The indexical artefact succeeds in calling forth its previous users: those who have intermingled with it. In looking at the artefact one must engage with the traces of use, and in engaging with these traces one is touched by them.

Ellen Sampson, Worn

In the summer of 2023, Laura Levitt and Oren Stier co-facilitated an interdisciplinary research workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under the auspices of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, a branch of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM.1 Our workshop, “Interrogating the Sacred: Holocaust Objects and their Care,” brought us together with eleven scholars and practitioners from the U.S. and overseas for ten days over a two-week period to learn from each other, conduct and present our research, and explore and tour the USHMM collections and exhibitions as well as other sites in Washington, DC.2 We were joined by members of the USHMM staff and a guest conservator, some of whom participated in all or part of the workshop.3 The workshop itself coalesced after several years of planning and preparation, including a COVID-caused delay of a year, which we used to meet via Zoom while developing themes and research perspectives, identifying objects and materials for further investigation, and bonding virtually. This close collaboration continued into our time together in person in 2023, through seminar discussions, presentations of specific objects, field trips, and informal gatherings.

Throughout our planning and execution of the workshop we sought to consistently center the Holocaust object itself, however defined, in our discussions and deliberations. Indeed, our work builds on a series of material turns in the humanities and social sciences. It prioritizes what it means to center “stuff.”

• 1

  This special issue and the workshop before it came out of abiding work produced by the co-editors over the past decades. Oren first began writing about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and some of the objects housed and displayed there in his books Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), and, in particular, in his essay “Torah and Taboo: Containing Jewish Relics and Jewish Identity at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” in Relics in Comparative Perspective, edited by Kevin Trainor, special issue of Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 57, nos. 3/4 (2010): 505-536. The issue also builds on Laura’s work with family photographs, images carried to the camps from life before the Holocaust in American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2007), and then in her work on material objects and Holocaust memory in The Objects that Remain (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020).

• 2

  Workshop participants were, in alphabetical order, Caroline Sturdy Colls, Lisa Conte, Kate Yanina Gibeault, Yaniv Feller, Tahel Rachel Goldsmith, Koji Lau-Ozawa, Barbara Mann, Jennifer Rich, Christine Schmidt, Dan Stone, and Hannah Wilson.

• 3

  USHMM staff who participated in all, or part of the workshop were Rebecca Carter-Chand, Scott Homolka, Jane E. Klinger, Alexandra Drakakis, Colleen Rakemaker, Heather Kajic, Julia Liden, Zachary P. Levine, Travis Roxlau, and Robert M. Ehrenreich. Julia Brennan joined as a guest conservator.

These turns take seriously the power and importance of objects in recasting how we think about history and memory.4 During the workshop, we considered the ways that some Holocaust objects are imbued with “sacredness” by survivors, museum professionals, scholars, or the public—on account of their biographies and provenance, through rituals of tender care, by way of proximity to the events they witnessed, and in terms of what these objects meant and mean to those who encountered them or to whom they once belonged. We explored questions of what makes an object “sacred” and what it means to care for such objects.

Some of the questions that motivated our conversations included: How are objects that are sacred, holy, or numinous distinguished from those that are profane or quotidian, and who decides how they are classified? How can we create a shared vocabulary around these terms? Does the dichotomy of sacred/profane offer a useful framework in which to conduct our work? What about sacrality’s inverse: desecrated, evil, haunted, or cursed? Moreover, how does trauma or an object’s proximity to violence alter its ontology? Can objects become sanctified through trauma and violence?

Additional questions relate to objects’ contexts: How do academics and practitioners, institutions, museums, libraries, and other organizations differ in their understanding of which objects in their collections are considered sacred and how they care for them? How do curation, conservation, and holding imbue otherwise inanimate objects with new life? What ethical and practical issues do museums consider when conserving, storing, and displaying sacred objects, particularly regarding objects’ cultural and religious contexts? How can these considerations of museum professionals be used to deepen museum visitors’ understanding of the Holocaust and other difficult histories? Finally, how do these discussions mark a material turn in scholarship around such legacies?

As scholars of religion, we have always been engaged in interdisciplinary work, bringing together history, memory, and visual and material culture, along with literature, film, museums, and other cultural manifestations. These are the ways we have come to approach Holocaust studies; in this instance, we wanted to focus our attention on the power of Holocaust objects, especially at this important historical juncture where, as survivors are aging and dying, we see our work shifting from an engagement with lived memory towards new interactions with recent history.

This special issue—and our respective work—are situated at the intersection of memory studies, religious studies, and material culture in Holocaust studies. Beyond the critical historical research long associated with Holocaust studies, the preceding workshop and now this special issue bring an interdisciplinary vision to our work as scholars, acknowledging not only academic expertise but also that of crucial museum professionals, including conservators, curators, archivists, cataloguers, registrars, and collection managers, among others. They not only make our turn to material artifacts possible but also have a great deal to teach us about the sacred nature of these objects and the tender regard necessary for their care. In other words, this collection has tried to honor and acknowledge the full range of knowledge producers whose work often goes unseen—those museum and collections professionals who work behind the scenes at places like the USHMM’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in Bowie, Maryland (the Shapell Center), home to the Museum’s archive, storage facility, library, and conservation labs.5 Part of what we hope readers will take away from this special issue is the power and importance of these often-invisible labors, making visible the work of those who tend to Holocaust objects.

• 4

  These scholarly turns to material culture constitute a vast body interdisciplinary literature. Some of these works, representing some of the fields appearing in this special issue, are listed here. First and foremost, we want to acknowledge some of the critical work in our own field of religious studies including: MAVCOR Journal and the journal Material Religion; S. Brent Plate, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Sally Promey, ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); and Deborah Dash Moore, ed., Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2022). In Holocaust studies, we include not only our own work but critical scholarship by Marianne Hirsch, especially The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012); James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016); and Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014). In Jewish Studies we are inspired by works such as Laura Leibman’s The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (New York, NY: Bard Graduate Center, 2020); and Gabrielle Berlinger and Ruth von Bernuth, ed., The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2025). In history, we include Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, eds., The Objects of War: Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). And, finally, in Literary and Cultural Studies, we have been particularly influenced by Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects Radical Materialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

• 5

  “The Shapell Center: Building and Preserving the Collection of Record,” United States Holocaust Museum, accessed May 13, 2025, https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/the-shapell-center .

Towards these ends, we were able to bring together in the workshop scholars, educators, and professionals working with material culture, scholars engaged in archeological and anthropological work, as well as scholars of literature, history, and religion, not all of whom are engaged with the study of the Holocaust. This interdisciplinarity was greatly enhanced by the presence and active participation of those involved in the Material Culture Initiative at the USHMM.6 We were also fortunate to have had scholars at various stages of their careers, from graduate students to more established scholars, participate in the workshop. As we had hoped and imagined, others from the Mandel and Rubenstein Centers joined us for portions of the workshop, and some later contributed to this special issue. Our vision for the workshop and now for this special issue has always been to create a diverse interdisciplinary conversation where scholars and museum professionals could learn with and from each other.

In part we begin with the workshop and the Holocaust objects at its center because they so profoundly shaped this special issue. Indeed, we deliberately met for the workshop’s first two days at the Shapell Center so that our initial impressions and discussions as a group would focus not on objects already on display at the USHMM but rather on objects as they are held and stored, conserved and preserved, in order to highlight the processes and care involved—and even to reveal prior acts of tender regard critical to the objects’ care, including acquisition, accessioning, researching, cataloging, and more. We traced the voyage of newly acquisitioned materials into the collection, meeting and hearing from archivists, curators, and collection managers. We learned from conservators working with various media, including paper; three dimensional objects made of wood, metal, and glass; and textiles.

• 6

  The aim of the Initiative is to enhance understanding of the Holocaust, both within and beyond the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, through the incorporation of methodologies from material culture studies into Holocaust research and teaching. Current members of the Initiative include Robert M. Ehrenreich, Zachary P. Levine, Julia Liden, and Gretchen Skidmore.

Although these essays build on several presentations and discussions during the workshop, we also feature additional essays that cover a range of objects in the USHMM’s collection as well as Holocaust objects held in other museums, libraries, archives, and center collections. In addition, essays now include works not only by those who were official participants in the workshop but also by USHMM staff members and others. Moreover, many of the pieces were written or rewritten in response to the workshop, emerging out of our collective experiences learning with and from those at the Shapell Center who shared their expertise, their practices, and their collection with us. Alas, not all workshop participants are represented here, but the themes and concerns raised in each of these pieces are in conversation with those raised before, during, and after the workshop. This is the dual meaning of our title, “Tending to Holocaust Objects,” not only attending to the care taken regarding these materials, but also an orientation that leans towards those objects themselves and their intrinsic value.

In some of what follows here we want to consider our title, “Tending to Holocaust Objects,” and share some glimpses of our collective engagement behind the scenes to offer a clearer sense of how the sacred nature of these artifacts come to bear on the ways they are handled, and vice versa—the tender regard of those who do this work not only at the USHMM but in other settings, other collections of not only Holocaust objects. Indeed, as Laura explains in The Objects that Remain, these practices connect our work in Holocaust studies to other sites of traumatic loss, of individual and collective experiences of violation and genocide.7 Thus, this special issue invites and encourages comparison with and reflection on material remnants from other historical episodes of atrocity.

• 7

  Laura Levitt, The Objects that Remain (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020).

What are Holocaust objects and what makes them so compelling of our respect and tender regard? As the essays collected here make clear, these artifacts tell powerful stories about those who suffered and died and those who survived horrific acts of violation. The relationship between these once ordinary objects and the people who held, wore, and saved these precious things demands our attention and our care. Because these stories fill these objects with presence and urgency, they allow us to see the past breaking into the present, and that in turn produces a form of reverence.

These items include a full range of intimate, familial and personal possessions from life before–a once beloved blouse, a photograph, a pocket bible, a ring or a wristwatch but also prisoner uniforms, wooden shoes, a tin bowl, or a spoon. Among these various essays readers will be introduced to objects held in camps and ghettos, small intimate gifts created in these places, a tiny book, a bracelet, a broach. They include ritual objects, a tallit katan that belonged to a small boy who had it with him as he and his family boarded the ship, the St. Louis, en route to the U.S. only to be turned back to Europe. It includes wedding dresses—one a prized possession from before the war, a reminder of a joyous occasion in the past, and two dresses made and acquired after liberation by former camp inmates in DP camps where they reimagined their lives after—hopeful signs of renewed life. There are texts that are themselves Holocaust objects, including precious letters lost and found from within the whirlwind. They include the maps and memories gathered after the Shoah in precious communal repositories, Yizkor books alongside key documents, a passport that made survival and escape possible. There are forensic archeological finds, some newly discovered—a ring, a name tag, dentures—and the very containers that held precious papers and other possessions—a briefcase, a valise, a trunk or any number of suitcases confiscated or later recovered. These artifacts are only some of the items discussed in these pages. Some of these items are or were conventionally understood to be sacred objects—a missal, a rosary, a mezuzah—while so many others, once ordinary objects marked by violence, have become sacred by their proximity to genocide, to the lives and bodies of those who died and those who survived.

