This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction, objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily belong.
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
noted the cabinet’s unacceptable unilateral decision to bury the skulls at the Heroes Acre without consent and consultation with the Nama and Ovaherero traditional leaders. The memorandum also contained the following recommendations: instead of burying such vital material evidence where no one will see them, the skulls should be kept in a special chamber within the Independence Memorial Museum for restoration and posterity; statistical data about the skulls should include the victim’s identity (in terms of Namas, Ovaherero or whoever else), the number of men, women or
brought to the idea of the Holocaust’s omnipresence with regard to memory models. Listen to the audio podcast ‘Uncovering the evidence’, in Voices on Genocide Prevention (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009). It is not possible here to describe in more detail the importance of the voluminous report (700 pages long) published following this investigation. It nonetheless constituted the main piece of evidence used in the trial of Clément Kayishema. O. Adede, ‘Statement of the registrar of the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, Ictr
1941 god.: Knjiga 1, Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda, vol. 4 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski Institut Jugoslovenske Armije, 1951). See also Arthur Häffner to DGiA, 23 June 1941, BA-MA, RH 31 III/13, p. 10. 7 Interview with Miloš Despot from Bijeljina, US Holocaust Memorial Museum (henceforth USHMM) Archives RG-50.468/10, Tape 1. See also P. Broucek (ed.), Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General in Kroatien und Zeuge des Untergangs des ‘Tausendjährigen Reiches’. Ein General im Zwielicht. Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (Vienna
Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 13 A kommando was, in the vocabulary of concentration camps, a ‘subcamp’ that was an offspring of a larger camp. 14 See, for example, the case of Echterdingen, a kommando of StruthofNatzwiller, who was located on the German bank of the Rhine. J.-M. Dreyfus, ‘Echterdingen’, in G. Megargee (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 1027–8, at p. 1027. The bodies were buried in the forest near the kommando
application T 58240 Kl. 24 for a ‘Kontinuierliche arbeitender Leichen-Verbrennungsofen für Massenbetrieb’, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim, ms. BW 30/44. The collections of the Osobyi Archive are now part of the Russian State Military Archive. Significant parts, including the interrogations of Sander and other Topf engineers, are available in microfilm at the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 122. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust
agreement was reached between the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Polish government, obliging the Polish side to redesign the memorial landscape at Bełzec. Soon thereafter, a closed national competition was announced. The winning project, by Polish sculptors Andrzej Sołyga, Zdzisław Pidek and Marcin Roszczyk, was unveiled in the summer of 2004 in the presence of high-ranking officials from Poland, Israel and the United States, Jewish religious authorities from Poland and abroad, and the Holocaust survivors. The radical, if not somewhat paradoxical
Serbian thinking. Sadly, there is little consensus on the total number of dead, or, indeed, what percentage of the victims were Serbs. Historians, using a variety of statistics, often arrived at startling different figures: Denitch less than 100,000; Vulliamy around 600,000; Štitkovac ‘hundreds of thousands’; Dragnich: total in NDH 500,000–700,000; Hall 750,000; Glenny 200,000; Ridley 330,000; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (300,000–400,000).2 This extreme range of estimates may have resulted from a confusion between the number of dead at Jasenovac and
: Left Coast Press, 2009). 7 J. Hunter, B. Simpson and C. Sturdy Colls, Forensic Approaches to Buried Remains (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013). 8 Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies. 9 A. Kondoyanidi, ‘The liberating experience: war correspondents, Red Army soldiers, and the Nazi extermination camps’, The Russian Review, 69:3 (2010), 438–62. 10 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM LIB6492; University of South Florida, 2005, Photos: Germans Confront Nazi Atrocities. http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/confront.htm URL: (accessed 20