Memoria [EN] No. 13 (10/2018) | Page 27

Particularly striking is the amalgam of half-melted cutlery. The cutlery was melted as the result of burning of 'Kanada' barracks during the SS evacuation of the camp. This amalgam of metal and more than 40 elements of cutlery have been preserved by departments of the ABSM to display the same deformations and evidence of fire, although the metal has been stabilized.

Another relevant group of objects of the deportation period are the letters, some of them thrown from the trains that led to the different camps. These testimony documents have been conserved, among others, by the Camp Westerbork Museum in the Netherlands, and present a good state of conservation in both the paper and inks.

B. Objects – witnesses of survival in the camp

Some of these objects were hidden by their owners, and were carried with them, witnessing their tragic stay in the camp. These type of elements are usually kept by survivors' relatives in a private context, and in some cases donated to museums. This was the case, for example, with the blanket of Siegfried Fedrid, used in a death march to shelter a group of people, on loan from the Holocaust Center for Humanity of Seattle (United States).