Even in bits and pieces, the stories of these objects draw us in, make them come alive, touch us, as Sampson suggests in our epigraph. They tug at our hearts, and they disturb us. These affective responses are part of how we consider these objects as sacred, or as former chief conservator at the USHMM and contributor Jane Klinger describes, as “numinous.”8 Many of the pieces addressed in this special issue evoke great pathos, while at least a few bring with them some disgust and discomfort. These designations are often bound not only to actual ritual objects but also to objects that are connected to those who died, intimate objects held close but also objects that bring this past back to us in the present. We have put this issue together around some of these sites. As Klinger has argued, without a sensitivity to the power of Holocaust objects and the range of emotions they evoke, those whose task it is to hold and attend to these collections could not do these jobs. Those who work with Holocaust materials are not alone in these affective engagements and sensitivities to the sacred nature of the artifacts that they care for. During the workshop we were fortunate to have had textile conservator Julia Brennan join us at the Shapell Center and, moreover, invite us to her home studio, where we were introduced to some of the objects she and her team were tending to in the intimacy of her workspace. Among these pieces was a bloody garment, an artifact of contemporary police violence against African Americans. Brennan has also done extensive work with the bloody garments of those slaughtered in the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, carefully working with these communities around the sacred nature of these painful relics.9

We understand this work as part of what it means to consider these objects sacred. Tender regard is a form of ritual even as these labors are professionalized. Indeed, we see these behind-the-scenes activities as ritual enactments of otherwise mundane professional tasks, whether in Brennan’s home studio or at the Shapell Center. In other words, well before we as scholars get to these repositories, the very handling of these artifacts by museum professionals signals something about their special status that is translated into the tone of our writing and speaking about them. To be clear, part of what we want to call attention to is the powerful relationship between the respectful labor of these museum professionals as it is interrelated with how those of us who are scholars engage with these materials.

• 8

  We remain struck by Jane Klinger’s use of this kind of religious language to describe the aura around the Holocaust artifacts she works with. Although others have written about the agency of objects and their vibrancy, we are especially taken by the power of religious language and its ability to address the allure of such objects. Although scholars of anthropology have written eloquently about such agency, they tend to avoid any reference to religious discourse. See, for example, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). In sharp contrast to Bennett, both Laura and Oren have written extensively about icons (Stier, Holocaust Icons), relics, and reliquaries (Levitt, The Objects that Remain). Other works that describe such objects using the language of the sacred include, in art history, Cynthia Hahm, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion Books, 2017) and, in literary studies, Joe Moshenska, Iconoclasm as Child’s Play (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

• 9

  Zoey Poll, “Preserving Brutal Histories, One Garment at a Time,” New York Times (January 22, 2021), accessed March 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/world/asia/conservator-textiles-atrocities.html .

This interrelationship leads into the order and logic of the essays. This special issue is divided into five parts, each addressing a different cluster of concerns regarding Holocaust materials, their care, and their relationships to other legacies of trauma and loss. We begin behind the scenes with comparative and institutional questions and then move to the most intimate objects, those in closest proximity to the human body. From there we turn outwards, from items worn on the body to ritual-textual objects. Our concluding section addresses textual objects that communicate from the past to the present with the assistance of museums and other contemporary interpreters. Each section of the special issue is preceded by a brief introduction that sets the stage for the essays that follow.

We want to thank a number of people at the USHMM, most especially Rebecca Carter-Chand, the Director of the Programs on Religion and the Holocaust (formerly the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, or PERH) for sponsoring the workshop, the first to address material religion in relation to Holocaust history and memory at the Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.10 We are deeply indebted to Julia Liden who worked alongside us and helped imagine, organize, and carry out our workshop as PERH Program Coordinator. Julia is now a Senior Program Coordinator working on the redesign of the USHMM’s permanent exhibit. We are grateful as well to all the professionals who work behind the scenes at the Shapell Center through the David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation.11 We want to thank Robert M. Ehrenreich, Director of Academic Research and Dissemination at the Mandel Center who has been a valued advisor to us on both the workshop and this special issue. We also want to acknowledge Robert and Julia’s generosity, as members of the USHMM’s Material Culture Initiative, in supporting this project. We have all benefited greatly from their efforts. Finally, we are indebted to Sally M. Promey and Emily C. Floyd at MAVCOR Journal for believing in this special issue and helping us bring it to fruition.

• 10

  “About the Mandel Center,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 22, 2025, https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center .

• 11

  “Rescuing the Evidence: David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 22, 2025, https://www.ushmm.org/support/why-support/our-work-and-mission/rescuing-the-evidence .

Around 1938, Henry and Rose Basch, a Jewish couple, fled from Poland to escape persecution by the Nazi government. They eventually made their way to Shanghai, China, where numerous other Jewish refugees were permitted to stay by the occupying Japanese Imperial government. Over 16,000 Jews would establish a community in Shanghai throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, including over 1,000 from Poland, joining Baghdadi and Russian Jewish communities that were established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Jewish people in Shanghai not only found community in exile but created businesses, mutual aid societies, schools, and maintained national and linguistic communities within their diasporas. While in Shanghai, the Basch family purchased a leather briefcase, which they used in their daily affairs. Nearly 70 years later, the briefcase they used was filled with an archive of papers related to their journey, as well as their struggle to bring more family members from Poland to Shanghai in the early 1940s (Fig. 1). In 2008 this briefcase and archive was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).1

• 1Andrew Jakubowicz, “Stopped in Flight: Shanghai and the Polish Jewish Refugees of 1941,” Holocaust Studies 24, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 287–304, https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2017.1387845; Kenji Kanno, “The Designated Area for Stateless Refugees in Shanghai: Exploring Aftereffects Using Unpublished Documents of Captain Toshiro Saneyoshi,” in The History of the Shanghai Jews: New Pathways of Research, ed. Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 75–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_4; Steve Hochstadt, “How Many Shanghai Jews Were There?” in A Century of Jewish Life in Shanghai, ed. Steve Hochstadt (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 3–26, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv21d620x.4 ; Steve Hochstadt, “The Kadoorie School: Educating Refugee Children in Shanghai,” in The History of the Shanghai Jews: New Pathways of Research, ed. Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 99–131, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_5; Rachel E. Meller, “Bruno Loewenberg and the Lion Book Shop,” in The History of the Shanghai Jews: New Pathways of Research, ed. Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 133–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_6; Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia, “Introduction,” in The History of the Shanghai Jews: New Pathways of Research, ed. Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_1; Rotem Kowner and Xu Xin, “The Jews of Shanghai: The Emergence, Fall and Resurgence of East Asia’s Largest Jewish Community,” in Jewish Communities in Modern Asia: Their Rise, Demise and Resurgence, ed. Rotem Kowner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 207-26, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009162609.013.

While the Basch family was in Shanghai, the Iwasaki family had a bag packed by the door of their house in East Hollywood, California, ready in case the FBI came to arrest Genichiro, the Japan-born patriarch of the family. In the weeks after the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, thousands of Japanese Americans were arrested under suspicion by the FBI. Most were simply community leaders or involved with businesses and organizations with ties to Japan. None were convicted of conspiracy or acts of sabotage against the United States. Genichiro was not arrested, but the Iwasakis would use their emergency bag to carry their possessions to the Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp to which they were forcibly removed and imprisoned during WWII. The Iwasaki bag is now a repository of photographs and papers of their family history and time in the incarceration camps (Fig. 2).

Briefcases and suitcases evoke a certain portability of objects and the movement of their owners. Such items register semiotically as indexical of specific journeys and are symbolic in their ability to mediate histories of movement. Jewish Studies scholar Joachim Schlör argues that suitcases are integral to telling migration stories due to their ability to “hold memories” of movement.2The suitcase’s proximity to migrants and the ability of museum visitors to intrinsically connect the images of suitcases to people make them ideal for teaching, speaking, and understanding histories of movement. However, the materiality of such items is less discussed. Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. Such items are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of pasts of violence and trauma. 

In focusing on luggage items, I look to understand the tensions which arise between the transition of objects connected to histories of violence from family collections to their curation and display by institutions. The power of luggage is in part due to its intimacy as an object that is prosaic but that also comes into close contact and touch with people, holding some of their most precious possessions. In doing so, they can be precious heirlooms through which families connect to their own histories of displacement. These are some of the attributes which make luggage attractive for museums, collections, and other displays to discuss these histories. However, in moving between the context of the family collection and the curated collection, the relationships which surround luggage items change, challenging institutions to contend with what it means to remove, sanitize, and care for objects. 

In this essay, I employ Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite categorization of signs as symbols, icons, and indexes to help think about the multiple meanings of luggage in museum and other collections.3In Peirce’s classificatory scheme, the mediation of signs means that they can often be layered with multiple meanings that render their categorical designation (index—icon—symbol) slippery and often overlapping. An index as a sign relates to its object by real relation to it as opposed to an icon which resembles an object or a symbol which relates to its object by convention.4Perhaps the most well-known illustration of an index is smoke as a sign which relates to its object, fire.5A person seeing smoke can infer the presence of fire considering the causal relationship between the two. Objects can be indexes through their relation to people as biographical objects, or through their evidentiary qualities which can be read to understand life histories, use, and physical associations.6Icons refer to the ways in which signs refer to other things and objects through resemblance. A picture of an eagle might refer to an actual eagle. It is their resemblance which allows for the sign to be linked to its referent. Symbols are signs that refer to concepts and ideas that have no direct visual referent in the sign. Using the eagle again, the sign might refer to the United States as a national symbol, or in another context to the Roman Empire. In both cases, the relationship between the sign (eagle) and the object it refers to (the United States or Rome), is determined by multiple cultural relationships that link the two. The symbol is the most abstract of the three types of signs. By employing Peircean semiotics, I seek to show the various registers through which the power of luggage items is interpreted and in doing so demonstrate the importance of luggage in understanding histories of violence, removal, and loss. 

