Sacred in Function, Sacred in Memory: A Rosary and Missal from the Holocaust

In Memory of Beatrice (Trixie) Muchman*

These objects will not be around me forever but something about what they might represent feels like it could last a lifetime1

- Kerri ni Dochartaigh

Identifying what is and is not a sacred object is complex, nuanced, and malleable over time and context. As Diane McGowan puts it, “the meaning and value of religious objects is not rigid, but is fluid and open to modification or re-writing, irrespective of governing norms.”2 In essence, a sacred object is something deliberately crafted or collected by a community and designated for use in rituals and ceremonies. In religious terms, what makes objects sacred is thus directly tied to their function within the different rites of a society. Sacred objects transcend religion, however, and the two concepts should not be understood as synonyms. As McGowan clarifies, “Research on the sacred is hampered by the ‘injudicious’ use of the term ‘sacred’, which is too often conflated with the term ‘religious.’”3

In terms of the Holocaust and other traumatic histories, surviving objects are commonly described using sacred terminology (i.e., imbued with sacredness) due to their connection with victimized people or communities, especially those murdered or destroyed. For example, a Holocaust survivor once placed his hand on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 and described it as a “holy book” because it inscribed the sites in which the Jewish population of Europe was persecuted and murdered, ensuring their memory was preserved.4 Holocaust survivors and their families thus often revere objects for the numinous quality resulting from their association with loss, their surrogacy for the victims of the tragedy, and the memory they sustain of irrecoverable homes and lives lived:

They are the objects we collect and preserve not for what they may reveal to us as material documents, or for any visible aesthetic quality, but for their association, real or imagined, with some person, place, or event endowed with special sociocultural magic. The “numinosity” of an artifact or place, the intangible and invisible quality of its significance, consists in its presumed association with something, either in the past or in the imagination or both, that carries emotional weight with the viewer.5

Objects that embody both characteristics of sacredness, the religious and the associative, simultaneously exist within communities and families and may even command greater reverence. For example, using a Torah scroll from a diaspora community’s original homeland in ceremonies can intensify the richness of both the object and the ritual. But what about the reverse? How should objects that are held sacrosanct by one community in a specific context be regarded when another community or individual ascribes sacredness to them for reasons other than their original purpose?

This article examines a rosary and missal (i.e., a liturgical book of instructions and prayers for the celebration of the Catholic Mass throughout the year). These objects were given to a Jewish Holocaust survivor for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town as a child. Although the survivor returned to her Jewish faith, she still revered the objects, as demonstrated by her decision to keep them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for safekeeping. In this article, the authors explore these multiple layers of sacredness. They also consider how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

• 1Kerri ni Dochartaigh, “he brought it with him,” in Impermanence, ed. Nora Hickey M'Sichili and Neil Hegarty (Belfast: No Alibis Press/Centre Culture Irelandais, 2022), 83.
• 2Dianne McGowan, “Materialising the Sacred,” in Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, ed. Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias (Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press, 2008), 55.
• 3Ibid., 57.
• 4Jürgen Matthäus, “In Memoriam: Geoffrey P. Megargee (1959–2020),” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 34, no. 3 (2020): 571. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcaa060.
• 5Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (1993): 10, https://doi.org/10.2307/3378030.

Beatrice (Trixie) Muchman (née Westheimer) was born in June 1933 in Berlin, Germany, just five months after the Nazi Party’s rise to power. The mounting persecution of the Jewish community in Germany during the 1930s convinced her parents, Julius and Meta Westheimer, to flee to Brussels, Belgium, in March 1939 with her maternal grandmother, Johanna Boas; her maternal aunt, Margot Lewy; and her aunt’s husband and son, Werner and Bernt Lewy. Their two-day trek to the Belgian border was predominantly on foot (Fig. 1). In her 2016 autobiography, Beatrice said that her grandmother described the people whom Julius and Werner hired to guide them as “dishonest men who had charged a lot of money and done little to assist our escape.”6  The family was in constant fear that the men would renounce them or abandon them in the woods.7

• 6Beatrice Muchman, Never to be Forgotten: A Young Girl’s Holocaust Memoir (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1997; repr., eBookIt.com, 2016), 3. Citations refer to the eBookIt.com edition.
• 7Ibid., 3.

