Objects and Memory
"I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction"…Adolph Eichmann.
In measured inexorability Jews lost their civil rights, means of employment, and their homes. Their businesses and farms were aryanized, insurance and bank accounts were liquidated. Property, possessions, valuables, and all things presupposed that contributed to a sense of identity and connected them to a culture, a social network, a religion, a family, and friends were confiscated or terminated, including schools and universities; civic, professional, and religious organizations; and synagogues. Expropriation, legal and rudely efficient, occurred both in the early stages of the persecution of Jews as part of “voluntary” aryanization (i.e., before it became involuntary); during forced relocation to ghettos; and in the death camps. Six million Jews were murdered in shtetls, town squares, villages, forests, ravines, marshes, trucks with carbon monoxide gas, ghettos, and death camps wherein their bodies were violated and harvested: hair for pillows, gold teeth to be melted down, clothes for cold German winters, wedding rings and shoes and eyeglasses sent back to the Reich or auctioned. Former neighbors descended upon their homes looking for gold or treasure buried behind walls, hidden in nooks and crannies, or in root cellars. In the fullness of time objects became, in the words of Bozena Shallcross, “post-Jewish,” stripped of their cultural identity. [See 2023.1.3a-c]
Objects embodied
A relatively recent area of research in Holocaust studies, “material culture” is concerned with the meaning of objects possessed and valued by their owners. Like the owners themselves, objects are embedded in specific historical contexts, and are subject to change with the social and psychological dislocations consequent to war and displacement. People are more reliant on objects during such times and readily form strong affective attachments to them to such an extent that objects can have their own stories to tell. Such objects are therefore an important prism into an understanding of the traumatic history of the Holocaust. Things valued and carried with us can take on a life of their own precisely because they are extensions of our lives and intimately connected with our action in the world. Philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Bachelard reject a rationalistic understanding of objects as disengaged from us in a Cartesian dualistic universe, but rather understand them as embodied or “inhabited,” i.e., inherently human, and already bearing meaning. Our underlying human relationship to things is one of action and feeling before it is conceptual. Ontologically speaking, Heidegger would refer to this inseparability as being-in-the-world.
The Kindertransports which rescued children from Nazi-occupied Europe - unaccompanied by their parents or family members - provide numerous examples of the historical transformation of objects. A doll, a toy, even a towel might function developmentally as a “transitional object,” providing a sensory link to absent parents and helping a child to emotionally integrate the terrifying experience of displacement, loss, and feelings of abandonment. Parents themselves could not help but telegraph their own mounting apprehension and panic, not knowing what would happen to their children and dreading that they were making the wrong decision [see: 2014.1.43, 2014.1.45, 2022.1.41]. These very objects could acquire for many children a life of their own with the changing circumstances of the child’s life. Many objects carried by children such as teddy bears have been donated to Holocaust museums and have their own stories to tell. For example, one teddy bear on display at Yad Vashem accompanied a child, Stella Knobel, whose family fled Poland and travelled through the Soviet Union and Iran before arriving safely in Palestine. “He was like family. He was all I had. He knew all my secrets” this now elderly woman, a widow, would say: “I worried what would happen to him when I died.” Her relationship with her teddy bear clearly changed throughout her life, acquiring new meaning through changing contexts, but was always a reliable source of emotional ballast that helped her integrate her experience - especially during times of strife when her family’s life was under threat. Ms. Knobel donated “Misiu,” now a little worse for the wear - missing an eye, stuffing exposed, but sporting a red ribbon - to Yad Vashem’s “Gathering the Fragments” exhibit, knowing he would be cared for and that others might learn Misiu’s value to her.
The teddy bear appearing on the Israeli Holocaust stamp of 2003 [see 2012.1.138] commemorates the 1.5 million children murdered by the German Nazi regime, but as well the six million murdered Jews whose lives and names were stolen by the Nazis. The quotation from Isaiah 56:5 has God making a promise: I will give them, in My House and within My Walls a monument and an everlasting name …which shall not perish. The Nazis wanted to erase the Jews and any memory that adhered to them. The Talmud reminds us that a person is forgotten only when their name is forgotten, when no one is left to carry their name after death, i.e., to tell their story. For some children, teddy bears and other treasured objects helped carry the story through dislocation, loss, and renewal.