• 2Joachim Schlör, “Means of Transport and Storage: Suitcases and Other Containers for the Memory of Migration and Displacement,” Jewish Culture and History 15, no. 1–2 (May 4, 2014): 76–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2014.898965.
• 3Floyd Merrell, “Charles Sanders Peirce’s Concept of the Sign,” in Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, ed. Paul Cobley (London: Routledge, 2001), 28–39, see here.
• 4Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings: Values in a Universe of Chance, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, NY: Dover, 1966), 391.
• 5Merrell, “Charles Sanders Peirce’s Concept of the Sign,” 37.
• 6Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998); Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language & Communication 23, no. 3–4 (July 2003): 409–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00010-7; Zoë Crossland, “Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces,” American Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (March 2009): 69–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01078.x; Zoë Crossland, “Signs of Mission: Material Semiosis and Nineteenth-Century Tswana Architecture,” Signs and Society 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 79–113, https://doi.org/10.1086/670168; Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017).

I begin this essay with a discussion of the ability of luggage in different contexts to evoke the movement of people both as visual symbol and as pedagogical device. I then turn to the way the movement of luggage items through space and time creates an authentic aura.7Layered on top of the visual signification, the aura of luggage constituted by their relationships to people and families makes them incredibly powerful. Finally, I turn toward the physical nature of luggage. How their material components and their capacities to store other objects and materials shape the different relationships that families and institutions hold with trunks, suitcases, and briefcases. The materiality of luggage forces separation and sanitization in their transfer between the family collection and the institutional collection. Throughout this discussion, I examine the different meanings these objects hold in personal collections and museums. Such objects bring to the forefront a question of curation which confronts museums: in researching, interpreting, and retelling histories of displacement, how does the luggage of the past matter?

• 7I use aura here in the sense of Walter Benjamin in his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1986); Oren Baruch Stier, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Luggage items like suitcases, briefcases, and trunks are powerful images which can captivate viewers and immediately invoke histories of movement. At the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), visitors enters the museum on the ground floor before ascending a staircase to see the core exhibition—Common Ground: The Heart of Community. Upon reaching the top of the stairs, visitors turn to the left and are immediately confronted by two large exhibits. The first is a reconstructed original barrack from the Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp, one of over 70 sites of incarceration that imprisoned over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry during WWII.8 The barrack is made of wood, with tarpaper siding still present on some of the exterior façade and informational signage attached to contextualize the history of the building and the Japanese American incarceration experience. The second exhibit is Wall of Suitcases and Trunks, designed by artist and Buddhist priest Hirokazu Kosaka (Fig. 3). The wall is composed of over 80 suitcases and trunks and immediately brings the concept of movement to the observer.

Kosaka explains that the inspiration for the wall came from his time working as a Buddhist minister at the Koyasan Temple in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s.9 While there he presided over many funerals from the issei (first generation), those who were born in Japan and migrated to the United States before WWII. As part of his role as minister, Kosaka would meet with family members of the departed issei, listening to stories from their lives and of their journeys to the United States on steamer ships. These narratives of migration recalled his own journey from Japan to the United States as a child, crossing the Pacific with his younger brother without guardians, and being looked after by the adult passengers on the ship. Many of the families Kosaka spoke to gave him their family member’s suitcase or steamer trunk, unsure what else to do with such large objects (Fig. 4). Kosaka kept many of these in an attic in the temple building he worked in until he wrote a play to honor the migration of issei and featured Wall of Suitcases and Trunks as part of the production.10 The exhibit was then installed at JANM with the opening of the Common Ground exhibition. It is unclear if all the suitcases and trunks in the wall are originals donated to Kosaka from issei family members, or simply a large proportion of them.

• 8Current estimations of the total number of people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in the United States during WWII put the number at 125,284. For more see “Irei chō: The Book of Names,” Ireizō, accessed March 2, 2025, https://ireizo.org/ireicho/
• 9Interview with Hirokazu Kosaka. January 23, 2024.
• 10For more on Kosaka’s art, see Shayda Amanat and Hirokazu Kosaka, Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Verandah: Selected Works 1969-1974, ed. Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2014).

The exhibit merges the luggage into a collective material signifier of movement. Iconically, they encompass a range of shapes, textures, and colors which signify luggage more generally. Their form transcends the specificity of context and can bring to mind any number of luggage containers a viewer may have encountered in their life. Symbolically, the suitcases represent movement and migration. The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration to the United States is integral to the narratives of the country as a “nation of immigrants” and a “melting pot.”11 By highlighting the migration of issei, the wall folds Japanese American history into these larger narratives of American history. Though they allude to a specific period of transpacific migration between the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth century, in the museum the objects are rendered into new semiotic registers by their proximity to the recreation of the Heart Mountain barrack.12 The barrack recalls a period of forced removal and imprisonment between 1942-1946, a displacement which is visually reinforced by its proximity to the wall of suitcases. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also uses the image of the suitcase to signify movement. A recent exhibition installed at the museum titled Americans and the Holocaust, discusses responses to the rise of Nazism and to the Holocaust in the United States. The exhibition’s displays touch upon histories of racism and xenophobia that intersected with economic depression, currents of isolationism amid rising migration, and antisemitism. One installation charts the number of immigration visas issued each year between 1933 and 1941 as well as the number of people waiting for visas (Fig. 5). The data visualization utilizes a grey outline of a person to represent 1,000 unissued visas, a golden outline of a person to represent 1,000 visas issued, and a suitcase to represent 5,000 people on waiting lists for visas. Between 1933 and 1938 there were thousands of unissued visas as the waiting list expanded from three to five years with tens of thousands of people entering a prolonged period of indeterminacy. Strikingly, while the images of visas issued are contained on a chart on the wall of the display, the same wall is unable to contain the expanding number of suitcases which leak onto the floor. By 1939, over 50 suitcases trail onto the floor of the exhibition room, representing over 250,000 people (Fig. 6). 

• 11For discussion of the “nation of immigrants” narrative in American history and a critique see John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, Revised and enlarged edition, 1st Harper Perennial edition (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021).
• 12For more on issei migration see Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America (Seattle, WA: Executive Committee for Publication of Issei, Japanese community service, 1973); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986); Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York, NY: Free Press, 1988); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The museum’s display works on two registers. The icon of the suitcase suggests the packing of luggage, and the inability to unpack such items for those awaiting visas. At the same time, the mass of suitcases, like Kosaka’s display at JANM, evokes a feeling of overwhelming numbers to the viewer. They are given power as a collected mass, unruly in their inability to be confined to the wall space, the normative area of organized information. The system of legal immigration through the issuance of visas is visually inadequate to handle the mass of people attempting to escape persecution. There is further irony in the use of suitcases as images, items which hold the belongings of individuals, and the display overflowing with suitcase images, unable to hold them on the wall. While the suitcase connotes an orderliness and containment for migration, the system of migration is disordered and unable or unwilling to accommodate those attempting to migrate.

The ability of suitcases to evoke a history of movement is not unique to JANM or the USHMM. Numerous museums around the world look to the suitcase as a symbol in discussing the movement of people. In Japan, a central display of the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum in Yokohama is a pedestal with multiple suitcases piled on top of one another filled with the kinds of objects that early-twentieth-century migrants would have packed. In the United States, a central component of the museum on Ellis Island, the main port of entry for immigration to the United States on the East Coast during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is the Baggage Room, which has multiple trunks piled up to replicate the baggage of newly arrived migrants from Europe. The National Museum of Australia lists the suitcase as one of 14 defining symbols of the country, a representation of immigration to the continent.13 Similarly, Jason De León collected and displayed backpacks left behind by migrants on the US-Mexico border, using the objects to illustrate the scale and materiality of undocumented migration.14  Suitcases are even used as pedagogical tools: in the United Kingdom to talk about histories of migration in classrooms; in Czech theatrical productions centering histories of movement; in Canada, the Musée de l’Holocauste Montréal developed a teaching tool for elementary school students oriented around the suitcase of a young girl named Hana Brady.15

• 13For a critique of the uses of suitcases in Australian museums see Eureka Henrich, “Suitcases and Stories: Objects of Migration in Museum Exhibitions,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 3, no. 4 (2011): 71–82, https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/v03i04/44347.
• 14Jason De León, “Undocumented Migration, Use Wear, and the Materiality of Habitual Suffering in the Sonoran Desert,” Journal of Material Culture 18, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 321–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183513496489.
• 15Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn, “Unpacking the Suitcase and Finding History: Doing Justice to the Teaching of Diverse Histories in the Classroom,” Teaching History, no. 154 (March 2014): 40–46; Ilinca Tamara Todoruț, “Unpacking Identity: Traveling Cases as Theatrical Props,” Jurnalul Artelor Spectacolului (JAS), no. 2 (2014): 24–30.

The suitcase is effective in signifying migration due to its iconicity; it looks familiar to those who have traveled and can act as rhetorical shorthand for movement. In Japanese American incarceration history, the suitcase is commonly deployed in literature and memorialization. A monument at the Merced County Fairgrounds in California, a site used as a temporary detention center for Japanese Americans awaiting transfer to incarceration camps, shows a bronze statue of a child sitting atop a pile of suitcases (Fig. 7).17 The image is evocative of many photographs taken by War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographers like Dorothea Lange in the days and weeks of forced removal when Japanese Americans had to pack their belongings before their incarceration (Fig. 8). Depicting children with suitcases waiting for removal further resonates with other memorials of removal such as Frank Meisler’s Kindertransport monuments. In these monuments and photographs, the presence of luggage visually connotes the state of dislocation of the subjects. It is notable that most of Lange’s photographs depicting the hardship of removal were initially impounded by the WRA.18

Orders for removal stipulated that what incarcerated people could bring with them would be, “limited to that which can be carried by the individual or family group,” a phrase taken up in oral histories and literature as “only what you could carry.”19This dictum inspired museum didactics at sites like the Minidoka Incarceration Camp, where a display asks visitors what they would pack to take to camp (Fig. 9). Similarly, Vancouver artist Kayla Isomura turned to this theme for her Suitcase Project which photographs yonsei and gosei (fourth and fifth generation Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians) with the items they might take with them if they were incarcerated. 

Museums use luggage as a signifier of movement when presenting different types of migration, from immigration to displacement. The image of the suitcase, what Schlör classifies as the “anonymous symbolic suitcase,” is actively employed in a range of contexts described in this section because of its iconicity and symbolism.20 These qualities allow for luggage to represent histories of migration and visa issuance programs, or to be used in memorials or as a pedagogical device for teaching about displacement. However, in family archives, the symbolic and iconic qualities of luggage are rarely if ever mentioned. While these interpretive elements of the sign are important to institutional representation, in family archives, luggage as symbol or icon is much less present. In the next section, I move towards an area where institutional and family collection notions of luggage begin to coincide—albeit still in tension with one another—as indexes.

