In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bozena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects羅pots, eyeglasses, shoes,
clothing, kitchen utensils羅tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish
and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Wiadyslaw Szlengel, Zofia
Nalkowska, Czeslaw Milosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical
approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of
that time.