Once in Belgium, Beatrice’s family joined her mother’s oldest sister and her family, Frieda, Walter, and Henri Hurwitz, in Ukkel. Beatrice remembers the continual anxiety suffered by her family while desperately attempting to secure a visa to the United States. Another of her mother's sisters, Hella Tausk, had successfully emigrated to the United States with her husband in the 1930s; and the final sister, Margot Lewy along with her husband Werner, departed for the United States on December 9, 1939. Emigration was impossible after Germany occupied Belgium in May 1939. Beatrice’s father and Walter were arrested in a series of nationwide actions. Julius was sent to the detention camp at Gurs, France, near the Pyrenees but later escaped and endured an arduous trip back to Brussels.

On his return in 1942, Julius worked through the Belgian resistance to hide Beatrice and her cousin Henri with two women, sisters Jeanne and Adele Duchet, in the small town of Ottignies, approximately 25 km southeast of Brussels. Beatrice and Henri adopted the last name of Duchet and posed as Jeanne’s niece and nephew. Since Jeanne had only arrived in Ottignies from Paris a few years earlier, following the death of her husband, the children’s cover story was that they were visiting her for the summer. Jeanne also decided that the children should call her “Marraine” (Godmother). The situation in Brussels continued to deteriorate, precluding their return. Julius visited the children one final time in the fall of 1942 to settle their long-term living arrangements and bring the remainder of their meager belongings.

A charming and precocious child, Beatrice excelled at school and dreamed of becoming a movie star. She and Henri quickly became enamored with the small town and the freedom afforded to them after the years of terror in Berlin and Brussels. They also adored Marraine. The parish priest, Father Vaes, knew the children were Jewish and helped protect them. To bolster their cover story, the pair were baptized on October 2, 1942. The Catholic Church appealed to Beatrice’s theatrical nature, and she even toyed with the idea of becoming a Carmelite nun as opposed to an actress, as she suggested in her 2016 USHMM oral testimony:

I wanted to be a Carmelite nun of the non-speaking order, because we had visited the Carmelite nuns, who were just lovely and floating around in these incredible outfits. And I thought, continuing the Shirley Temple routine, that this outfit—this habit—would be wonderful on me.8

She was confirmed into the Catholic Church when she turned nine years old. Marraine gave her a rosary and a small missal (Fig. 2).

• 8Beatrice Muchman, Oral Testimony, Accession number: 2016.298.1; RG Number: RG-50.030.0900 (USHMM Archives, 2016), 0:58:16-0:58:32.

She kept the missal under her pillow at night, finding its presence comforting. As Beatrice remembers in her oral testimony:

. . . religion became, I think, surrogate parents. I think Catholicism became enormously important to us . . . It gave us hope. There was the afterlife. I never understood death anyway, but if you're afraid to lose someone—and you can believe that there is a life hereafter—how wonderful. And we believed. So there was nothing about the Catholic religion lost on us.9

Beatrice’s parents were arrested in February 1943. They were first sent to the Mechelen (Malines) transit camp in Belgium, approximately 25 km northeast of Brussels. Transit camps were staging sites for the mass deportation of Jews, usually to killing centers. Her parents were being sent to Auschwitz when, with the aid of the Belgian resistance, they escaped from the train. Most of the escapees were subsequently shot and killed by German guards, including Beatrice's father. Her mother was injured and sent to hospital. She was later denounced and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Father Vaes informed Beatrice of her parents’ death shortly thereafter.

Belgium was liberated by Allied Forces in September 1944. Beatrice did not want to leave Marriane, Ottignes, or the Catholic Church, but Father Vaes thought she should return to her grandmother, who had survived in hiding in Brussels. She states in her oral testimony:

Oh, and prior to that, I had told the parish priest—when I didn't want to leave—that I was going to be a Carmelite nun, and I just wasn't leaving. And this incredible, incredible parish priest said, ‘Oh, you know, your roots are Jewish. And when you grow up, you can do whatever you want to, but right now you belong with your grandmother.’ Now, if we transpose this to today's times, we know what it would mean for a Catholic priest to make this decision for a child, who would not have left. I would have stayed.10

Beatrice and Henri returned to Brussels in December 1944. Beatrice lived with her grandmother as well as other friends and relatives while awaiting emigration to the United States. Henri returned to his mother, who had also survived. Slowly, her grandmother and Henri’s mother, Aunt Frieda, redirected the children back to Judaism. Beatrice and her grandmother immigrated to the United States in May 1946, and Beatrice was adopted by her aunt and uncle, Margot and Werner Lewy. She lived in Chicago, where she fully returned to Judaism, attending Hebrew School at Hyde Park’s Congregation Isaiah Israel. As she states in her autobiography, “Father Vaes did well in sending me back to my roots.”11

• 9Ibid., 0:58:42-1:01:06.
• 10Ibid., 1:15:28-1:16:06.
• 11Beatrice Muchman, Never to be Forgotten, 126.