In her important meditation on the work of six Polish poets of the WWII era who wrote about the fate of material objects in German-occupied Poland, Bozena Shallcross describes how ordinary material objects - shoes, clothing, eyeglasses, and candelabra, for example - can serve as metonyms for the Holocaust. She concludes that “…the nature of this genocide is representable…and occurs more vividly when the Holocaust experience is evoked through ordinary objects.”
Survivors themselves held tight to whatever small items they could carry that held sentimental value, connective tissue to the cultural and familial world they had lost [see 2012.1.55, 2021.1.13, 2014.1.435, 2014.1.295, 2014.1.106].
Circumstances were such that Jews assumed great risk holding any objects, even small ones. Some objects held during the war would help maintain a sense of identity or serve as a form of spiritual resistance or proof of Nazi crimes. Jakob Machat proudly displayed his Buchenwald prisoner’s uniform after the war, at this time living in Jerusalem [see 2012.1.505]. Gertrude Katzenstein changed her name upon emigrating to America after Kristallnacht, but held on to her black dress with the Star of David [see 2012.1.566]. The plaque from the Berlin synagogue clearly held spiritual significance to whomever risked his life rescuing it from further assault by the Nazis during Kristallnacht. Transported to Jerusalem, the plaque would live another life [see 2019.2.356]. Many prisoners held on to their Stars of David or armbands as a point of pride, as well as proof of Nazi persecution of Jews. The author René Lambrechts was just happy he made it through the concentration camp ordeal - clearly dispirited and in great physical pain - but on the back of this photograph he sent a message to his friend and fellow “Muselmann” Jos Veerman - “my brother from the hell of hate and murder” [see 2019.2.103]. For the lucky emigrés who were able to escape Nazi-occupied Europe or go into hiding like George Zwirz [see 2021.1.108], it was critical to hold their documents and even join international groups of refugees saved by a particular diplomat who risked his life to save theirs. These documents were often handed down through the family [see 2022.1.58, 2021.1.118, 2014.1.478]. In many instances however, it would be difficult to know an object’s history and personal meaning.
The Iconography of the Shoes
A palpable hush descends upon visitors at the exhibit of shoes at Holocaust memorial museums. The shoes have been described as leaving a more profound impression on visitors than any other exhibit. Holocaust historian Oren Baruch Stier’s description of the symbolic power of certain objects as “icons” would seem to apply to the shoes, acting as a metonym and point of entry for “engaging” with the enormity of the Holocaust itself. Here the curatorial focus is placed less on an intellectual understanding of the Holocaust mediated through text than on an emotional connection through iconic artifacts.
What remains of the agglomeration of shoes may be the gender, and possibly the age and social status of the owners, but we know nothing else of the shoes’ wearers. Katherine Boyle’s August 24, 2012, article in the Washington Post acknowledges that visitors to the USHMM often approach this exhibit with the reverence typically accorded sacred objects, a response that seemed somewhat puzzling to staff she interviewed. One curator stated, however, that the shoe exhibit “shows the magnitude of Nazi murder through something so deeply personal.” Icons are symbols and can accrue multiple meanings and evolving interpretations, and while there is a decided focus here on the depths of Nazi German depravity in the murder of six million European Jews, and the obliteration of whole communities and ways of life that thrived in Europe for over two thousand years, this depravity extends as well to the economics of plunder of Jewish objects.
These shoes were the last material remains of martyred Jews, the last objects in touch with the bodies of those murdered in gas chambers, crowded into undressing rooms having been assured they would be taking showers. We do not know who wore these shoes. Unlike teddy bears, there is no imbuing these shoes with agency, they do not acquire an individual life of their own. They only exist to the extent that we enter this hall. Here we confront a void, the sense of profound emptiness that this exhibit induces, the ghosts that it evokes of incomplete lives stolen mercilessly that still inhabit the sepulchral space of this room. We do not see these absent children and wives and grandparents, but they are always present and no more so than when we enter this hall. This absence is a presence which we cannot ignore or bury in narrative explanation. Boyle’s article suggests that visitors seem to tacitly understand as they clutch their ID cards ever so tightly. Or perhaps hold their own children a little closer.
Yad Vashem. Bearing Witness – Stories Behind the Artifacts in the Yad Vashem Museum Collection. 2022.
