreich for this clarification. 
• 19The bottom of the catalog page includes links to these objects: “the Purple Velvet Tallit Pouch Made By A Woman For Her Fiancé In A DP Camp;” “Wedding Veil And Train Worn By Multiple Jewish Brides In A DP Camp;” and “Pair Of 2 Button Gloves Worn By Multiple Jewish Brides In A DP Camp.” These other items also have stories to tell about Lenka (Lili) Lax. These include both her name and some of her sewing skills. But they also tell us something about gendered objects and their Jewish ritual purposes. The apron, for example, unpictured in the museum’s catalogue, is described as a “Floral embroidered apron worn by a Jewish Czech woman in a DP camp.” The brief narrative about this item explains: “White apron with floral embroidery worn by Lili Frydman, 22, on Shabbat while working in a kosher kitchen in Celle displaced persons camp ca. 1945 to 1948. She wore a plain white apron the rest of the week.” “Floral embroidered apron worn by a Jewish Czech woman in a DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024,  https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13646. The “Purple velvet tallit pouch made by a woman for her fiancé in a DP camp” was another of Lilly’s creations. She made this case for Ludwig’s prayer shawl especially for their wedding. See “Purple velvet tallit pouch made by a woman for her fiancé in a DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024,  http://hdl.handle.net/10079/5d3aaf9e-e5fb-47cd-8921-d36e6f120256. The other items I want to call attention to are the veil, train, and gloves for the wedding. The catalogue explains that Lily’s veil and train were, “made from 11 feet of cotton netting, and could be styled in different ways.” These objects were too delicate for me to see them when I was at Shapell. “Wedding veil and train worn by numerous Jewish brides in a DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024,  https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13649. And finally, the gloves, something I discovered like the apron and the tallit bag only after I was at Shapell: “Pair of 2 button gloves worn by multiple Jewish brides in DP camp,” are described as a once white pair of, “cotton knit, wrist length gloves worn by Lilly Lax, 22, for her wedding to Ludwig (Aron) Frydman, 21, on January 27, 1946.” “Pair of 2 button gloves worn by multiple Jewish brides in DP camp,” USHMM, accessed February 15, 2024,  https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13650. I thank Kristin Bloomer for raising questions about these other items, especially the apron and the tallit bag.
• 20“Wedding Dress made from a white rayon parachute worn by Lili Lax Friedman and many additional Jewish brides in a DP camp,” UHSMM, accessed August 21, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13648. There were many weddings and new babies born in these camps and after. For more on these stories, see Atina Grossman, Jews, Germans, and the Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Robin Judd on displaced women, survivors who married American GIs after the war, Robin Judd, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023). These are powerful and important stories but also extend beyond the focus of this essay and its attention to the dresses.  
• 21“Wedding Dress made from a white rayon parachute worn by Lil Lax Friedman and many additional Jewish brides in a DP camp,” UHSMM, accessed August 21, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13648. 
• 22"54.000 inches (137.16 cm)” and a width of 12.000 inches (31.75 cm).” Ibid.

The second dress is Raya (see Figs. 5 and 6). She is the most elaborate of these wedding gowns with beautiful and flattering 1940s styling and delicate green beadwork and embroidery. Raya Kirschner (later Feig), and her husband Micky Feig were married at the Barletta DP camp in Italy on May 27, 1948.23 Raya’s dress was accessioned in 2008. 

The dress is described in the catalog as “Wedding gown with green embroidery worn by Raya Kirschner Feig in Barletta DP Camp.” The entry follows the same pattern as Lilly’s dress, a brief narrative, date, place, credit line—a gift of Raya Feig, markings, “zipper pull tab and slider, engraved: TALON,” and contributor, followed by yet another haunting biographical accounting for the details of the bride and her family’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust. 

