ABSTRACT
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, one of the most poignant displays is an exhibit of 4,000 shoes belonging to victims of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland. When the shoes first arrived at the USHMM they were delivered in body bags. This presumably accidental symbolism would prove to be a reliable portent for perceptions of the shoes as representations of their dead owners. This would come to have a dramatic effect on the treatment and display of the shoes. This chapter examines how conservation and display decisions have helped to shape viewer perceptions of these objects. I examine the way the shoes stand in for their dead owners, and how this helped to create inaccurate ideas about the causes of damage to this very particular kind of material culture.
