Holocaust memory is not merely a realm of historical information but, for many, also interwoven with perceptions of sacredness. This is especially evident in the status of witness testimonies from survivors and attempts to record the experiences of pre-war Jewish communities. The papers in this panel will explore the challenges and even dangers associated with this authority. But critical consideration will also be given to the inverse, that is, the status of perpetrator testimony, material, and ephemera in Holocaust museums and archives. What happens when the sacred, profane, and the profoundly evil are displayed together?
Holocaust survivors have long held a unique moral and cultural space in western societies, constructed by a combination of Holocaust remembrance institutions, media, policymakers, and the public, serving as both living witnesses to history and ethical figures. As their numbers decline, the reverence and authority associated with their testimony become increasingly transferred to digital forms. This paper seeks to explore the conceptualisation of Holocaust survivors as sacred or holy figures, and the challenges of preserving their moral authority in an era where direct testimony is no longer possible. By conceptualising Holocaust survivors in this way, it could be argued that eternalising their memory in digital formats reinforces their status as sacred, characterising survivors as moral exemplars in western society rather than mere historical witnesses. However, this paper critically examines the potential dangers to this sacralisation of survivors.
One way Jewish survivors of the Holocaust sought to reclaim their lives and memories was by collaboratively authoring yizker bikher, memorial books, devoted to the lives and deaths of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. There are over 1,000 of these place-based volumes, written to memorialize the hometowns of the writers and to pass collective community memory to descendants of both the victims and the survivors.
Created not as objective monographs but as portable containers of memory, yizker bikher are both books and objects, and contain text and images that work in tandem. They are comprised of rich descriptions of everyday life before the war and – only towards the very end of any given volume – individual and communal experiences during the Nazi era. Equally present in the books are hand-drawn maps, sketches, religious iconography, photographs, and documents from daily life.
Editors of, and contributors to, yizker bikher commonly asserted that the books were intended as matzeyve, gravestones. Through an examination of the narrative, visual, and material structures of the volumes, my paper considers yizker bikher as sacred objects, and explores the implications of that claim on the critical examination of the material they contain.
This presentation examines the complicated status of perpetrator materials at Holocaust museums and archival collections -- specifically, the manner in which they tend to be perceived by students, donors, and visitors as "disgraceful" or unsettling. Nazi-related materials are often described as standing in stark contrast to the sacred artifacts, documents, and photos of Holocaust survivors or victims. Drawing from research conducted at two sites (a college archive and a Holocaust museum), the author unpacks questions such as: Is there space for perpetrator materials at sites that seek to preserve the sacred memory of survivors and victims? What specific emotions and reactions do these artifacts evoke for donors, students, and others? Are efforts made at these sites to contain or limit the power of Nazi flags and other symbols of hatred? And what, if anything, might such objects teach us about the realities of war and genocide?