How the “Merely Material” Matters: Jewish Possessions during and after the Second World War

It is well-known that even those European Jews who survived the efforts to annihilate them during the Second World War were successfully deprived of their property. In some cases their businesses and belongings were seized or stolen. Others were forced to sell goods at fire-sale prices.  Some tried to safeguard valued objects by leaving them with friends or neighbors. Many who went into hiding shut the door on their homes and businesses, hoping against hope to find them intact when they returned.  Some, lucky enough to become refugees, shipped their goods, planning on recreating their abandoned dwellings in their place of refuge.  Most of those deported to camps carried at least a suitcase and the clothes on their backs.  

With war's end, surviving Jews, occupying forces, defeated governments, and neighbors faced the challenge of dealing with "borrowed" goods, businesses and dwellings, as well as boxcars filled with abandoned goods on the one hand and immiserated, homeless returnees on the other.  What was one to do with thousands of Sabbath candlesticks, kiddish cups, and channukiot, now that those who had relied on them for ritual practice were murdered or had fled? Should they be put in museums? sold? Or (after 1948) sent to Israel?  To what were those whose homes and livelihoods had been stolen from them entitled? Literal restitution? repayment in kind? Who had the right to a dwelling abandoned in 1935 and subsequently allocated to a bombed-out family? What should be done with piles of suitcases and shoes discovered in camps?

My intervention in this session addresses what we can learn about the experience of persecution, survival, and efforts to recreate "normalcy" from these processes of loss and reclamation.  Surviving objects, memoirs, photographs, and restitution documentation provide a rich photographic and textual record upon which this intervention is based.