Artifacts Close Up: Scholars Make New Discoveries by Examining Objects
At first glance, the coiled brown leather belt — scratched and worn — appears ordinary. But as a witness to history, this Holocaust artifact has an extraordinary and very personal story to tell. It is an example of “material culture” — a focus of study at the new David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center.
“ When you get to the last hole of the belt, it’s terrifying. He kept
adding holes as he got thinner and thinner. It’s an incredible record
of his starvation and should not be forgotten.” — Jane Klinger
“Material culture” is generally defined as the study of ordinary objects. But Robert M. Ehrenreich, director of the Museum’s National Academic Programs in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, said there’s more to it. “It’s about everything that’s been manipulated by people and how those things have been manipulated,” he said. Signs of use tell stories about the past. When archaeologists and anthropologists use artifacts to draw conclusions about culture, about how people lived, they are studying material culture.
“In the future, these objects are going to be the only Holocaust witnesses left,” he said. “The things that happened to them are going to show us what life was like.”
In October 2018, Ehrenreich and Jane Klinger, chief conservator for the Museum, led an academic workshop that included a day at the Shapell Center. Fourteen experts including archaeologists, anthropologists, conservators, and artists in the fields of material culture and Holocaust studies joined up to discuss how the things humans leave behind tell life stories. They also debated how material culture can help us better understand complex traumatic histories like the Holocaust.
Most importantly, Ehrenreich said, the workshop was about “trying to get people to think about what our collection contains and what we can learn from it.”
So, what can something like an old belt teach us about the Holocaust? Twenty-one-year-old Zelig Appel wore it when he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp during four cold months between January and April 1945. His frostbitten fingers struggled to hold up his ill-fitting pants. He traded two pieces of bread — two days’ worth of food — for a Soviet prisoner’s belt. Over the months, Appel slowly starved. As his waist narrowed, he used the sharpened end of a spoon to carve more holes into the belt.
“When you get to the last hole,” Klinger said, “it’s terrifying. He kept adding holes as he got thinner and thinner. It’s an incredible record of his starvation and should not be forgotten.” Appel was liberated in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1949. He later changed his name to Stanley. In 2012, his son donated the belt to the Museum. Today, the artifact is part of a vast collection of 22,000 objects at the Shapell Center, located in suburban Washington, DC.
Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University and a participant in the seminar, paid particular attention to the objects that embodied people physically, like hair or even photographs that were folded and hidden in victims’ mouths. “Such items humanize the people who experienced the Holocaust and reveal subtle details connected to their experiences that would likely not be available from other sources,” said Sturdy Colls, whose work focuses on the Holocaust. “They also show how peoples’ bodies were exploited by the perpetrators and how they were a means of resistance by those who were persecuted.”
She says material culture can also be a symbol of hope and strength. During the seminar, a small floral brooch made of cloth and metal caught the attention of Koji Lau-Ozawa, another participant at the seminar and a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. His work focuses on materials associated with Japanese American incarceration. “To me, the brooch signified several different things — the connections and relations between people in extreme environments like the Holocaust, the desire to have beautiful objects, the resourcefulness of the creators, and economies
of exchange. The story of the object was captivating, as was the potential to learn more through a close analysis.”
Donated to the Museum in 1990, the brooch was handmade with found materials by a Warsaw girl held at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Two other children in the camp, along with their father, traded the young artist a piece of bread for the brooch to give as a birthday gift to their American mother. “The mother could have left, but stayed with her family,” Ehrenreich said, noting that letting the artifacts “speak” for themselves serves as a reminder to keep asking questions about what these artifacts can tell us about history. While it’s not known what happened to the young artist, the family who traded for her brooch survived and immigrated to the United States in 1947. “The brooch shows how people were trying to hold on to their humanity and keep their families together.”
