Icons of Trauma

Abstract

Even though the MHM displays human remains in parts of its permanent exhibition, it refrains from showing any human remains (such as hair) in the section on the Holocaust. There is a glass case with shoes from Majdanek, however; not in a huge pile like in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, but lined up in (irregular) rows, together with a poem written by a 12-year-old Jewish girl, who was ordered to sort the shoes of the dead and was herself killed in 1944. The poem ‘survived’ because it was memorized by fellow inmates who testified after the war. It counterbalances the mute material witnesses whose careful arrangement reminds visitors of their mediated presentation which takes great care not to mimic the way the shoes were collected and stacked in the camps. Their re-collection in the museum re-individualizes the shoes, even if they stay nameless. Shoes are the closest one can get to bodily remains: the leather of the shoes behaves like a second skin and through constant wear moulds to fit its owner’s feet. This has become proverbial in expressions such as ‘to put oneself into someone’s shoes’ or ‘to step into someone’s shoes’ that is, to feel what someone else is feeling and even to take on their identity.