Oren Baruch Stier. Holocaust Icons. Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Katherine Boyle. Washington Post, August 24, 2012.
Bozena Shallcross. The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture. Indiana University Press, 2011.
--Michael D. Bulmash, K1966
Browse the Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection.
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Young Refugee with Doll
2014.1.45
Front: An image of a girl with glasses, beret, doll, and satchel standing with her parents.Back: Typewritten and handwritten information about the image.Additional Information: "Refugee girl arriving with her parents in Canada from Germany in 1938.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Information on wire photo from Acme Newspictures Inc. verso: Young Jewish refugee arriving with her parents in Montreal, Canada, from Germany in November, 1938.
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Helga Kreiner of First Kindertransport Arrives in Harwich, England
2014.1.43
Front: An image of a girl in an overcoat clutching a doll. Back: Typewritten information about the image.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Helga Kreiner is pictured having arrived in Harwich, England, a member of the first Kindertransport of refugee children escaping the Nazi menace against Jews in Germany. Clutching her doll to her chest, holding her bag by her side, she stands anxiously awaiting her future in a foreign land without her parents whose own fate she could not know.
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ID Issued to Ten-Year-Old Member of the Kindertransport Helga Beck from Vienna, Austria for Admission to Harwich, UK
2022.1.41
recto : photograph is lower right corner with raised stamp at lower right corner; ‘5218’ printed at top right corner; verso: green and blue dated handstamps from Exeter and Harwich.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Helga Beck’s identification card accompanied her on her journey from Vienna to England in 1939. Helga’s journey to the UK with the Kindertransport occurred six months after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Austria. The information on the card is as follows: Recto: “THIS DOCUMENT REQUIRES NO VISA” - in other words, it serves as passport and visa for purposes of the Kindertransport to England. It provides her name, sex, place of birth, and names and place of residence of her parents: Vienna, Austria. Verso: two hand-stamped seals: Exeter City Police, 3 November 1945 with alien registration number. Also included: permission to land in Harwich 15 May 1939, an accompanying photo of Helga, and the stamp of passport control. Her number at top right: 5218.
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"Angaben über die Wohnung" (An Apartment is Entjudet) Referring to Jewish Removal from Apartment
2012.1.55
Brown half-sheet filled with printed charts and typewritten and handwritten information titled, "Angaben über die Wohnung."
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Document attesting to the fact that a Jewish family had been cleared from their apartment. The home is now "entjudet," meaning that it has been cleared of Jews and their belongings. Jewish homes would routinely be confiscated by the Nazis and given to a German family or used by the military. The Jewish inhabitants would be removed to ghettos or deported to concentration camps. The concept "entjudet" went through a semantic evolution, the term becoming increasingly more sinister under the Nazi regime. It referred to removal of Jews from professional and economic institutions, removing Jewish influence, taking over Jewish firms and property, and finally deportation and murder. "Entjudet" no longer appears in modern German usage.
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Spanish Vice-Consul in Thessaloniki, Greece, Solomon Ezrati Signed Attestation of Citizenship for Mentech Saltiel, Sephardi Jew in Thessaloniki During German Occupation
2022.1.58
Page with photograph stapled in top right corner, purple handstamp on bottom half of photograph, typewritten 'Bestatigung' underlined at center.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Document on Spanish Consulate in Thessaloniki letterhead during the German occupation confirming Mentech Saltiel’s address and that he is a Spanish subject. It is dated June 29, 1941, just two months after the occupation, and signed by Solomon Ezrati. Ezrati served as a Vice-Consul at the Spanish consulate in Thessaloniki, Greece. He worked closely with Consul General Romero Radigales helping save Sephardi Jews and was acknowledged as such by Yad Vashem. Jewish himself, Ezrati was arrested along with other Spanish nationals and deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He survived the war.
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Heydrich Document on Jewish Assets
2014.1.295
Off-white paper with smudged typewritten German text. Several stamps included a grid with 'Datum:' at top; a brown retangular fastener at left.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer, at this time in 1941 the "Reichsprotektor" in Bohemia and Moravia, wrote this directive for the Nazi Reichsbank, which dealt with the assets of Jewish individuals, businesses and organizations and the deadlines that they had to meet to keep at least a part of their wealth. This directive references the German laws in effect as well as punishments Jews were to face for not meeting these deadlines. In the end all Jewish assets were seized anyway.