I want to enter this story just after Raya Kirschner and her mother, the only members of their immediate family to survivor, were liberated. With the aid of Bricha, a Zionist organization that, as the catalog put it, “helped Jewish persons illegally travel around Eastern Europe and to Palestine,” Raya and her mother made their way to Bad Gastein, a displaced persons camp in Austria. It was at Bad Gastein that Raya met Miklos (Micky) Feig, her future husband, the only member of his family to survive. From Bad Gastein, Raya, Miklos and Raya’s mother traveled to Milan, Italy in July of 1947 and around December of that year they relocated to the Barletta DP camp where they were married on May 27, 1948. On September 1,1949, the couple, along with Raya’s mother, sailed to the United States and settled in Brooklyn.  

The additional details that readers eventually find at the end of this entry explain that this dress was just a bit longer than Lilly’s and made of nondescript “cloth, thread, metal, and glass.”24 But the belated physical description offers a more textured account conveying some of the beauty of this garment. I cite it in full: 

Off-white crepe cloth gown with a short sleeved, draped blouse, fitted waist, and a flowing, pleated floor-length skirt. It has a pointed collar and no front fasteners. There is a curved slash pocket on each side and two thread loops at the waist for a now missing sash. A floral and scrollwork, green, thread design, with clear and silver-colored glass bead accents, is hand sewn along both sides, curving outward from the shoulder and then inward near the hips to trim the pocket edges. There is a white zipper on the right side, from underarm to hip. Seams and hems are machine sewn.25

 
What I know from the conservator is that this dress was also made of rayon, not mentioned in this catalog account. There is, furthermore, no reference to the physical condition of this dress and the original stains that mark it, something that was salient in my discussion with the conservator who told me a more joyous tale about this wedding. This informal narrative alas, is hardly the kind of intimate story of wear to be found in these catalog entries. That said, this catalog description is especially detailed. I love the way it feels to read this account. I begin to imagine how this dress might feel on my body, that fitted waist, the pointed collar and that zipper along the right side that runs the length of the wearer’s torso. Such vivid language makes me wonder about the person who wrote this copy, someone who appreciated her beauty and style.  

What I want to tell you about this dress is rather simple. As the fabric conservator explained to me, careful attention and testing of this dress reveals that, by and large, the stains on this well-worn dress are original. They come from the time of this 1947 wedding, and they seem to include a festive array of stains—wear, sweat, food spillage—and although further testing is not possible to ascertain the nature of these stains with more precision, the conservator observed that this dress had a really great time!26 In this case, the same tools of conservation she uses to reveal so many of the horrors of the Holocaust in most of the garments in the museum’s collection, confirmed as authentic to the time period something perhaps surprising about postwar celebration. This was information that one could not glean from the catalog. And I am so very grateful to have learned these details. Here stains confirm pleasure and celebration, the dress forever marked by this wear.  

• 23“Wedding gown with green embroidery worn by Raya Kirschner Feig in Barletta DP camp,” USHMM, accessed November 4, 2023, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn34862.  
• 2453.250 inches in height or 135.255 cm. Ibid.
• 25Ibid.
• 26To isolate any of these stains would be detrimental to the preservation of the dress. Private Email conversation with Emma Schmitt, August 21, 2024. 

Although these are happy stories, not all wedding dresses attest to this kind of hopeful promise. As Svetlana Boym explains:  

Exile is both about banishment and springing into a new life. The leap is also a gap, often an unbridgeable one; it reveals an incommensurability of what is lost and what is found. Only a few manage to turn exile into an enabling fiction.27

The last dress I saw, a dress that was in the lab because the conservator was about to begin working on her, was not found on that table with Raya and Lilly (Figs. 7 and 8). She was in a drawer and her story was a reminder that any one of these stories might have turned out differently. In this case, exile did not become an enabling fiction. This couple died in 1941 along with countless others shortly after they had all been deported to the Riga ghetto.  

I went in search of the story of this dress as I had with the others through a close reading of her catalog entry but in the midst of editing this essay in late December of 2024, I discovered that her narrative had changed. Had I not double checked my sources, I might never have known about what turned out to be a November 2024 update to the collection catalog.28 This was an unexpected wrinkle in the tale of this wedding dress, and I am glad to have found it in time. Had I not, I might have sent readers unknowingly to a currently nonexistent link. That said, my citations now reflect both the original entry and the updated version.29

Having spoken to one of the museum’s cataloguers, I learned that the contradictions I had  originally written about (see below) between two different stories about how the gown made its way to the United States, whether sent by the couple in 1938 or sent later after the war by Alice’s parents’ neighbors led the museum to return to the donor to garner more information.30 This information now shapes the new no longer contradictory narrative. 