• 17Jeff F. Burton et al., “Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites,” Publications in Anthropology (Tucson, Arizona: Western Archaeological and Conservation Center, National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1999); Koji Lau-Ozawa, “Dissonant Memories of Japanese American Incarceration,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 7 (July 3, 2019): 656–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1534259.
• 18Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York, NY: Norton, 2006).
• 19Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, “Civilian Exclusion Orders, Nos. 1-108,” University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, 1942. Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement records. Online Archive of California. See here. Lawson Fusao Inada, ed., Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2000).
• 20Schlör, “Means of Transport and Storage,” 78.

In the basement of the Panama Hotel in Seattle, there is a pile of suitcases left behind and never retrieved by Japanese Americans as they were forcibly removed. The suitcases are maintained by the hotel owners, undisturbed as a reminder of the removal. These objects are visible through glass in the floor of the hotel café (Fig. 10). As visitors look down, they can see the original objects and speculate what might be inside, the things left behind and never returned to after the mass removal and incarceration. For visitors to the hotel, the power of these objects lay not in their resemblance to the removal of Japanese Americans, but as the actual abandoned objects. Moreover, as objects left behind, they are indexical of the material loss of the Japanese Americans who could not take these objects with them. Like the example of smoke as an index of fire, abandoned objects serve as an index of people who lost those objects. They remain in the hotel because their original owners had to leave them.21 This ability for luggage to point towards histories of movement, displacement, and loss, makes them potent for museum displays. 

• 21Kate Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 19-37.

As Oren Stier writes, at Holocaust related museums, the suitcase is a powerful index because it carries a trace of authentic experience.22 The suitcase is an object held by survivors or once held by the victims of genocide, resonating with aura and poignancy. In addition to the images of the suitcases used in the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit, the museum has a display of luggage piled outside of a railcar in its permanent exhibition, luggage which belonged to Jews who were deported to killing centers. These items are inscribed with names and the numbers assigned to families, relating them to individuals and actual lived experiences. In Poland at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum there are approximately 3,800 suitcases (Fig. 11). Like other masses of objects collected by the institution, the large number of suitcases sparks a reaction from visitors, as they invoke the scale of crimes committed there.23 The suitcases signify the people who held them, and the displacement they endured traveling from their homes to ghettos to concentration camps. 

• 22Stier, Holocaust Icons, 35.
• 23For discussions of mass objects displayed at the USHMM see Oren Baruch Stier, “Torah and Taboo: Containing Jewish Relics and Jewish Identity at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Numen 57, no. 3–4 (January 1, 2010): 505–36, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852710X501360; Laura Levitt, The Objects That Remain (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 94-112.

Pieces of luggage, suitcases, and briefcases, which can be traced to particular people and particular moments, are imbued with an aura of authenticity through their use in historical moments—having been in the possession of people who carried them through migrations, exiles, and diasporas. For museums and museum visitors, the relevance of objects possessing historicity is situated in their itineraries, where they traveled throughout their lives as objects, and in their authenticity, the object as a witness to historical moments. 

At JANM, there is a small display which comprises suitcases that directly relate to the incarceration. Five suitcases are stacked against one another with names and WRA designated family numbers written on their sides. These suitcases and trunks have individual accession numbers listed next to them, linking them to specific donors, chains of custody, and stories (Fig. 12). What makes these objects relevant to the museum are the specificities of their history, brought by families to incarceration camps. They are displayed due to their past itineraries, specific movements through space and time connected to historical moments.24 The information card beneath the case outlines each individual object’s accession number and the donor:

Gift of the E. Masuyama Family (2003.272.1)
Gift of the Minamide Family (98.89.1)
Gift of Yoshio Sato and Hanako (Takeoka) Sato (2018.3.1)
Gift of the Hasuike Family (95.129.1)
Gift of Janice D. Tanaka (94.62.1)

The general process for donating objects to JANM starts with a staff member encountering a prospective donor, often initiated by the donor. The objects under consideration are referred to the collections task force which is a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees and includes JANM trustees, governors, and content experts, and from there the case is brought before the Board of Trustees. The collections manager noted that the decision-making process is subjective as each person or unit—the staff member, collections taskforce, and Board of Trustees—must assess the object on a range of criteria: duplication of objects already in the museum’s possession, the condition of the object, its size and storage requirements, and perhaps more difficult to discern, the story behind the object. How does the object connect to Japanese American history and culture, and how does it tell that story? To determine this, JANM staff might ask the prospective donor for more background information alongside independent research around the object. This information will then be used to craft a justification as to why a particular object or collection would complement JANM’s collection.

These kinds of accession assessments aren’t unique to JANM; the USHMM indeed uses a similar process. A prospective donor contacts a curator, and the staff member assesses the donation in relation to the Holocaust. An in-person assessment of the piece, which may take place at the museum, the collections repository at the Shapell Center, a field office, or in the homes of the donors themselves, allows curators to evaluate the potential acquisition. If the curator and the donor are in agreement after the in-person assessment, the object or collection is transferred into the temporary custody of the USHMM. In the meantime, the curators hold weekly informal meetings to discuss issues or potential donations. Potential donations are brought before an internal committee that meets every four weeks and the final decision is made. If both the museum and the donor then agree, a final deed of gift is signed over to the museum, formally transferring the collection to the USHMM. Two central considerations used by the curators and the collections committee to assess potential donations are the museum’s mandate to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust and the need to care for the collections in perpetuity.

For both JANM and the USHMM, the ability for objects to contribute to the museums’ missions, whether in the realm of evidence gathering or telling stories, guides their decisions on whether to accept objects.25 At the USHMM, when considering a briefcase or suitcase, curators might ask who is offering the object, a survivor or descendant, and whether there are direct memories associated with it. Similarly, at JANM, a curator will ask what stories are associated with the objects, and who is offering the object. In both cases, the chain of custody is crucial—from a historical moment to the moment of donation, it is important to trace what happened to the object. This not only provides contextual information, but aids in establishing authenticity. The objects are assessed by their proximity to history. In her discussion of the procedures of police custody, Laura Levitt notes that the chain of custody encompasses not just the acquisition of objects or evidence, but the “ongoing work of custody, the holding and processing of objects over time, from start to finish.”26 For the objects of history, the ways in which they have been held and processed before entering into contact with museums are crucial to their legibility to archivists and curators. As indexes, suitcases and briefcases are not considered based on their appearance and aesthetics as they might be in an art or craft museum. At museums like JANM and USHMM, the objects must signify a story that can link them to historical moments and people. This is what makes them significant and worthy of institutional acceptance.

The indexicality of suitcases and briefcases, their authentic histories and links to the experience of people, makes them powerful to families who curate their own collections as well, but in a distinct way from museums. There is an intimacy in the objects which not only relates authentically to a past history, but to a family member, with affective ties. The Iwasaki family bag (Fig. 2) was never donated to a museum. A community history project called 50 Objects recorded the bag’s story. Inspired by object-based histories, 50 Objects works to utilize the power of things to narrate the history of Japanese American incarceration during WWII. Many of the objects it selects are part of museum collections, but many others are part of family collections. Founded by community activists and historians in the wake of a 2015 auction which threatened to commodify objects made by Japanese American incarcerees, the 50 Objects project centers community-based knowledge and the affective relationships that survivors and descendants have with objects connected to incarceration history.27 The bag itself is in the possession of Amy Iwasaki Mass, who, as a six-year-old, saw the bag packed by the door when she feared the FBI would take her father away. When holding the bag, she tells community historian Nancy Ukai that she recalls her family’s journey, the uncertainty of removal, and a time of racial animosity.28 The bag has an intimate connection to her past, and her ability to embrace it, to hold it as she tells her family’s story. It thus moves beyond the ability of museums to convey a more abstract sense of history.

In some cases, museum collections’ aim to preserve the past for the broader public comes into conflict with the more intimate relationships between families and these objects. A suitcase held by the Auschwitz Museum was inscribed with the name Pierre Lévi. The suitcase was lent to a museum in Paris for an exhibition where Michel Lévi-Leleu, the son of Pierre Lévi, recognized it. Lévi-Leleu obtained a court order to keep the suitcase in France as he argued it should be returned to the family. The Auschwitz Museum objected, arguing that it was an important object in telling the history of the Holocaust. Eventually the case was settled with the museum agreeing to a long term loan to keep the suitcase in the Paris Shoah Museum with the Lévi-Leleu family renouncing its claim to ownership of the suitcase. Such an instance shows both the power of the suitcase and the tension between institutional and personal ownership of such items. By holding an object to tell the history of the Holocaust, the museum intervenes in the ability of a family to engage in more intimate means of holding. This is not an issue that is particular to suitcases, but a tension with which museums are continuously struggling as they attempt to answer the question of who has the rights to hold objects of the past.29 As Jane Henderson argues in her critique of museum conservation practice, the holding and preserving of materials for the future excludes actors in the present who may articulate other relationships with such objects.30 As the next section will discuss, institutions do more than simply hold objects, they institute a range of practices to consider accessioning objects and their subsequent care.

• 24For more on object itineraries see Rosemary A. Joyce, “Things in Motion: Itineraries of Ulua Marble Vases,” in Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice, ed. Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2015), 21–38.
• 25For more on the role of materials as evidence see Weizman, Forensic Architecture.
• 26Levitt, The Objects That Remain, 56.
• 27Koji Lau-Ozawa, “Origami Activism, Inalienable Collections, and Crumbling Concrete: Material Engagements with Histories of Violence,” American Anthropologist 125, no. 2 (2023): 435–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13841.
  Stephanie Takaragawa, “Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online,” Anthropology Now 7, no. 3 (December 29, 2015): 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2015.1103620.
• 28Nancy Ukai, “Bag by the Door,” 50 Objects (blog), 2017, accessed March 1, 2025, see here.
• 29See for instance with regards to colonial collections in museums Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
• 30Jane Henderson, “Beyond Lifetimes: Who Do We Exclude When We Keep Things for the Future?” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 43, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 195–212, https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2020.1810729.

Symbolism, iconicity, indexicality, and authenticity are not the sole considerations institutions use to assess the value of including objects in their collections. Objects are also judged for their materiality, which is to say, the material and physical qualities of the things themselves.31 Objects take up space, release gas, undergo chemical changes, deteriorate, degrade, rot, and host micro- and macro- parasites. They are subject to the demands and vulnerabilities of the physical world. Consequently, in institutional environments, precautions and protocols contend with objects’ materiality. Space and material composition are two crucial dimensions which impact the assessment of objects.

