Reclaiming Plundered Lives: Intimate Dispossession and Its Aftermath

• In Event: Responses of Eastern European Holocaust Survivors to Liberation, 1944/1945

Abstract

Most of the things stolen from Jews during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust were everyday household objects and personal items: shoes, clothes, furniture, pots and pans, bedlinen, and cutlery. This paper concentrates on the most intimate aspect of this process, the plunder of Jewish clothes—which in most cases remained in the local communities of Eastern Europe and continued to circulate on the local markets. How did Jewish survivors managed to rebuild their lives, facing neighbors complicit in their despoliation and how they reacted to seeing their personal possessions in the hands of the Others?

Author

• Magdalena Waligorska, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)