Packing for an unknown destination: possession and dispossession

Packing for an unknown destination: possession and dispossession in the Holocaust

Visitors to Auschwitz today cannot help but be struck by the sheer range of objects brought there by the victims of the Holocaust. Ordinary and extraordinary, these things were carefully chosen and illustrate the lives of those subject to Nazi persecution. They tell us about where they were from and also where they imagined they were going.

Exploring these possessions thus helps the historian to uncover the experience of dispossession almost in real time. Reading these objects against other forms of testimony, both visual and verbal, provokes significant methodological difficulties, but also offers the possibility of particularising and personalising an otherwise almost unimaginably enormous cataclysm in European history.

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