Beatrice has always been a major proponent of donating Holocaust-related materials to the USHMM for safekeeping.12 She herself gifted the majority of her collection to the Museum in eight batches—or accretions, which is the curatorial term for additions to an original collection—between 1998 and 2013, including biographical materials, correspondence, and photographs.13 She also donated two small notebooks, one of which was a diary comprising eleven entries that she wrote in French between November 1944 and October 1946. The entries cover personal topics, such as her mourning her parents’ death, her love for Marraine, Liberation, her birthdays, her preparations for American immigration, and her new life in America. The second notebook contained seven poems on similar topics written between September 1944 and May 1946, six of which are in French and one in English. She also donated a small, elegant book of daily Jewish prayers and blessings in Hebrew and German, Gebete und Segenssprüche (Prayers and Blessings). This book, which was similar in purpose to the Catholic missal that Marraine gave her, is itself a rare and significant historical artifact. The volume was published in the 1930s and contains a label from her grandparents’ printing business, C. Boas Nachf. Buchhandlung (Figs. 3 and 4).

• 12

  See the oral testimony associated with this publication.

• 13Accession Number: 1998.A.0269.2; 1.0 linear foot.

Beatrice has yet to donate the rosary and missal mentioned above, however. The two small notebooks she donated sustain deeply personal connections to her life in hiding. Similarly, the Jewish prayer book materializes these relations, especially having been produced by the family business and manifesting traces of frequent use by some past member of the family, suggesting its likely status as a family heirloom. This raises the possibility that the missal and rosary might hold a greater significance. If so, did the Catholic religious affiliation of these artifacts determine their importance to her, and how?

One of the authors interviewed Beatrice on February 16, 2024 for this article (see here the Interview and Transcript) to clarify the potential reasons for keeping the missal and rosary long after she had parted with the rest of her collection. “Why did I hang on to it?” Beatrice clarified. “Partially superstition, partially just the one thing that was very dear and very personal.”

The author followed up later in the interview, “I'm not questioning why you keep it . . . can [I] just ask you . . . what you mean [by how] superstition has kept you from donating it? Superstition from what?” Beatrice replied:

You know . . . I mean . . . as mortality is closer and closer, do we really know where we're going? Do we know what's happening? Or, you know, maybe that's something I was thinking about. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I think those were the two most precious things.

This statement echoes the sentiments expressed in her original 2016 USHMM oral testimony, quoted above, regarding the personal nature of these objects and the significance of the Catholic doctrines of hope and afterlife during her confirmation and following the loss of her parents.14 She craved the comfort of an existence after death in order to cling to the idea that she would see her parents again, one way or the other. Many sacred objects are viewed in this manner:

When we are travelling through that dark night of the soul we often need that which is sturdy and solid to hold. Sacralized objects serve that purpose. They are literally something to touch and hold during our difficult hours.15

Beatrice’s attachment to these particular objects became more complicated with time, however, as seen in her oral testimony for this article. The use of the term “superstition” highlights this complexity. From a traditional religious perspective and in the common vernacular, “superstition” is a pejorative term. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a “Religious belief or practice considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance.”16 The contested nature of her feelings about the objects is further revealed by how distraught Beatrice was when she thought she may have lost the rosary. She repeatedly fretted over its loss in her 2024 oral testimony, and chided herself for not listening to her daughter, who had been urging her for years to donate it to the USHMM. A Catholic friend even offered her a replacement rosary, but she declined the offer. A new rosary would not have eased her vexation because the rosary’s prescribed Catholic prayer function was not what was important. She had donated the Jewish prayer book to the USHMM without hesitation, demonstrating that it was not religious objects in general that were important to her. The defining feature of these objects—what made them “very dear and very personal” to her in her later years—was their childhood associations, especially her love of Marraine and need for comfort and hope. As Linda Mayorga Miller argues: “the objects are usually embedded in the life narrative of the individual and introduced to the individual in childhood by a maternal-like family member, not necessarily the primary caregiver.”17 Her devotion to these artifacts was thus not directly linked to their Catholic connotations per se but tied to her continued childhood devotion to Marraine and hope of an existence after death in which she would see her parents again. Her conflicted feelings place the objects in a liminal space between religious and personal sacredness that is both numinous and unique: 

As objects move from marginal environments into sacred contexts, they participate in networks of objects, humans, and deities. This creates social lives and afterlives for the objects, in which their status may shift between ordinary and sacred domains, while retaining past associations. This is worth stressing because notions of the “everyday” and the “sacred” are often considered to be mutually exclusive.18