Institutions which curate objects must consider space, the area and volume taken up by objects in their storage and presentation. Museum collections, as well as archaeological and anthropological collections held by other institutions, have faced a crisis of storage space for more than 50 years. The tripartite issues of under-resourcing, real estate, and ever-growing collections produced by archaeological excavations, curatorial collection, and donations, put pressure on institutions to figure out how to deal with all the things that come into their possession. This is compounded by the need to track these things, producing gigabytes of metadata to document the meanings, conditions, and placement of things.32  Thus, when considering accessioning an object or collection, an institution must consider registration and storage. Though I focus on questions of storage and care in this section, keeping track of things is itself a practice fraught with inconsistencies and challenges, even as institutions from museums and libraries to courts and police forces attempt to professionalize the practices of object tracking with technologically oriented solutions.33

• 31Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127; Ruth M. Van Dyke, “Materiality in Practice,” in Practicing Materiality, ed. Ruth M. Van Dyke (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 3–32.
• 32William H. Marquardt, Anta Montet-White, and Sandra C. Scholtz, “Resolving the Crisis in Archaeological Collections Curation,” American Antiquity 47, no. 2 (1982): 409–18; S. Terry Childs, “Archaeological Collections: Valuing and Managing an Emerging Frontier,” in Of the Past, for the Future: Integrating Archaeology and Conservation, Proceedings of the Conservation Theme at the 5th World Archaeological Congress, Washington, D.C., 22-26 June 2003, ed. Neville Agnew and Janet Bridgland (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute, 2006), 204–10; Michael Bawaya, “Curation in Crisis,” Science 317, no. 5841 (2007): 1025–26; Barbara L. Voss, “Curation as Research. A Case Study in Orphaned and Underreported Archaeological Collections,” Archaeological Dialogues 19, no. 2 (December 2012): 145–69, https://https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203812000219; Morag M. Kersel, “Storage Wars: Solving the Archaeological Curation Crisis?” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 3, no. 1 (2015): 42–54, https://doi.org/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.1.0042.
• 33See Levitt, The Objects That Remain, Chapter 4.

Luggage items such as suitcases, briefcases, or even steamer trunks, present particular challenges inherent in their design. As objects meant to hold things, they tend to be large and filled with empty space. For museums like the USHMM, luggage can take up a considerable amount of room when it is not on display, stacked on shelves as bulky oversized items too large to fit inside drawers or cabinets (Fig. 13). Similarly, at JANM, the curator articulated the difficulty in figuring out how to store luggage, which is commonly offered to the museum by descendants. These objects take up space and institutions struggle to accommodate their volumetric demands. In discussing Wall of Suitcases and Trunks, the JANM curator speculated that it would be tough to justify the space required to store the work if it weren’t on display. Although she noted it could potentially be accessioned as a piece of art, the massive amount of space they would require in a storage facility challenges the ability of the institution to consider accession. The materials demand too much room.

The composition of items is another concern for museums considering accession. Institutions often divide object-based collections by material type, a practice that helps to coordinate the storage requirements of different objects. At the USHMM, collections specialists place non-oversized objects, as opposed to larger ones like those seen in Fig. 13, into locker storage based on their materiality (Fig. 14). There are lockers for paper, wood, metal, fur, and fabric items among the many different types of materials. There are also different temperature and humidity-controlled rooms to provide for cold storage of materials that degrade faster at higher temperatures or to assure differing levels of moisture appropriate to the needs of different materials. These separations limit the interaction of materials with each other, ensuring maximal preservation. Material science research on the long-term durability of objects has provided scientific insight into object care and helps shape conservation decisions.34 Pieces of luggage, particularly those manufactured in the twentieth century, present unique challenges due to their mixed media composition, often combining synthetic materials, leather, metal, cloth, and paper as well as chemical treatments to assist in weathering. Each material brings with it its own conservation concerns and necessitates specific approaches to avoid degradation.35

Consequently, when choosing to accession pieces of luggage, museums must consider the materials they are composed of, how to handle these materials, and how to store them. At JANM and the USHMM, objects entering the collections often go through a quarantine period when they arrive at the institution. This allows for an assessment of the object’s conditions and a chance to contend with any possible parasitic travelers on the objects. From mold to insect larva, newly acquisitioned objects can contain potentially dangerous contaminants which would impact not only the donated objects themselves but could spread to other parts of the collection. Freezing objects is a common practice to attend to these possibilities, allowing for minimal harm to be done to the objects themselves while neutralizing the threats of insects or fungi.36

The composition of the luggage itself is not the only consideration institutions make when accessioning items or planning the long-term curation of objects. A crucial quality of items of luggage is their ability to hold. By design, these bags and cases are meant to contain things, whether clothing, books, sundries, or food. They are meant to transport items from different locations. What they hold and how these holdings relate to the composition and history of the luggage itself impacts how institutions care for their collections.

At both the USHMM and JANM, curators note that people often bring family archives to the museum in suitcases, briefcases, and trunks. These evocative pieces of luggage transport the past to the present. Archives do important work in curating the materials from which the writers of history draw some of their primary sources. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s discussion of historicity in Silencing the Past is helpful in understanding the power of family archives and their curation. Trouillot distinguishes between the materiality of socio-historical process, what he terms historicity 1, and historical narratives which are produced about the past, historicity 2.37 Trouillot’s bifurcated historicity concerns the divide between what happened in the past and what was said to have happened and the ambiguity that the word history conjures as referring to both. For Trouillot, the actions of the past occur (historicity 1) after which people, often in official institutions, assemble archives. Historians subsequently produce historicity 2, creating narratives and assigning significance.38 For Trouillot, archives are an essential part of narrative assembly, constraining the production of historicity 2. The archive creates the conditions of possibility that the historian uses to access what occurred in the past (historicity 1). In this way the archive can both be inclusive in expanding knowledge of what has happened, or exclusionary and silencing when a lack of resources is available to trace certain moments or people. Family archives can powerfully increase the resources used in the construction of historicity 2, challenging institutional archives, or filling in the silences left by gaps in archival holdings. The accumulation of archives by families challenges the power of institutions to control the assembling of historical sources. For every item that comes into an archive there is an expansion of access to historicity 1, a widened view of the past. Institutions play an expanded role in the access to such materials as well as their arrangements and storage, none of which are neutral actions.39

• 34Susan M. Blackshaw and Vincent D. Daniels, “The Testing of Materials for Use in Storage and Display in Museums,” The Conservator (January 1, 1979): 16–19; D. Thickett and L. R. Lee, Selection of Materials for the Storage or Display of Museum Objects, British Museum Occasional Paper, no. 111 (London: British Museum, 2004); Kristina Holl et al., “Sustainable Museum Storage Buildings for Long-Term Preservation,” Studies in Conservation 63, no. sup1 (August 1, 2018): 366–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393630.2018.1505088.
• 35Amanda Kathryn Comminos Vance, “The Conservation of Composite Luggage Trunks: Case Studies from the Kings Mountain National Military Park” (master’s thesis, Texas A&M University, 2015), see here; Brenna Campbell, Élodie Lévèque, and Erin Jue, “Marcel Duchamp’s Boîtes-en-valise: Collaboration and Conservation,” Studies in Conservation 57, no. sup1 (August 1, 2012): S52–60, https://doi.org/10.1179/2047058412Y.0000000017; Nel Jastrzębiowska, Anna Wawrzyk, and Natalia Uroda, “Influence Analysis of Polyvinyl Alcohol on the Degradation of Artificial Leather with Cellulose Nitrate Coating Originating from a Suitcase Stored in the Collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland,” Materials 16, no. 21 (January 2023): 7033, https://doi.org/10.3390/ma16217033.
• 36Mary-Lou E. Florian, Heritage Eaters: Insects and Fungi in Heritage Collections (James & James Science Publishers Ltd, 1997); Valerie Blyth and Clair Battisson, “Dangerous Liaisons,” Studies in Conservation 53, no. sup1 (January 1, 2008): 93–97, https://doi.org/10.1179/sic.2008.53.Supplement-1.93.
• 37Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 29; Benjamin, Illuminations, 222.
• 38Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26. 
• 39Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 87–109, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632; Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628; Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 95–120, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9180-7.

Through the ability to hold archival materials in themselves, luggage pieces in family collections become transportive objects for the production of history. They can hold the materials which produce Trouillot’s historicity 2. Moreover, in the hands of families, these luggage-based archival repositories themselves are subject to idiosyncratic curation and organizational logics. A “family historian” determines which papers and objects are relevant for entry into the repository. The Basch family briefcase was one such repository. It held papers from the family related to their time in Shanghai: folders with visas in them, official state documents, photographs, and correspondence (Fig. 15). The briefcase was an archival repository, a fact acknowledged in its title on the USHMM catalog: “Leather briefcase used to hold family papers by Jewish Refugees.” The object is listed both in its association to Jewish refugees, the Basch Family, as well as its use as an archival repository. This is in contrast to another entry for an almost identical briefcase used by a different Jewish refugee family in Shanghai, simply listed as “Briefcase.” The Basch family briefcase’s use as a repository of papers is integral to its identification in the museum’s collection. Despite this close affiliation with the papers, they are stored separately, subdivided into acid-free folders which are rehoused in an acid free box like the ones visible in Fig. 16. Not only are they separated out, but they are stored in completely different sections which divide documents from objects. Such separation is unsurprising given the differing material requirements of the briefcase itself and the papers within. Conservation guidelines for leather luggage note such items should not be used as storage containers lest the contents damage the leather or vice versa.40

• 40Marion Kite and Roy Thomson, Conservation of Leather and Related Materials (Routledge, 2006), 117.

Amy Iwasaki Mass also uses her family’s bag as an archival repository. She keeps the bag at home in a closet stored next to the Christmas ornaments, and stores family documents in it, including immigration papers, books, and photographs (Fig. 17). The Iwasaki bag’s continued usage as an archival repository marks its personal connection to the Iwasaki family. The piece of luggage was a witness to history, itself an object marked by time and indexical of the family’s forced removal and incarceration. It is also a memory object, something deeply intimate to its owner who can touch it and recall the past. At the same time, it holds an archive of materials collected and curated by its owner. The Iwasaki family’s use of the bag as an archival repository with a mixture of material types stored inside, contrasts with the separation of material types that the Basch family briefcase underwent. Though the storage of these materials inside of the leather bag in a closet may not conform to best practices of conservation, its meaning transcends functionality. Here, other relationships are prioritized over conservation.

