“My brother kept the ring and I kept the watch”: with Stolen Memory, confiscated objects tell the great story

Planted in the middle of the Jean-Jaurès alleys in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), this blue container with a red interior inevitably attracts the attention of passers-by. Some read the inscription on the central panel, “Objects of victims of Nazism”. Others, more curious, approach and discover the stories of these goods confiscated during the Second World War. Pierre, a retired history teacher, finds the exhibition system “very ingenious”. “I didn’t know this story at all, and yet I’ve read books on the Second World War! In the current period, it’s fundamental to talk about it. And an exhibition like this, made with Germans, is also a symbol of peace”, points out this biographer of the resistance fighter Raymond Naves.

Born in 2016, this traveling exhibition project started concretely in 2020. Two containers are traveling through Germany, one through Poland and a fourth has been traveling through France for a year, after being installed in several cities in Belgium. The objects they present were collected by Arolsen Archives, the largest international documentation center on the Nazi persecutions, whose resource collection is classified as a UNESCO world heritage site.

A few weeks after Cahors (Lot), Stolen Memory was officially inaugurated this Thursday, June 27 in Toulouse. For Jean-Paul Bouche, municipal councilor in charge of secularism in particular, it was logical that the Pink City, “deeply committed to the fight against discrimination and the duty of memory”, welcomed this system.

Thousands of objects recovered

Among the stories told in this exhibition is that of Braulia Cánovas Mulero, who fled the Franco regime and joined the French resistance at the age of 20. In 1943, she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück. Her daughter, Marie-Christine Jené, who attended Sciences-po Toulouse, is present for the occasion because she was able, a few years ago, to recover some of her mother’s belongings.

In the 1960s, Arolsen Archives notably obtained 5,000 envelopes containing jewelry, watches and wallets as well as train tickets. “This campaign is therefore both a way of communicating about our work, of calling on volunteers to activate research and of telling people that we can help them retrace the journey of their ancestors,” explains Theresa Nisters. , coordinator of this exhibition, who had the honor of participating last year in the restitution of property to families, including one who was unaware of the history of their Algerian ancestor buried in northern Germany.

A work of memory that is still relevant today

“This presentation in a container has a practical aspect for transport and it makes things easier for the communities that receive us,” explains the coordinator, who is also an art historian. “And then, this container inevitably evokes the wagons in which the prisoners were deported,” she adds.

“The Arolsen Archives collection is very special because it consists of personal effects confiscated by the Nazis. These confiscated goods followed the same path as the deportees. We have very few that belonged to Jews, because they were immediately sold or stolen. This concerns more political prisoners, resistance fighters, forced laborers or those detained for religious reasons or considered ‘asocial'”, explains Theresa Nisters. In a few texts, this exhibition recalls the extent of the roundups and traces, through a few objects, the scale of the work that remains to be done to return them.