![]() The conference objective was to consider “the meanings of material objects that have been tempered by trauma.” As the key terms “survivor object” and “trauma” were not fully delineated by the organizers, and, as most of the participants were historians of material culture for whom the concept of “survivor object” is broadly defined, the speakers varied widely in their approach. In November 2014, the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware held a symposium on “Survivor Objects: The Material Culture of Memory”. Such objects as clandestine testimonies, personal items, and photographs speak of the life and final actions of the victims and help us both return their humanity and frame the events in a personal manner. For this reason it is important to explore the relationship between what little is found in or near mass graves and what may be considered a form of self-burial through the voluntary disposal of highly prized items before being murdered. Thus, in the absence of personal possessions in mass graves, evidence of the identity and lives of the victims must be sought elsewhere: hidden in walls, under floor boards, buried in the ground, or thrown away in a desperate attempt to keep such items from falling into the hands of their killers. ![]() ![]() How can such graves be carriers of knowledge of the victims when they were made to strip naked and remove all valuables before execution? Can one truly refer to a grave when bodies were burnt after death and the ashes intermingled and dumped in rivers and ponds, or spread in fields? What stories can these ashes and naked bones tell? Such dark questions can, at times, be answered – or at least partly conveyed – by the victims themselves, many of whom anticipated their fate. Yet, often, the material traces of victims of the Holocaust are absent. Since then, they have found more than 4,250 artifacts, many from 19, that included bullets, shell casings and charred wood that was likely used to burn the bodies.Much can be ascertained from objects found in mass graves, from the identity of the victims to their social status, to even what they valued. Metal-detector surveys also revealed many artifacts, which led the researchers to excavate eight of the trenches. Later, the trenches were backfilled with soil."Īt the trench site, the team performed surveys on the soil underground with ground-penetrating radar, electromagnetic field analysis and electrical resistivity, and found many anomalies hidden in the soil underground. "The victims fell into the trenches or their bodies were thrown there by the perpetrators. "Executions took place at the trenches," they wrote in the study. But just a few months later, the Nazis used these trenches to hide the bodies of their victims, the researchers said. The lidar work revealed trenches that the Polish army had dug in 1939 in anticipation of a war with the Third Reich. To investigate, Kobiałka and his colleagues used noninvasive techniques to study the area, including with lidar (light detection and ranging), which uses lasers shot from an aircraft flying overhead to map the topography of the ground. ![]() "It was commonly known that not all mass graves from 1939 were found and exhumed, and the grave of those killed in 1945 was not exhumed either," study lead author Dawid Kobiałka, an archaeologist and cultural anthropologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. But it was evident from the exhumation reports and the witness' testimony that there were more burials to be found, the researchers said. After the war, in 1945, exhumations at that spot in Death Valley unearthed the remains of 168 people.
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