The separation of papers from the Basch Family’s briefcase incorporates these materials into the larger repository of the USHMM archives and the bag into its object collections. These incorporations into the museum will aid in the preservation of the materials for many years into the future, providing access to researchers and members of the public. At the same time, these materials are removed from the personal, losing the intimate qualities connected to their families as they are moved into a sterilized environment. Further, they are subject to the classificatory schemes of the institutional archive, a process which will inevitably color the use of such documents in the production of historicity 2. The keywords attached to these documents “Refugees, Jewish—China—Shanghai—History” and “Shanghai (China)—Jewish Refugees” influence the connections that are drawn in search results and the other documents and papers they will be put in relation with. In contrast, the Iwasaki suitcase will remain vulnerable to the degradations of time as it is kept by a family with much less control over its environmental conditions. The mixture of material types may hasten such deterioration, though perhaps on a timescale not noticeable within the next decades. This item, however, will remain with the family that cares for it, accessible for the telling of family histories and to the meanings and affects layered onto it. Its ability to develop historicity 2 is preserved on a smaller scale than papers available in research institutions. For better or worse, the people who decide what enters into the Iwasaki family archive, who has access to it, and how it is arranged—archons as Jacques Derrida may have described them—stay for the moment within the Iwasaki family.41

• 41I use archons in reference to Derrida’s discussions of archives and power in Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

When objects like briefcases and suitcases are kept by families to mark their own histories of movement, they are imbued with multiple values. They can be deeply personal, evoking memories of the past and loved ones long gone. They can also hold the family’s historical archive, containing a multitude of objects and materials which tell stories like building new lives in a Shanghai refugee community or migration to the United States and eventual removal to incarceration camps. For museums they are powerful as iconic and symbolic signs of historical trends of migration and displacement. They are also indexical, authentic items which traverse the very geographies which they then represent. Such items can and often do move between these two states, from family collections to museum collections, though at times with frictions. Briefcases and suitcases can also form assemblages, such as when incorporated into an artwork like Wall of Suitcases and Trunks or when combined with contents of family collections and archives. They are imbued with new meanings while in contact with sets of other objects, meanings that can be lost or obfuscated when partitioned, separated by material type, or divided into individual pieces. Further, the intimacies of such objects can be difficult to access when they are transferred from personal possession to institutional collections.

At the same time, luggage still occupies a liminal position. Some bags are unambiguous in their ability to produce narratives of history. In All That She Carried, Tiya Miles details the history of a sack containing a small number of items given by Rose, an enslaved woman in South Carolina, to her daughter Ashley before they were separated. The great granddaughter of Rose, Ruth Middleton, then embroidered the sack with this story.  Such an item makes its historicity known both in its physical qualities as well as the narrativization by Ruth. In contrast, as detailed above, each item in Wall of Suitcases and Trunks is of undetermined significance for an institution like JANM. Though collectively powerful it is also collectively burdensome for conservation. When divided up, the itineraries of each component are obscured by a lack of clear connection and record keeping. 

Luggage items are powerful in part because of their ability to hold and move. Briefcases like that of the Basch Family or the bag of the Iwasaki Family are prized because they were able to hold things and move them. Luggage can transport the past. The Basch and Iwasaki bags are seen as significant both for the stories attached to them as well as their role as repositories, but such determinations ask: what containers come to matter? Mollie Wilson Murphy, a Black girl living in Boyle Heights in the 1940s, kept a trove of letters from correspondence with her Japanese American friends who were sent to incarceration camps across the country. Eventually, in 2000, she donated these letters to JANM, bringing them in two grocery bags that she had kept them in.43 Should these grocery bags be considered for accessioning into the collection? They were not kept by the museum, but what would have warranted their inclusion? If they were historic? If they were of more durable materials like leather as opposed to paper or plastic? Such questions and lines surround the ambiguity of luggage. They are both prosaic and powerful, activated when in contact with certain signifiers and dormant when left unmoored by narrative support. Their materiality can help them endure and hold, but also provide challenges to institutions which look to contain them. 

Loss and the impossibility of reproduction are intrinsic to histories of displacement. Ma Vang in her accounting of the archives of Hmong refugees starts with a discussion of a lost baggage tag. Noting the items listed in the bag, Vang draws out not only its personal and spiritual contents, which held great meaning to the family that lost the bag, but also the bag’s place in the larger story of dispossession and displacement faced by Hmong refugees.44 Historian Leora Auslander recounts the longing and anger of Parisian Jews who petitioned the state in the post-war years to reclaim furniture and other items seized from them. In doing so, they not only sought out their lost items but articulated their relationships to the state and French society. Moreover, they annunciated their loss of home, a home defined by material things.45 In histories of displacement, loss is a recurring aspect, and luggage holds a particularly potent position as an item that can help take some of the things that matter. 

Still, a suitcase cannot hold a homeland. As poet Mahmoud Darwish poignantly wrote of his own displacement, “my country is not a suitcase, I am not a traveler.”46 For the Basch and Iwasaki families, their suitcases and briefcases cannot contain their lost homes. Their luggage can, however, contain their memories and archives, forging new affective narratives of history. Both pieces held family archives and were held by families themselves, clutched in periods of exile and uncertainty and relied upon to carry the possessions that remained. Suitcases and briefcases, trunks and sacks, can transport the past, and in doing so remain central to understanding the loss of displacement. The narrative efficacy of luggage is exactly why institutions like JANM and USHMM look to luggage to study and interpret the past as well as to tell these stories of displacement to the public. However, the tensions between the practices and meanings of family collections and institutional collections remain. Consequently, both families which hold these material archives and institutions which may accession them must navigate with care the potential transition of such materials between these repositories.

Acknowledgments: I would like to extend my utmost thanks to Laura Levitt and Oren Stier for organizing the workshop which pushed me to think of objects in new ways as well as this special issue. I would also like to thank Caroline Sturdy Colls, Jane Klinger, Robert Ehrenreich, Jennifer Rich, Kate DeConinck, Lisa Conte, Barbara Mann, Dan Stone, Christine Schmidt, Hannah Wilson, Tahel Goldsmith, Yaniv Feller, Julia Brennen, Julia Liden, and Rebecca Cater-Chand for their insightful comments and thoughts which helped to inspire this piece. I would also like to thank Alexandra Drakakis, Kristen Hayashi, Nancy Ukai, David Izu, and Hirokazu Kosaka for their insights, discussions, and help with understanding luggage and curation processes. Finally, a tremendous thanks to Emily Floyd and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. All errors and mistakes are my own. 

• 43George Sanchez, “Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 9, 2001,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 1–23.
• 44Ma Vang, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
• 45Leora Auslander, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 237–59.
• 46Mahmoud Darwish, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound,” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987), 200-202.

In her book, Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, Amy Sodaro describes how the Al Qaeda operatives who hijacked the planes on September 11, 2001, are framed in the narrative at the 9/11 Museum in New York City. Sodaro observes many ways in which the presence of the perpetrators is intentionally minimized. For example, small photos of these men are displayed at knee-level in the exhibit space as a way to symbolically ensure that their status is lower than that of survivors, victims, and other people who were affected by the attacks. The same section of the exhibit also displays a reproduction of “The Last Night,” an infamous letter that was written by one of the perpetrators on the day before the attacks. Though the letter might be of interest to visitors who want to understand the motivation behind the attacks, only one line of this document has been translated from Arabic into English. Such decisions, Sodaro argues, “[point] to an underlying fear that representing perpetrators or explaining their actions might lead to understanding or condoning them.”1 However, the author contends that the designers’ effort to deny the perpetrators much space or voice in the exhibit also limits visitors’ ability to understand “the deeper causes of the rise of global terrorism.”2 Sodaro’s analysis raises important questions about what is at stake in whether or how the perpetrators of violence are framed at museums and other sites that seek to promote remembrance of and education about mass atrocities. Is there space for perpetrator materials at sites that seek to preserve the sacred memory of survivors and victims? Does the profane or unsettling nature of such materials threaten the perceived sanctity of the space, or might there be value in including them?

Such questions have also surfaced in my work as the Director of the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. The Institute, which was founded in 1983 as one of the oldest Holocaust resource centers in the United States, started off as a collection of books and other materials that were brought together by its founder, Dr. Charles Hildebrandt, to support the mission “to remember . . . and to teach.”3 Today, the Institute offers dozens of public-facing programs and events each year, as well as international study opportunities and resources and support for educators who teach Holocaust and Genocide Studies. One of the responsibilities tied to my role as Director of the Institute is working with the College Archivist to oversee the management and development of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies collection of the Mason Library on campus.

The Holocaust and Genocide Studies collection contains hundreds of original artifacts, documents, passports, and other materials, all of which constitute a “teaching collection.” This means that, although materials are stored within a temperature-controlled room and treated gently when they are brought out for use, they are meant to be handled and studied by students and community members. Although these items will inevitably deteriorate over time due to contact with human hands and light, they also serve an important role in giving people a tangible point of connection to the past.

The first time I visited the Archives, I was drawn in by a set of pen pal letters written to and from a young girl in the United States and another in Germany. The six letters dated from February 1933 through January 1934. Half a world away from each another, these two correspondents described the mundane realities of their everyday lives as well as the changing conditions in their countries over time. Each time I have visited the Archives since then, I have found new items of interest: passports written in different languages that can be deciphered using Google Translate, photos of a bombed-out Nuremburg, post-Holocaust photos and identification cards from Eva Gordon—who grew up under the Nazi regime as a mischling (a child with “half Jewish” blood)—and more. These are just a handful of the many items nestled in the heart of the library. Parts of the collection have also been digitized to make them accessible to wider audiences.4

Although it is not an official policy, the Institute and the Archives maintain a passive acquisitions approach. This means that staff members do not actively seek out or purchase materials for the collection. Rather, most items come to us through donors who are looking for a place to house their things. Since stepping into my job with the Institute in 2022, I have spent a significant amount of time traveling across New Hampshire alongside our College Archivist to meet with these prospective donors and help them decide if our special collection is the right option for them.

Given how many Holocaust museums and centers there are in our world today, one might wonder: what motivates these families or individuals to reach out to our Institute, which is located in a quiet city in southwestern New Hampshire? The first factor that often comes into play is proximity. Many of those who give materials to this collection are local to New England. Some have a personal connection to the Institute, its staff, or the College, and they want to either support our mission or know that they are entrusting their items to people who are part of their own network. Others have told me that they want their items close by, and they appreciate the convenience of being able to come in and see the materials without having to travel. This is especially the case when people are donating treasured family artifacts.

