“When we consider criminal evidence—proof positive that terrible things happened—we often imagine their role in a courtroom. But not all evidence operates that way. Most of the tainted objects held even in police property rooms never make their way to court. In the case of the vast trove of rescued Holocaust objects held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), which have likewise never been to court, we often think about their role as empirical, historical evidence of the crimes of genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. And yet there are those intangible qualities that attract us to such objects, that draw our attention.”
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