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HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE 20
Artefacts hold stories—gifts from those who can no longer speak to those who will never have known them
at all. These narratives give life to an object that would otherwise be wordless. For me, three small, nowtarnished
silver spoons I found in my mother’s kitchen drawer would have had no meaning had I not known
that these were the spoons she used when she fed hot rice cereal to me in my infancy, and then, years
later, to my own baby daughter. For my husband, a small, plain, blue metal Chanukah menorah might have
been of no consequence had he not known that his mom bought it some 50 years ago in the Old City on
her very first visit to Jerusalem and loved to tell the story of her first encounter—and success!—with Middle
East bargaining.
We no longer have our mothers, but we have a few of their things, and their things tell stories that help our
mothers and their history to live on—in our hearts, and in our families.
Witnesses
and Their Possessions
Survivors, and those who did not survive, also have stories about objects—about, for instance, the things
they wore or carried with them when they were displaced and forced to move unceremoniously from city
to ghetto, from ghetto to camp, just as the woman who owned the rose brooch found at Treblinka wore or
carried that pin, precious to her.
The historian Michael Berenbaum (2006) tells us that “29 storerooms [of Jewish possessions] were
burned before the liberation of Auschwitz.” Six other storerooms remained. In them were, among other
items, “348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats . . . and even 13,964 carpets” (p. 185). These mute
possessions teach us a great deal, including the fact of the large-scale Nazi deception that made the Jews
believe that they were going to be resettled in the East.
The poet Stephen Herz (2014) illustrates this in a poem he called “Whatever You Can Carry,” reprinted here
with permission. Using Berenbaum’s statistics as an epigraph, he continues:
“You will work in the factory, work in / the fields, you will be resettled in the East,/ bring whatever you
can carry.”