Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

5. “We Are the Last Witnesses”: Artifact, Aura, and Authenticity

119 5 • “WE ARE THE LAST WITNESSES” Artifact, Aura, and Authenticity Flying Spice Box, an oil painting by Israeli artist Yosl Bergner (1966), depicts an ornate spice box hovering against an ominously dark sky. Beneath the spice box lies a dusky, low-hanging sun and ruined landscape with a border of crumbling stone walls. The spice box plays a special role in the Havdalah ceremony that marks the end of Shabbat and transitions its participants back into ordinary time. As part of this ceremony, a sweetsmelling spice—often stored in a special spice box—is passed around the table so that each person can share in its scent. The elaborately carved spice box in Bergner’s painting represents Jewish custom and, by extension, the Jewish family who used this box in its weekly Shabbat ritual. Here, the spice box appears in flight—fleeing ravaged, war-torn Europe and searching for a new home and future—and suggesting, as Ziva Amishai-Maisels notes, an “‘inanimate’ rendering of the Wandering Jew as a survivor.”1 Many artists depicting the Holocaust draw on relics and objects—above all, on objects of a personal or ritual nature—to anthropomorphically symbolize Jewish victims. Joseph Richter’s pencil drawing The Lublin Railway Station (1943), for example, portrays a brief stretch of train track that separates vaguely heaped-up, unmarked mounds (most likely impromptu graves) from discarded possessions that lie about on the ground, including prayer shawls (tallits), a child’s doll, crutches, Torah scrolls, and caps. The possessions refer metonymically to their absent owners—victims of 120 Holocaust Memory Reframed the latest round of deportations—and, at the same time, to their mortal remains. Whether it is through a single, valued object like a spice box or through a heap of possessions plundered from Holocaust victims, many artists and curators rely on objects to represent missing Jewish figures. This chapter focuses on the roles that artifacts play in museum exhibits and on a single type of vision called “witnessing vision”—a way of seeing that responds to authentic artifacts within displays that are presented as witnesses to atrocities. Philosopher Giambattista Vico argues that objects are “manifest testimony” and carry greater authority than mere texts or mimetic representations .2 Objects act as witnesses and bear testimony in the sense that they testify to the time and place whence they came. They belong to a different world, and thanks to their authentic presence, or “aura,” we can come closer to that distant, vanished world through them. Paul Williams suggests that by presenting authentic artifacts as witnesses to atrocities, museums “humanize” the artifacts within a “rhetorical strategy ” of exhibition and, in a sense, grant them their own “lives.” The idea that an artifact may act as a witness suggests a nebulous or even mystical view of objects in museum settings. As David Freedberg argues, however, there is nothing “vague, mystical, or unanalytic” about the aura of an image (or, in this case, an artifact); rather, the “aura is that which liberates response from the exigencies of convention.”3 In other words, the aura of an artifact does not exist without the individual who perceives it and who experiences, in response, something meaningful—the aura emerges in this way from real, concrete conditions of presentation and spectatorship and is neither magical nor mysterious. Authentic artifacts, like those on display in the USHMM’s permanent exhibition, are physical remnants of a distant time and place. Within the museum context, artifacts usually fall into one of the following three categories : objects that are “particularly rare or revelatory,” objects that exhibit typicality and therefore “represent a category of experience,” and objects that possess remarkable provenance.4 In memorial museums, however, artifacts often belong to more than one category. They may, like eyeglasses and toothbrushes, exhibit typicality but simultaneously possess a remarkable history by virtue of having belonged to Holocaust victims imprisoned in a notorious concentration camp or ghetto. Discovered at the actual sites where key events of the Holocaust took place, such as the Warsaw Ghetto or “We Are the Last Witnesses” 121 the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, otherwise quotidian objects like bowls or spoons acquire an aura of fatefulness because they seem to bear the very traces of the Holocaust itself; they possess, in short, a unique and powerful presence. Through their genuineness or authenticity, they claim to bridge the geographic and temporal distance between contemporary museum visitors and the...