In what follows, I tell both of these stories to make clear what changed. I do this because the catalog itself does not tell this archival tale; the earlier narrative is gone without a trace. I have chosen to share it here to make explicit this ongoing labor of identification and narrative production in relation to the objects in the USHMM’s collection. The catalog can and does change. The work of this archival collection is ongoing.  

Given all of this, let me tell you her story. What we know for sure is that this dress was worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki at her wedding to Robert Plocki in Berlin in the early 1930s.31 The original entry told two stories about how the dress found its way to the United States and when that happened. Originally the object’s name, what viewers see as the catalog entry title, read as follows: “Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga.” The new object name is now: “Wedding dress worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki and shipped to the United States postwar by a neighbor.”32 Comparing these two versions of the entry, I learned that both the brief narrative and portions of the longer object biography had also changed. Because the museum had new information, we now know that the dress was not sent by Alice in advance of her and her husband’s planned emigration to the United States in 1938. Official accounts of even old stories can and do change.  

The original brief narrative offered a quick description that echoed the dress’s original object name. It said that the couple had shipped the dress themselves and then in the longer object biography we learned of the couple’s terrible fate along with what happened to members of Alice’s family. Embedded in her parents’ story was a reference to the possibility that the dress might have been sent to the United States after the war rather than shipped by the couple in anticipation of their own planned arrival. 

• 27Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 256.
• 28Zoom Conversation with Margaret Mariani, Cataloger, Archive Affairs, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 5, 2025. I am extremely grateful to Ms. Mariani for taking the time to meet with me and talk to me about this recent catalog update. I am moved by the ongoing work of the various collections professionals who continue to work to better know the stories of the various objects in the museum’s vast collection.
• 29I have chosen to share this information in part because I think it is helpful to appreciate how even official stories can and do change. The object’s name, the title of the catalog entry, as well as the brief narrative and object biography have all been emended as of November 2024. This dress’s object name is now, “Wedding dress worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki and shipped to the United States postwar by a neighbor,” the same garment that was formerly known as “Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga.” Although I refer to the original entry in some of the narrative that follows, much of this entry remained unchanged. “Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga,” USHMM, accessed November 4, 2023, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/09852070-04a9-43bb-9909-887db847bf7d; “Wedding dress worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki and shipped to the United States postwar by a neighbor,” USHMM, accessed November 24, 2024, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn594839. Please note that now the links for each go to the same updated webpage.
• 30Conversation with Margaret Mariani, Cataloger, Archive Affairs, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 5, 2025. 
• 31“Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga”; “Wedding dress worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki and shipped to the United States postwar by a neighbor.”
• 32The Germans occupied Riga, the once capital of Latvia, in July 1941. For more on this place see, “Riga,” The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, accessed February 15, 2024, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/riga.

This graceful diaphanous silk dress seemed to have been a prized possession. But in the new story it assumes a different form. The couple did not send the dress themselves. The dress was carefully stored in Alice’s parents’ home along with her trousseau where it survived the war. As the updated entry explains: “Cream silk wedding dress, worn in the early 1930s by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki, a German Jewish woman, and shipped to Alice's brother, Walter, in the United States in the 1950s by a neighbor. The dress was in a trunk that also contained Alice’s trousseau and other linens, which had been in the basement of her parents’ home in Sebnitz, Germany. The neighbor retrieved it after the Lubranitskys were relocated to Dresden and held onto it for the duration of the war.”33

• 33“Wedding dress worn by Alice Lubranitsky Plocki and shipped to the United States postwar by a neighbor.”

