Autograph albums as Holocaust objects: hapticity, futurity, trauma

Within the growing scholarship on creative production inside sites of persecution during the Holocaust, researchers have studied autograph albums to a much lesser extent than diaries and other writing. This article presents three autograph albums that Jewish girls and young women carried with them on their journeys through ghettos and camps, and in hiding. The prewar autograph album genre required owners to circulate these small books to friends and acquaintances to solicit whimsical verse, well wishes for the future, or slogans for moral improvement. This article foregrounds the importance of inscribers physically handling the albums, as well as the role of genre, to argue that autograph albums are best considered objects rather than texts. Scholars have much to gain by considering the materiality of these sources to understand the experiences of girls and women in the Holocaust.