The more I have spoken with donors over time, the more attuned I have become to the affective relationships that they maintain with these “things.” One woman told me that she had previously considered donating her grandparents’ photo collections to a museum in Florida but, when she visited the museum, its storage facilities felt too much like a cold, “sterile” warehouse. She is one of many individuals who have expressed a desire for their items to be cared for lovingly and kept alive through engagement with or the companionship of a community. We are always careful to explain the nature of our teaching collection during meetings like these so that donors understand that their objects will be used in classrooms and available for workshops, events, and research. Most donors are attracted to our collection because this approach a good fit with what they want for their items.

But that is not always what motivates a donation. We also have had families and individuals approach us with items that they simply do not know what to do with—things, such as perpetrator paraphernalia, that they do not want in their possession but that others do not necessarily seem to want either. In some cases, they have reached out to other museums or institutions and have been turned away. Many Holocaust museums went through an initial wave of acquiring materials for exhibits or collections in the early 1990s but have become more selective in what they accept over time. For example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website states: “Due to the large number of Nazi flags and banners regularly offered to the Museum, we can only accept flags and banners of a specific size that accommodate our current exhibit needs.”5

Thus, the Institute also receives inquiries from local residents who are looking to rid themselves of Nazi-related artifacts—flags, propaganda, and more. Oftentimes these items were unearthed while a family was cleaning out the attic of a recently-deceased loved one. Suddenly confronted with a symbol of a hateful ideology that has been packed away for years, they do not know what to do with it. Conversations with these prospective donors raise radically different emotions than conversations with those who treasure the items they are looking to donate. While materials such as photos of victims or survivors, yellow stars, or other items might evoke loving tenderness, grief, or joy, the donation of perpetrator materials more often carries emotions of discomfort, shame, or anger.

The remainder of this essay highlights specific examples and stories of perpetrator materials in archival or museum collections. The first three images that I share foreground the complicated emotions that such items have evoked for the donors and students who I have encountered through my work at the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The remaining five images turn to consider some of the materials that are housed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection. Ultimately, these cases, when taken together, raise two important questions: What emotions and reactions do these artifacts evoke for donors, students, and others? And what, if anything, might these objects teach us about the realities of war and genocide?

• 1

  Amy Sodaro, Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 151.

• 2

  Sodaro, Exhibiting Atrocity, 159.

• 3

  “To Remember . . . and to Teach,” Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, accessed November 2, 2025, https://www.keene.edu/academics/cchgs/ .

• 4

  “Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” Special Collections, Keene State College, accessed April 19, 2025, https://commons.keene.edu/s/KSCArchive/page/HGS .

• 5

  “Donate to the Collections,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed April 19, 2025, https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/donate-to-the-collections .

The owner of a thrift store in New Hampshire donated this original photograph of Adolf Hitler standing with other uniformed officials to the Cohen Institute.6 She explained that she had found the photograph—already encased in a protective plastic sleeve—in a box of books that had been left at her shop. After misplacing the photo for a year, she met with me when it had reappeared.

“It’s uncomfortable for me to hold this photo,” she told me. “It was uncomfortable for me to even possess that [the photo]. I don’t feel comfortable selling it.” The thrift store owner expressed gratitude to the Institute for relieving her of the burden of ownership because, otherwise, she would not have known what to do with it. She ended the conversation by saying, “I wish I knew more about where it came from or who donated it. But maybe this was their way to pass it along because they didn’t know what to do with it either.”

Stories like this one raise interesting and important questions about provenance, or records of origin and ownership, as related to perpetrator materials. When people find an object unsettling to have in their possession, museum or archives professionals may be less likely to gain access to the full history or significance of an item. Who took this photo and why? Was it part of a set? How did it end up in southwestern New Hampshire? The lack of context also seems to be part of the reason why the store owner wanted to rid herself of this photo.

In other cases, the hate-filled content of the material itself is what evokes strong emotions from a donor.

• 6

  Any identifying information pertaining to students, donors, and others mentioned in this piece has been anonymized or altered to protect their anonymity.

This box of photos, documents, and books was donated to the Cohen Institute during the summer of 2023. Before it arrived in the mail, the Institute received an email from its owner, who had inherited the contents from his father. The email read, in part: “I have a few boxes of anti-Semitic ‘Hitleriana-Nazi’ items. Nobody seems to want any of it except ‘online Internet Nazis’ . . . and that will never happen! I’ve shredded many boxfuls . . . others went to a landfill. If Keene State can use any of the material, I will ship it at no cost. You can burn or destroy this disgraceful nonsense if you want.”

One thing that stands out in this note is the author’s fear that these items will fuel neo-Nazism or other hateful ideologies in today’s world. I have heard the same concern from others. One gentleman told me about visiting a flea market in southern New Hampshire and coming across a table selling Nazi propaganda from the late 1930s, propaganda that contained dehumanizing antisemitic imagery. He was so distraught about seeing this content out in the open—in a space where children and their families were wandering around no less—that he bought all the materials himself. He figured that this was the best way to keep it out of circulation and prevent it from gaining traction with new audiences.

But the donor of the box pictured above also expresses a complicated form of anger in his note. He maintains a desire to see the “nonsense” destroyed but is hesitant to be the one to shred all of it himself. These items are labeled as “disgraceful”—literally, that which brings shame or discredit on someone or something—but he also wonders if there is any educational value to be found within them. The irony that later came to light was that, when the donor did eventually ship his box to Keene State College, we discovered that there were only a few books containing antisemitic propaganda in the mix. There were a handful of photos of Hitler at speaking events and in other contexts. But the bulk of the box’s contents was academic books about the Holocaust. So, this individual must not have sifted through the box in its entirety.

In some cases, donors possess a mixture of items that they treasure and other items that evoke shame or guilt. For example, one community member came to the Institute to donate photos of her two grandfathers, one who fought in World War II as a soldier in the U.S. Army and another who was among the persecuted Jews of Europe. We spent two hours getting to know one another during her visit, talking about her family’s story and her children’s own experiences as Jews in New Hampshire. Later on, I received a follow-up email from her thanking me for my time. The final sentences of the message read: “I wanted also to mention that we are interested in donating a nazi [sic] flag that my grandfather took [from Germany] . . . It’s a really big (6 foot wide?) flag with heavy tassels . . . I didn’t mention it to you in person because it’s awkward to talk about.” Although we had spent the afternoon building rapport and a sense of trust, this individual still felt uncomfortable telling me that she had this flag in her possession—as if the presence of this object might evoke my judgment or somehow negate her family’s other stories and experiences.

Thus far, I have highlighted a few cases pertaining to the complicated emotions that can emerge for donors as they seek to dispossess themselves of perpetrator materials. But I have also witnessed the complicated emotions and reactions that such objects can evoke for students who engage with the teaching collection. A colleague of mine who takes her classes to the Archives regularly for activities and workshops described one such incident from a few years ago. As she chatted with one of her undergraduates about a set of passports, she heard an archivist standing behind her exclaim, “Oh my gosh, take it off!” Turning around she saw that one of her students had donned the Nazi helmet that was part of the collection. When I asked the instructor what feelings were evoked by seeing a student wearing the attire of a perpetrator, she described herself as “flabbergasted” and “wide-eyed and confused.” What would possess a student to put on a helmet like that, she wondered. While the collection is meant to be handled and examined, certain items seem to have the potential to evoke behavior that is shocking or unsettling.

Not all students are so quick to wear Nazi attire, though. Perpetrator materials can also unnerve the learners who confront these items during their time in the Archives.

The students seated at this table were enrolled in a class that I brought to the Archives last year to examine curated boxes of items for a workshop on primary source literacy. These young women quickly dove into the documents and photos in their box, but conspicuously avoided the large, folded Nazi flag that was inside. When I asked them why that was the case, one student told me: “Some of my family members were Jewish. I just feel weird about touching something with a swastika on it. I think my mom would find it strange if I told her I was handling it.” Out of respect for those killed during the Holocaust and out of loyalty to her family’s own Jewish identity, she stayed away from this item. Sometimes the embodied reactions to that particular item are even stronger. A faculty member once told me about a student in her class who started shivering and hugging himself when he looked at that same flag during a workshop, saying that he could “sense the evil coming from it.”

I could go on, but these anecdotes capture the essence of what I have seen play out in many different contexts over the past few years. What is at stake in our encounters with perpetrator materials? The question of why these objects seem to evoke such intense and widely ranging emotions has many possible answers. One obvious point to consider is that sometimes the content of a collection can prove traumatic in and of itself. In an article entitled “Working with Traumatic Material: Effects on Holocaust Memorial Museum Staff” that was published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, the authors describe how museum workers who were preparing for the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 were exposed to personal artifacts and other reminders of the horrors of the Holocaust that were “potentially disturbing.”7 As a result, interventions were designed to lower distress among staff and volunteers and help them process their reactions. If trained museum professionals may find themselves traumatized by artifacts of the past, the same might be true for others who confront such items.

Additionally, material culture grounds us in the human dimensions of genocide. That helmet that the student put on, for example, was worn by a person who was complicit in a system that claimed the lives of millions of people. The perpetrators of past violence were human just as we are human today. Some of the encounters described above seem tied to a distancing reflex similar to that which Peter Hayes describes in his book, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust.8 In the introduction to this book, Hayes notes that many people describe the Holocaust as incomprehensible or unfathomable as an “almost instinctive recoiling in self-defense.”9 He goes on to write: “To say that one can explain the occurrence of the Holocaust seems tantamount to normalizing it, but professing that one cannot grasp it is an assertion of the speaker’s innocence—of his or her incapacity not only to conceive of such horror but to enact anything like it.”10 In rejecting perpetrator materials in such visceral ways, perhaps people are actively working to reject the humanity of the perpetrators—as well as their own potential for committing hateful acts or crimes.

The desire to maintain boundaries between different types of people and different types of things may also explain why some students and donors seem to worry that the presence of perpetrator materials—say, for example, a Nazi flag stored alongside a collection of Jewish family photos—might pollute the sanctity of other items. Such logic evokes anthropologist Mary Douglas’s framework for understanding how societies and religious communities deem certain things pure and sacred and other things unclean and out of place.11 The human tendency to shun dirt, Douglas claims, is not merely about hygiene but rather about trying to impose order on chaos and about the maintenance of boundaries. “Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.”12 Perhaps the ambivalence evoked by perpetrator materials is due in part to the manner in which they can challenge the neat divisions of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims that have been so heavily reinforced in Holocaust and genocide research.13 Some people may want to store Jewish family photos apart from Nazi flags because doing so helps to reinforce clear-cut lines of division between the objects themselves and the types of stories or experiences that they represent, even if history itself was much more layered and complicated than that.