Given this, despite the fact that in 1938, the couple had an affidavit procured by Robert’s brother Erich Plocki who had already emigrated and was living in New York for the couple to leave Germany, this never happened. One can only imagine, as the older entry suggests, that the couple had been hopeful about their emigration and thus had sent the dress ahead. But Alice and Robert never made it out of Germany. Robert was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin where he was badly beaten. Although he was eventually released, an injury to his leg was so severe that his American visa was revoked. In late 1941, the couple was deported to the Riga ghetto where they and the rest of the 1,053 other deportees on their train were killed immediately.34

Wedding gowns can tell such different stories.35

Nestled in the object biography in a section about Alice’s parents, we find the story of the neighbors. It was included in both versions of the catalog entry. In other words, the original entry contained this contradiction. It told both stories even as it privileged the tale about the couple sending it themselves. As the entry still reads, “After they left, a neighbor retrieved the trunk from their home, containing Alice’s wedding dress, trousseau, and other linens which they held onto for the duration of the war.”36 Based on new information gathered from the donor, we now know that these neighbors did indeed send the dress to Alice’s brother.

I tell both of these stories because I want to honor the hope that marked that original telling, the couple’s desire to hold onto the memory of their wedding through this dress as they were attempting to leave Germany in 1938, a tale no longer visible in the archival record. 

Returning to the family story, sadly, like Alice and Robert before them, Alice’s parents were also murdered near Riga after they were deported there in 1942.  

The biographical narrative concludes with the story of Alice’s brother, Walter Lubran who had made it to the United States in 1938.37 Alice’s dress was sent to him in the 1950s by those neighbors and his son donated the dress to the museum along with other pieces of his father’s story. 

Like the stories of so many artifacts in the USHMM’s collection, this is a tale told in pieces that do not always fit together neatly. The update to this entry only makes the original claim more vivid. There is no shipping manifest, and we do not have Robert, or Alice, or even Walter to confirm this update. We have only what the donor, Walter’s son, was able to surmise. And not surprisingly, what we know most clearly in the end are portions of Walter’s story as the sole survivor of Alice’s immediate family. There is still little information about Robert’s brother Erich Plocki, who had sponsored the couple’s American visa. 

Having waded through this narrative and its various iterations, we find the material description of this wedding gown unchanged: 

Cream colored matte silk floor length wedding dress with closely spaced decorative silk covered buttons stitched down the center front. The neckline is high and rounded and there is a fold between it and the shoulder that creates a layered v-shaped drape below the neckline.38 

The archivist took a great deal of time to get the description of this dress just right. The text continues: 

The fabric around the neck is folded and tucked inside and the edges have been cut with pinking shears to create a zig-zag line that is visible through the silk. The long, billowing sleeves are formed from multiple small folded pleats of the same silk fabric as the body but reversed to produce a lustrous sheen.39

I feel like I am back in her presence reading this description even as these words tell me things that I was not able to discern on my own, including that zig-zag pattern produced by the pinking shears. That pattern brings the dress back to life for me, the care that went into creating this special gown. And because this is such a lush description, I want to share it in full as a tribute to these astonishingly sad and beautiful garments: 

The sleeves are inset at a diagonal on the front and back and have a gathered band cuff at the wrists. There are two darts underneath each arm and inset, diagonally cut, side panels below the waist. There is a vertical opening on the left side of the waist with 11 metal snaps. The skirt of the dress is long and straight. At the back neckline is an opening with 6 silk covered buttons. A seam runs the length of the back and a long train made from the same reverse sheen side of the fabric as the sleeves is inset at a diagonal on the lower half of the skirt. A small fabric loop is attached to the end of the train.40

The physical description ends by noting the condition of the dress (See Fig. 9): 

There is a tear on the back right side where the train is attached and brown staining on the front, sleeves, and bottom of the train.41

We also learn that this dress, made with silk, metal, and thread, is larger and more elaborate than the others I saw when I was at Shapell because we are given its dimensions in the catalog.42

As I think about the various stories that attempt to animate this surviving wedding gown, I feel the heartbreak of the deaths of this couple and of so many members of their families. I am also keenly aware of how much we cannot know about any of these stories. The story is confusing and partial even without the contradiction. Did the couple hope to send the dress ahead in preparation for their imminent departure for the United States? Did that belated parcel from the neighbors include other possessions? Did they try to find Alice and Robert before sending it to her brother? What happened to the rest of the trousseau? Were there any things that these neighbors kept? Do their children or grandchildren still have that trunk? Did this family ever use those linens or wear this dress? We still do not know the answers to any of these questions even now.   

