Intimate Dispossession: Clothes, Corporal Practices of Plunder, and its Consequences during and in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

The plunder of Jewish personal belongings during, and in the aftermath of, the Holocaust was the most widespread, democratic, but also the most tabooed aspect of genocidal dispossession. Yet, while historical research has given a good deal of attention to the top-down and centralized Nazi state’s takeover of Jewish financial assets, real estate, businesses, or art objects, the history of mundane items of everyday use, stolen from Jewish households, and utilized for decades after the war’s end in many homes of East-Central Europe, remains little known. This article reconstructs the modalities of intimate dispossession, listing the conditions in which Jewish clothes would be appropriated by non-Jews. Secondly, it addresses the consequences of despoliation for Jewish victims, focusing in particular on the gendered aspects. Finally, it looks at the corporeal practices of appropriation among the beneficiaries, investigating the strategies of domesticating Jewish clothes, as well as the unwritten rules of despoliation, and the boundaries of social taboo. Based on survivors’ testimonies, files of post-war trials of Nazi-collaborators, interviews with Holocaust survivors and inhabitants of former shtetls in eastern Poland and western Belarus, this article attempts a microhistory of this most intimate form of genocidal dispossession as an embodied dimension of violence.