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Aftermath of Deportation: Three Photographs from German Soldier’s Album
2023.1.3a-c
a) baskets of belongings b) piles of belongings with German soldiers in the background c) men and women surrounding belongings
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Once Jews were sent to ghettos or deported to concentration camps, their dwellings would be rendered “entjudet” (free of Jews). Their homes would often be confiscated for use by a German family or by the military. Their belongings would be expropriated, pored over by former neighbors for personal use, or auctioned. Valuables were sent to Berlin.
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Notice of Confiscation of Jewish Property
2014.1.435
Form with 'Verfügung über Einziehung" printed at top.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Due to the inability to find Malka Klein, owner of the property in question, it is being forfeited to the Reich. It would be difficult for Malka Klein to contest this action as the ghetto in Ropczyc had been liquidated.
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Gestapo Seizure of Jewish Property in Austria Document Signed by Dr. Karl Ebner
2021.1.13
Signed and stamped document from the “Geheime Staatspolizei” with the serial code “0-5-4210 Q0547” in the bottom left corner.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Document from Gestapo main office in Vienna, May 5, 1943 sent by Dr. Karl Ebner who was head of the Gestapo in Vienna, to a Willy Dwroak, also in Vienna, regarding the seizure of the goods of a Jew named Theodor Israel Ehrenstein. The document states that according to the law of 18 November 1938, Mr. Ehrenstein’s estate has been confiscated or retained by the government. Ebner also reports that “Vugesta,” the Gestapo office for disposing of the property, has seized it and is entrusted with its management.
The background of this document is the increasing pace of aryanization and the confiscation of Jewish property in both Germany and Austria - now part of Greater Germany after the Anschluss - and Kristallnacht of November 9 and 10, 1938. The specific ordinance referenced by Ebner is the “Ordinance on the Seizure of Assets of Enemies of the People and the State in Austria.” This is an example of the seizure of Jewish property carried out by the Nazi authorities during the Third Reich. Vugesta had been in operation since 1940 in order to aryanize Jewish property and use it for the “citizens” of Austria. By the date of Ebner’s document, most of Vugesta’s role consisted in disposing of the residential property of deported Jews, utilizing forced labor to remove the property from their homes. The property thus sold would add to the revenue of the Third Reich. Mr. Ehrenstein, with the required “Israel” middle name to identify him as a Jew, was in fact deported to Theresienstadt in October 1942. He would have been in his 70s and probably perished there.
Ebner himself had probably worked closely with Adolf Eichmann who, as head of the department of Jewish affairs, was sent to Vienna after the Anschluss to “encourage” Jews to “emigrate.”
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Hungarian Schutz-Pass for Eva Lederer with Swedish Diplomat and Ambassador Carl Ivan Danielsson Signature and Raoul Wallenberg Initials
2014.1.478
Front: Pass is divided up into 4 yellow boxes. Three yellow crowns rest in the middle. Identification photo in upper right corner. Purple hand stamp on bottom
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Danielsson worked with Wallenberg at the Swedish Legation in Budapest and was instrumental in helping save Jews from deportation to Auschwitz.
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Letter of Exemption signed by Wallenberg
2021.1.118
Collage of Raoul Wallenberg letter, photograph and plaque.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
A Letter of Exemption signed by Raoul Wallenberg issued August 24, 1944, designed to protect the daughter of a Hungarian art collector by identifying her as a Swedish subject thereby exempting her from wearing the yellow star and ultimately safeguarding her from deportation and murder in the Nazi death camps. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from extermination during WWII, would be recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. He would be recognized as well as the 13th Honorary Citizen of the United States.
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Belgian Author René Lambrechts (1923-1981) Photograph with Written Statement to Friend
2019.2.103
Photo of man with glasses wearing striped concentration camp hat and shirt labelled with "82221." Back of photo signed "René Lambrechts" near bottom.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
René Lambrechts was a Belgian author and hymnist. During WWII, he had been a liaison officer in the Belgian resistance. Arrested in November 1943, he spent the remainder of the war in various concentration camps, including the infamous Dora-Mittelbau near Nordhausen, where he was severely injured.