These are but a handful of ways in which we might think about what is at stake in the encounters and reactions to which I have borne witness. But, as difficult as perpetrator materials might be for individuals to confront at times, can they also serve a purpose? What, if any, value might these objects hold in helping students and others better understand the realities of genocide and war?

When I had the opportunity to participate in the workshop on “Interrogating the Sacred: Holocaust Objects and Their Care,” which was held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during the summer of 2023, I decided to spend my time examining some of the perpetrator items in the Museum’s exhibition and collections. I wanted to learn more about the things that might be construed as the opposed of sacred—the “disgraceful” perpetrator materials—and what is at stake in conserving and exhibiting them. The Museum’s collections include, for example, more than 120 Nazi banners and flags, most of which are not on display as part of the permanent exhibition. But a staff member at the museum did point out one flag that is.

• 7

  James E. McCarroll, Arthur S. Blank, and Kathryn Hill, “Working with traumatic material: Effects on Holocaust Memorial Museum staff,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 65, no. 1 (1995): 66–75. doi:10.1037/h0079595.

• 8

  Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

• 9

  Hayes, Why?, xiii.

• 10

  Ibid.

• 11

  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

• 12

  Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2.

• 13

  See, for example Robert M. Ehrenreich and Tim Cole, “The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation: Rethinking Genocidal Relationships,” Human Organization 64, no. 3 (2005): 213-224.

This massive red Nazi flag is situated within the portion of the permanent exhibition that discusses how the Gestapo maintained a climate of fear, hatred, and suspicion under Hitler’s dictatorship. Despite its size, the flag is easy to overlook because it is placed behind a large metal grate and because there are enlarged photos with captions situated in front of it. The purpose of the grate, the same staff member told me, was to discourage pilgrimage and the leaving of votive candles or other items by neo-Nazi groups.14 Whereas exhibit designers worked hard to call attention to other objects that might otherwise be overlooked—such as a famous milk can used to secretly hide archives from the Warsaw ghetto—it is clear that they thought equally carefully about how to prevent this flag from becoming too noticeable or prominent in the exhibition.15

As noted above, though, most of the Nazi flags and banners in the Museum’s collection are not out on display but housed in its storage facilities. Conversations with one of the museum’s textile conservators revealed how the flags—which, to the untrained eye, look very similar—have different stories to tell. Take, for instance, the flag pictured below.

• 14

  This is not an unfounded concern. The staff at a Holocaust Center in Detroit redesigned parts of their space—and removed a large photo of Hitler entirely—after some visitors were caught giving the Nazi salute and engaging in other problematic forms of behavior. Ralph Blumenthal, “One Hope From Changes at This Holocaust Museum: Fewer Nazi Selfies,” The New York Times, published online January 26, 2024, accessed April 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/arts/design/zekelman-holocaust-center-detroit.html .

• 15

  “One of the three milk cans used by Warsaw ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum to store and preserve the secret ‘Oneg Shabbat’ ghetto archives,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last updated December 10, 2004, accessed April 19, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1092486.

According to the Museum’s catalog, this flag was found by a U.S. soldier in an abandoned department store in Germany near the end of the war in May 1945.16 It has a swastika emblazoned on both sides of the fabric, which the conservator told me means that it was designed to be displayed in the air on either a flagpole or a banister. The flag was brand new, unused, and it was once attached to a price tag for the Kaufhof Department Store.17 The catalog further explains that Kaufhof Department Store was originally part of a Jewish-owned chain of stores founded by Leonard Tietz in the late 1880s when his family pioneered the concept of a department store in Germany. When the Nazi Party rose to power, the Tietz family’s stores were boycotted because of their Jewish identity. Eventually, in the early 1930s, the family was forced to sell their shares in the business at a reduced value during a period of Nazi-enforced Aryanization. This is when Tietz stores were renamed Kaufhof—literally “buying” (kaufen) and “building” (hof)—and it was at one of these locations in which this flag was stocked for sale in 1945.

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  “Nazi red flag with a swastika with a price tag found by a US soldier in an abandoned German store,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last modified January 2, 2025, accessed April 19, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn36423.

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  The conservation team at the Museum opted to remove the price tag from the flag because, over time, the contact between different materials—fabric and paper—would have led to the deterioration of one or both. Thus, the price tag is now stored in a small clear envelope alongside the flag (see Fig. 6).

Thus, although this flag initially looked indistinguishable from others in the collection, conversations about its materiality with conservators and analysis of the catalog listing elucidated how much it might teach us about the past. This object could open up meaningful conversations with students about Aryanization as part of the pathway to genocide as well as other rich questions like: What happened to the Tietz family during the Holocaust? Were they or their descendants ever compensated for their business losses after the war? Does the Kaufhof Department Store acknowledge the “origins” of the business today and, if so, how? And how have other businesses approached complicated ethical questions pertaining to their complicity in the Holocaust?

Two other flags in the collection that look similar to this one carry very different but equally important stories as well.

This Nazi banner was also found in new and unused condition by a U.S. soldier at the end of the war. A close examination of the material alongside conservators revealed that the white circle is slightly lopsided, and the material is not of a fine weave. It is made of rayon, a less common material for these banners, which may have been the result of supply chain issues at the end of the war. The metal grommets along the edge and printing on one side of the fabric tell us that it was likely intended to be hung against a wall. These points, when taken together, indicate that this banner was likely created in a rushed—and perhaps desperate—fashion even as Nazi Germany was beginning to falter or experience strain during the war. An item like this might lead into a discussion with students about the changing course of the war and the conditions that ultimately led to Germany’s defeat.

Equally insightful is the catalog listing for this item, which tells us more about the soldier who found the banner and brought it home with him to the United States.18 This young man had been ordered to go to a small town in Germany and take the local townspeople to witness the unburied bodies of victims at a former killing center as testament to the atrocities of the Nazi government. Afterwards, the U.S. Army forced the townspeople to bury the dead themselves. The soldier had found this recently manufactured banner rolled in a bundle in a boxcar near the camp. Items like this one might raise important questions for students about early efforts to counter Holocaust denial through the witnessing of human remains, the relationships between American liberators and the German communities that they encountered, or the military practice of bringing home “souvenirs” from war.

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  “Unused Nazi banner with a swastika found by Earl Kinne,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last modified October 13, 2024, accessed April 19, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn522575.

The final flag that I examined during our workshop—though certainly not the only other flag in the Museum’s collection—was the one pictured above. One conservator told me that it has the “classic weave of a military flag.” Indeed, the catalog tells us that this flag was taken from an office at Dachau concentration camp in 1945 by Everett Fox, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army.19 Soon after Fox acquired it, it was signed by members of the 158^th Field Artillery Battalion and the 45^th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. Another round of signatures took place around 1990 during a reunion of the 45^th Infantry Division, and then the flag was eventually donated to the Museum by Fox’s grandson. Names, addresses, and short notes are still legible on the fabric today. It resembles a yearbook; these young men knew that the war was ending and they were about to be sent home. This was a moment of change, and they wanted to keep in touch with their wartime buddies. Mixed in among the names and addresses are inside jokes, pleas to stay in touch, and more. Looking at this item, one begins to wonder more broadly about the experiences of both survivors and soldiers after the war. How did they grapple with the traumatic experiences they had had or horrific scenes that they had witnessed during the Holocaust or war? What networks of support were available, if any, in the years that followed?

Ultimately, conversations with Museum staff reinforced the idea that perpetrator materials, as difficult as they may be to encounter at times, can teach us important lessons—and open up important questions—about the past. This is true even for Museum staff themselves, who cultivate what one conservator described as “split brain” in order to disconnect from the story or history of an item so that they can focus on tending to the object itself. She and other professionals also adhere to ethical codes that demand that they maintain a “standard of care” in treating all objects equitably. This individual told me: “We have to remember that objects like these are needed in order to tell the full story of the Holocaust.” She also mentioned that the work she had done on restoring flags like those pictured above had resulted in “useful learning” for her. For example, she is now better able to identify forgeries after so closely examining authentic flags and other artifacts.

We are living in a moment when the nature of Holocaust remembrance, memorialization, and education are shifting. Survivors and other direct witnesses to the Holocaust are a dwindling population as are those who had first-hand knowledge of perpetrators’ actions and motivations. During the fall semester of 2023, I invited Dr. Martin Rumscheidt, a renowned theologian who was also the son of Nazi industrialists and perpetrators, to speak with students in my class. Martin was just a young boy during the war, but he went on to spend much of his adult life grappling with questions about Christian-Jewish relations in the wake of the Holocaust. His visit inspired deep thinking about why some Germans supported the Nazi party, the culture of silence that emerged in families like his after the war, and the possibilities for remembering, repentance, and reconciliation in the wake of genocide. And then, in January 2024, Martin passed away.

With fewer and fewer people who were directly impacted by the Holocaust here to share their stories with us, I believe that we must lean into items in the collections at museums and in archives. And, while perpetrator materials might evoke shame or anger at times, they also have important stories to tell. If we can cultivate broader appreciation for the educational value of such materials, we may be able to maintain better records of provenance to further enrich the lessons they have to teach us. All of these artifacts help to tell a nuanced story about the past as we work to avoid the greatest “disgrace” of all—forgetting or denying what happened.

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  “Nazi flag from taken from Dachau and signed by over 50 US soldiers,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last modified January 2, 2024, accessed April 19, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn518590.

I want to express my gratitude to those who facilitated the workshop on “Interrogating the Sacred: Holocaust Objects and Their Care” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during August 2023. Our workshop leaders, Dr. Laura Levitt and Dr. Oren Stier, skillfully guided our group through conversations about what makes an object “sacred” and what it means to care for such objects. They did so with deep intelligence and an even deeper generosity of spirit. Staff and affiliates of the Program on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were also gracious in sharing their time and expertise during the workshop. Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand and Julia Liden played an especially critical role in the work we accomplished as did Dr. Robert M. Ehrenreich, Jane E. Klinger, and the dozens of other Museum staff members who we met during those two weeks. I also am grateful to the other workshop participants for the rich conversations and questions that we shared. Experiences like these are a rare gift. In my work at Keene State College, I am indebted to Dr. Rodney Obien, Caitlin Dionne, Dr. Celia Rabinowitz, Dr. Dana Smith, Michele Kuiawa, and student interns such as Amarrah Gates, all of whom have been powerful conversation partners as we collectively navigate the special collection in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Additional thanks go to two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions strengthened the final version of this piece.