There’s a hole in one of the socks near where the toes should be. Is that where an elderly female prisoner deliberately knitted a defect? This is the question asked by Victoria Martinez and Britta Geschwind in the latest EHRI Document Blog post.

The socks – which are part of the so called “Ravensbrück collection” at the local history museum Kulturen in Lund in southern Sweden – are an excellent example of how much can be learnt about the Holocaust based on what we can learn from an object’s materiality. By metaphorically unravelling the yarn of these socks, Martinez and Geschwind uncover the story behind them and how the innocent act of their creation worked to cunningly sabotage the Nazi war effort.

Read the EHRI Document Blogpost Unraveling “Sabotage Socks”: The Materiality of Nazi Concentration Camps in Sweden today. This research was conducted as part of the project Swedish Remembrance of the Holocaust: Museums, Materiality and Politics, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Image: The “Sabotage” drawer in the exhibition Att överleva – Röster från Ravensbrück at Kulturen in Lund, Sweden. Photo taken by Victoria Martínez in June 2024.