After the war Lambrechts wrote Wir Muselmanner about his experiences in captivity. “Muselmanner” is a derogation of Moslems, but in the vernacular of the concentration camps it refers to the walking dead, those prisoners who, dispirited and in increasingly poor physical health give up all hope for survival. Lambrechts also devoted himself to ethnography and hymnology, publishing collections of folk tales and hymns. He co-founded the museum Die Swane and became its first conservator.
In the photograph, Lambrechts is wearing his concentration camp garments. Verso is text written to his friend and fellow prisoner Jos Veerman, an inmate from concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau and political prisoner from Gross Strehlitz. Lambrechts writes: To Jos Veerman, my brother from the hell of hate and murder. As a remembrance of our Musselman-ship. Rene Lambrechts 12 December 1946.
[Related item: 2019.2.104]
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Two Belgium Boys, Once Refugees From the Nazis
2021.1.108
Newspaper article with black and white photograph.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Memphis Press-Scimitar article on the reunion of George Zwirz with Belgian friend Jackie Girard. George is currently a CBC student, preparing for citizenship in the United States and living with Attorney Abe Waldauer in Memphis. After the German occupation of Belgium in 1940, both boys found themselves attempting to hide from the ubiquitous patrols, George finding shelter with Father Joseph André, and Jackie with a farm family near the Netherlands. Jackie’s sister and her husband--newlyweds--had been deported and ultimately murdered in a concentration camp. After the war Jackie stayed with Father André, where he met George and the two became friends. Once again, Davis and Waldauer worked to get a visa for Jackie to come to the United States. As Clark Forteous of the Press-Scimitar staff described it: "It was through the efforts of a Catholic priest in Belgium, a Protestant congressman and a Jewish lawyer that both boys have been brought to the land of their dreams -- the United States.”
[Related items: 2021.1.93-.112f]
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First Day Cover: Commemorating Holocaust Martyrs with Quote from Isaiah 56.5
2012.1.138
White envelope with postage stamp of a teddy bear with Star of David Patch.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Israeli First Day Cover commemorating Holocaust martyrs with a quote from Isaiah 56.5: "I will give them, in My House and within My Walls, a monument and a name... which shall not perish."
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Exhibit of Shoes at Auschwitz
2023.1.2
Photograph of the exhibit of shoes taken by Christine Bulmash at Auschwitz in 2014.
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Transfer of Farm Property to True Germans Document
2014.1.106
Front: White paper with printed black writing and lines. Includes written information and several purple hand stamps.Back: Includes several stamps and a purple signature.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Probate court ensures only true Germans own farms. Legal folio, Cologne August 8, 1942, an 'Anerbengerichts' or inheritance court document approving the transfer of a farm to another party. The 'Anerben' laws were specifically established by the Nazis to ensure that German farms would be sold, inherited, or otherwise transferred only to those with pure German blood and that they would not be split up. The law actually saw farms as the "wellspring of German Blood" in fulfillment of Himmler's dream.
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Jakob Machat
2012.1.505
A black and white photograph of a man in a concentration camp uniform.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Original photo of Jakob Machat taken in Palestine, dressed in his own concentration camp prisoner's uniform. This young man later served as a pilot in the IDF Air Force.
[Related item: 2012.1.506]
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Dress with German Star of David
2012.1.566
A black dress with an attached yellow Star of David patch with the word 'Jude' written on it.
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Dress with German Star of David and “Jude,” owned by Gertrude Katzenstein (Gerdy Kaston).
[Items relating to Gertrude Katzenstein: 2012.1.38ab, 2012.1.39, 2012.1.40, 2012.1.94, 2012.1.95ab, 2012.1.566]
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Cast Metal Plaque, Rescued from Berlin's Fasanenstrasse Synagogue During Kristallnacht
2019.2.356
Metal plaque with scene of men seated at table
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue was Berlin’s liberal Synagogue and the largest Synagogue in Berlin. It was opened in 1912, and during its years of operation had been for a time the spiritual home to Rabbi Leo Baeck. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, along with many other synagogues in Germany and Austria, the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue had been set on fire - under Joseph Goebbels orders - and destroyed by SA thugs. This plaque, depicting a Seder scene with a group of Rabbis - probably influenced by a painting by the 19th century artist Moritz Oppenheim - had been damaged in the ensuing destruction of the synagogue. However, someone, perhaps a congregant, had been able to rescue the bullet-damaged plaque and carry it out of Germany to Jerusalem.