• 14Beatrice Muchman, Oral Testimony, 1:15:28-1:16:06.
• 15Linda Mayorga Miller, “An Angel in My Pocket: Touch, Sacred Objects, and Spiritual Coping,” Touch in the Helping Professions: Research, Practice and Ethics, eds. Martin Rovers, Judith Malette, and Manal Guirguis-Younger (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2017), 165.
• 16Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “superstition (n.),” September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3704570336.
• 17Linda Mayorga Miller, “An Angel in My Pocket,” 171.
• 18Caroline Hirasawa and Benedetta Lomi, “Editors’ Introduction: Modest Materialities: The Social Lives and Afterlives of Sacred Things in Japan," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 217, see here.

The USHMM has a number of sacred objects in its collection, including eight rosaries and a relic of Saint Edith Stein.19 The Museum also has fifteen New Testaments, including another volume donated by Sarah Boucart, a woman who similarly survived the Holocaust by passing as a Catholic in Belgium.20 Additionally, the Museum contains more than 30 Hebrew prayer books, a desecrated Torah Ark from the Nentershausen synagogue in Germany (on loan from the Frankfurt Jewish Museum), and a mezuzah that a Polish survivor found and used in setting up a new home after the Holocaust.21 Both the Torah Ark and the mezuzah are part of the Museum’s main exhibit. The Ark is contained within a case, while the mezuzah is installed on the archway leading into the room displaying Roman Vishniac’s nostalgic photographs of Eastern European Jewish communities before the Holocaust. Its physical positioning–about two-thirds of the way up the right side of the archway on entering the room and open to the world, as mezuzahs are prescribed to be displayed on doorways–implies a continued religious significance and use. However, it does not contain the “klaf,” or texts from Deuteronomy (traditionally placed inside), and thus does not satisfy Halachic law. Despite this, one of the authors has witnessed visitors touching the mezuzah as they pass and subsequently kissing their fingers,  as is commonly practiced among observant Jews when passing such an object.

The mezuzah would appear to be an exception to USHMM procedures for the collection and storage of objects, however, since it is placed according to Jewish ritual practice. Ordinarily, sacred objects are acquired, conserved, and stored in the same manner and for the same reasons as the rest of the Museum’s extensive collections: to maintain the memory of the victims and document this tragic history. The USHMM can maintain this position because its material collection was either donated to the Museum or acquired through purchases and loan agreements for historical and memorial purposes; this differs from the ways an explicitly religious institution would obtain and maintain similar objects. For example, as she states repeatedly in her oral testimonies, when Beatrice finally donates her rosary and missal, it will be to ensure their safekeeping, as opposed to ensuring their original religious intent. Although the objects will not be used for religious purposes, as their status is now that of a museum collection, their history and identity as religious objects of use will remain.

• 19USHMM 2001.62.7a; RG Number: RG-71.001.08
• 20USHMM Accession Number: 1997.63.1 a-b
• 21USHMM Accession Number: 1993.11.1

As discussed in this article, religiously sacrosanct objects and historical objects imbued with a personal sacredness are not mutually exclusive categories and both clearly exist within communities and families. Beatrice’s rosary and missal show how objects that encompass both definitions eventually assume a liminal space between the sacred and the numinous, as Caroline Hirasawa and Benedetta Lomi explain: “The afterlives of sacred objects are especially useful in understanding how the lines between the sacred and the ordinary can be blurred or redrawn.”22 While not forgetting her Jewish origins, Beatrice used the rosary and missal in sacred and religious prayers and ceremonies while in hiding. She embraced these practices and welcomed the structure they gave her daily life. The immense sense of comfort and hope she felt in these objects changed over the years to a more personalized one as a Jewish survivor, but these objects remained sacred to her. While their use has changed, their power has not.

All perspectives expressed herein are those of the authors and not of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or Council. The authors would like to thank Christine Liu and Justin Kang for their invaluable work on the creation of the interactive map; Julia Liden for her help preparing the video testimony for publication; Drs. Lisa Leff and Rebecca Boehling for their support of this research, and especially Trixie Muchman for her inspiring life and story. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

*This article is dedicated to the memory of Beatrice (Trixie) Muchman, who passed away on 28 April 2025 at the age of 91. She was an inspiration to all who knew her and will be dearly missed. We are honored to have had the opportunity to work with her and share her story.

Click here for the Conversation that accompanies this Essay.

• 22Hirasawa and Lomi, “Editors’ Introduction,” 219.