Volume 9: Issue 2 Tending to Holocaust Objects: Interrogating the Sacred

We begin, appropriately, by examining a range of institutional practices in comparative perspective, considering both how Holocaust objects come to be held in archives and museums and their subsequent trajectories. These objects are initially shaped by distinct practices of donation, acquisition, and accession and their transfer between intimate, family collections and public institutions, and later through curation, custody, storage, and display. Attuned to the ways in which objects marked by violence, trauma, and dislocation resonate socially and culturally, the authors of these first three pieces ask how objects signify—how they make the past present, how they become meaningful, how their materiality resonates viscerally—and how context impacts such signification. Such contexts include donor ambivalence, the conditions of storage, shifts in custody, how objects are handled, decisions concerning care and use, spatial considerations, and more. It is important to note that these contexts are often evolving and changing: objects can become artifacts or relics, accentuated by their relationship to extremity. We can question their ontological status; we can track them on their journeys into representation, as they circulate and recirculate from one person to another, from one institution to another. Throughout these first three essays, the affective aspect of Holocaust objects emerges: these materials can evoke powerful emotional responses directed at the people who are connected to them. Thus, we see here how institutional practices matter in making the invisible visible.  - OBS, LSL 

In this section we pivot to those objects that are the most intimate, due to their proximity to the human body. This intimacy straddles the boundary between the living and the dead and raises questions concerning how the body is treated in a Holocaust context. How do we tend to human remains, survivor bodies, and surviving materials worn on or hidden inside the body—items that may have outlived the bodies that once bore them? How do the range of practices around death and burial accommodate the objects unearthed in the process? Does body proximity impact the sacrality of a Holocaust artifact, and what happens when an object is separated from its bearer? The essays in this section speak to ethical considerations as well, as body proximity accentuates personal, professional, and institutional concerns for the proper care and handling of these materials, raising questions about their ownership. The essays in this section engage with the forensic turn in the human sciences, contributing to our understanding of these objects as well as the events that produced them. As remnants embodying loss, these objects and even the material traces of their own prior histories can be used to reconstruct individual histories of the victims, rescuing them from oblivion and from the perpetrators’ gaze. They thus constitute elements of a counter-archive of testimonial objects that speaks against Nazi attempts to commodify the victims’ bodies and their material belongings. - OBS, LSL 

Our third section continues many of the themes of the previous one, in that items worn on the body also share in the body’s intimacy, especially those garments that are not visible, worn underneath other clothing. This invisibility extends to objects’ origins, in cases where the items were created covertly, and to their inaccessibility: many of the items discussed in this special issue are not on public view, and in this section we ask what that might mean for Holocaust memory and representation. How might “de-centering” the role of museum exhibitions lead to a broader consideration of the multiple functions of a museum and the different epistemes—worldviews—undergirding the objects in its care? The essays here extend the narrative potential of objects previously discussed, transcending time and space and reflecting on the ways objects themselves tell stories, both literally and metaphorically, revealing a material agency that can, at times, telegraph hopefully and poignantly into the future. In some cases, the artifacts themselves record and preserve accounts of life in the ghettos and camps, documenting experiences of labor and loss and serving as records of the transactional economies in spaces of incarceration. The objects in this section are purposive, reflecting the intentions of their creators while also assuming the qualities of the wearers. Archival records can try to capture these qualities, but we recognize that they are by nature incomplete; there is only so much we can know about these remnants, even with ongoing meticulous research. The authors of these essays ask us to consider the function of worn objects, whether decorative or ritual; readers will note several items’ individuality as well as the gender distinctions that mark particular garments historically. Here, artifacts are themselves mediators of memory, offering enticing visual records of ghetto and camp life and embodying the experiences of people before, during, and even after World War II, beyond both written narrative and oral testimony. - OBS, LSL 

The authors of the essays in this section focus on ritual-textual objects. These items had specific religious functions in their original contexts, before being brushed by violence. During and after the Holocaust, these objects accumulated additional accretions of significance. The reflections here reveal the multilayered meanings of sacred objects. They also demonstrate the entangled histories of texts and things, where documentation helps in identifying and, indeed, accentuating an object’s power. Remnants of the past, the artifacts discussed in this section are both surviving and survivor objects, and their sacrality is bound to both of these roles. How do we understand the “sacred” beyond its context in “religion?” These essays address overlapping categories of sacredness, including religious, historical, personal, and associative types, and the ways objects move or are made to move between these classifications depending on ownership and accessibility, provenance and display. What happens to revered objects when they are transferred between custodians and contexts? Is the “sacred” a transferable quality? What happens if a donor does not want to part with certain items? How do the interventions of creators and curators transform an object’s sacrality? Here, objects act as anchors, sources of comfort during difficult times and orientation points afterwards. They can be embedded in networks in which ordinary and extraordinary functions and meanings overlap. These objects reflect as well the individual agency and personalities of their original owners, inheritors, and donors and often reflect those individuals’ decisions regarding their creation, care, and custody. These items are, ultimately, deeply personal reminders of individual and familial experiences. - OBS, LSL 

Tying a number of this special issue’s themes together, this final section features analyses of graphic objects that embody different forms of intentional communication: gratitude, instruction, desperation, desire, longing. These various, often personal, transmissions connect past with present and future and bridge wartime and postwar narratives. The range of forms of visual and textual objects discussed here constitute an appeal for materiality and its importance in telling the stories of the Holocaust. Paper, in particular. Paper is critically important for the survival and movement of both people and objects, especially in an increasingly digital age in which paper is already disappearing. Documents, both authentic and falsified, everyday and exceptional, record the spatial, temporal, and conceptual distances traveled from their origins to their final, often archival, resting places, serving as symbolic grave markers. They register multiple border crossings, both national and artistic, asking whether such boundaries are sites of constraint or negotiation, and what role bureaucracy plays in regulating identity. Yet, the contingency of the materials often used and the chance survival of the artifacts themselves point to these items’ precarity. At the same time, even tiny, nearly insignificant objects serve as powerful witnesses to an ever-distant past. The survival of such objects and their preservation testify to their resilience. These final essays have a tactile presence and an affective allure. They speak to the intimate experiences of exile and displacement for people as well as things. They show us how we may orient ourselves and navigate memory in time and space as they guide future generations in their journeys into the past. - OBS, LSL