Olga's Blanket: Trauma, memory and witnessing women in the Sydney Jewish museum

Abstract

This article analyses the gendered significance of a small blanket made from human hair which was donated to the Sydney Jewish Museum by a Holocaust survivor, Olga Horak. It forms part of the museum's Holocaust exhibition where Olga works as a volunteer guide. The blanket represents a testimonial object that carries in its fabric the personal stories of women's witnessing and suffering of events of the Holocaust. This article gives a brief overview of how the Sydney Jewish Museum provides memorial and historical context to the blanket as an authentic artefact and introduces Olga Horak as an embodied witness. The museum is an already gendered space within which Olga and her personal connections with the blanket contribute to the exhibition's narrative about events of the Holocaust. The article then discusses how, in the museum context and also drawing on Olga's written testimony, the blanket is inextricably linked to traumatic past events. Olga bears witness to her own experiences of trauma and suffering and to those of other women as they intersect at a particular historical moment with the blanket's 'biography.' It has also become a significant bearer of collective memory of women's experiences of Auschwitz which are literally and metaphorically woven into it. This fragment of material memory brings the past into the present, enabling gendered explorations of Holocaust memory, through Olga's story and that of the blanket. Show more