Of course, I want the complete story, but I understand that such a narrative is not possible in this case, even with new information. Nor is this possible in the cases of so many of the objects housed in the USHMM’s permanent collection. What we have are shards, pieces of a series of stories that do not necessarily constitute a whole. We need to honor these partial narratives, the actual confusion that surrounds these objects and their people. The original catalog entry and now this update together replicate this uncertainty, sharing the various threads we do and did have with all their contradictions, interruptions, and confusion.   

• 34Their train was “the seventh of over 60 transports of 35,000 Jews from Berlin to ghettos and killing sites in Eastern Europe. We believe that “Alice and Robert were killed in the Rumbula forest on the day they arrived.” “Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga.” 
• 35The catalog explains that the dress was used before 1941 in Germany and gifted to the museum in the name of Alice Plocki from its previous owner Alice’s brother, Walter Lubran in 2018 by Walter’s son, Bernard Lubran, Alice’s nephew. The wedding gown is a part of a fuller collection donated in the name of Walter Lubran, formerly Walter Lubranitzsky (1912-2000). 
• 36“Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga.”
• 37We learn that in 1944 Walter served as an intelligence officer having trained at Camp Ritchie. The “Ritchie Boys,” as they were known, were a powerful intelligence unit. Walter was drafted in. For more on this special unit, see “Ritchie Boys,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, accessed February 4, 2024, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ritchie-boys .  
• 38“Wedding dress shipped to the United States by a German Jewish woman murdered at Riga.”
• 39Ibid.
• 40Ibid.
• 41Ibid.
• 42Its overall height is 76.000 inches (193.04 cm), and its width is 12.300 inches or 31.75 cm. This dress is significantly longer than the other two at over six feet long. Ibid. 

Holocaust objects: garments like these dresses, a child’s sweater, an intricate prisoner uniform, a table runner, a hand cloth, or once cherished pieces of a trousseau, each offers us a way into the legacy of the Holocaust.43 These nested objects, each a relic, but also a container of memory, that are then housed in special boxes, rolls, and cabinets, reliquaries, are themselves held in Shapell, the museum’s remarkable storage facility.44 These intimate objects, like the many fabric and textile holdings in the museum’s collection (see Fig. 10), invite the telling of all kinds of stories even if, perhaps all too often, they are contradictory tales. Those of us who come to these objects and their stories do so belatedly, and we ourselves see many different things given what we bring to these materials—our passions and our expertise. There is no single definitive story to be told about any of these garments or those who wore them. Rather what we have are partial and incomplete narratives that together enable us to reanimate some semblance of these traumatic pasts. In this case, the wedding dresses tell tangled tales about the women who wore them, the men they married, the couples’ respective families, and their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust. The wedding gowns open up these human tales even as they present themselves to us in the beauty of their physical presence. As intricate, precious garments, their own creation, and the rituals that mark their wearing testify to life before and after. The weddings encapsulate some semblance of the pleasure and promise of marriage and futurity, whether that future was violently cut short as in the case of Alice and Robert Plocki or if it was long lasting like that of Lilly Friedman and Raya Feig. Lilly and Raya’s dresses speak eloquently to the hope of some of those who survived the Holocaust and began to build new futures together. Their stories offer soft landings, while Alice and Robert Plocki ultimately had nothing to break their fall.  

• 43See Levitt, The Objects that Remain, “Introduction,” 1-3. 
• 44On nested objects as relics and the interplay between relics and their containers, reliquaries as themselves a kind of secondary relic, see Levitt, The Objects that Remain, Chapter 6, “Tending to Sacred Objects and Their Afterlives,” especially, 123-126.