Handling Artifacts Not Built to Last
By RITA REIF

Published: January 5, 2004


WASHINGTON — Conservators at historical museums face a painful dilemma. They
must try to achieve a reasonable reality in the preservation of artifacts
that were not built to last. Too much, and there is fakery. Too little, and
objects fall apart.

Many conservators no longer restore objects to approximate their original
condition as fine arts museums do, preferring instead to maintain the way
they looked when acquired. The aim is to extend their life while retaining
the evidence of what made them important, even if it means presenting
tattered artifacts with blood stains, bullet holes and burnt edges. Now new
techniques and a new emphasis on less varnished truth in history museums are
transforming the staid exhibitions of the past.

At the Museum of the American Indian here, Susan Heald, the chief
conservator, said she and her colleagues used mostly plastics and and other
synthetics to stabilize objects in new subtle ways so that a repair can be
seen on close examination. They fix breaks in wicker baskets and quill work
with Tyvek, a paperlike substance used in envelopes that does not tear, and
they patch moccasins with Polar Fleece, the synthetic popularized in ski
wear.

Holocaust museums present similar problems. The Auschwitz State Museum has
struggled with how to preserve an open death camp so that it neither
disintegrates nor looks like some evil Disneyland. The United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum here, which opened a decade ago, has similar
problems but more money. Conservators have tackled problems of insects,
condensation and dust that threatened compelling artifacts like the shoes
and uniforms worn by prisoners in concentration camps. These shabby items,
made of ordinary materials meant to last years, not decades, are now
regarded as precious because of the horrific events they evoke. When the
environmental issues were solved, and the 3,500 shoes continued to
deteriorate further but more slowly in haunting displays of wall-to-wall
heaps spread across a darkened gallery, the conservators diagnosed another
problem.

"We needed to reduce the handling of the shoes because of their delicate
condition," said Jane Klinger, the chief conservator. "The shoes were
crushed, brittle and in pieces when they arrived here on long-term loan from
Majdanek, the concentration camp near Lublin in southeast Poland. And we had
to find a better way to preserve them without changing the look of the
exhibit." They decided to cut back on handling by breaking up the sprawling
mass of shoes into small groups, making it possible to handle fewer of them
in extending their life. They also hoped to ease the impact of the shoes'
resting on one another.

In 1998 a conservator found a solution to these problems while surfing the
Internet, discovering a high-density polyethylene bin slotted on the sides
for air circulation. She thought that the bin, made to store and move food
in supermarkets, hospitals and prisons, was large enough — 23 inches long,
20 inches wide and 7 inches deep — to hold 20 or more shoes, resting lightly
on one another. Luckily, the shoes covered the edges of the bins, spilling
out in heaps so that museumgoers did not see the grid of bins, only the same
gray-brown sea of pumps, oxfords, sandals and boots, looking as they had
always looked.

Initially too, the 40 striped uniforms from Majdanek suffered on display
until 1998, when Gail Singer, a textile conservator, devised two adjustments
to ease stress on the garments. She replaced the original hefty steel
hangers with lightweight black acrylic copies and removed the temporary
linings of the uniforms, replacing them with rag-doll soft mannequins of
polyester netting over batting. These were custom-made for each uniform and
attached to the hangers.

Now conservators are unraveling the mysteries of a major museum acquisition,
a rare diary written in secret during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. The
author, a young woman known only as Debora, fought with the underground unti
l she was killed in the uprising of 1944.

The existence of the diary, a tiny document of 20 unnumbered torn, burned
and fused-together pieces of paper the size of playing cards, remained a
secret until 2002 when it was sent to the Holocaust Museum by Dr. Mark
Donald Hornstein, a Boston physician. He said he did so at the request of
his mother, Dr. Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein, a Holocaust survivor who was a
friend of Debora in the Polish underground and later became a prominent
physician and a professor of pediatrics in Cincinnati.

His mother gave him the diary when she was dying in 1998, recalling to him
that Debora had asked her, should Debora not survive, to retrieve it from
its hiding place behind a radiator in the headquarters of the Polish
resistance in Warsaw. She found it in that spot among the ruins of that
building in 1945.

"My mother had never spoken to anyone before about the diary," said Dr. Mark
Hornstein. "She held on to it for more than 50 years, always waiting to find
the proper home for it, where it could be translated, preserved and shared
with others. I doubt that she ever read it or looked at it extensively
because of its fragile condition."

When the diary arrived at the museum last year, the pages were photographed
and a preliminary translation was done that revealed a text laced with
powerful words and phrases: "bombs," "fire," "angels," "Nazis," "mother's
coffin," "a pile of corpses" and "in ghetto is a certain death."

Even without a full translation, the diary's existence is significant, said
Sara Bloomfield, the director of the museum. "Since so much of what we know
of the Holocaust is from the perpetrators themselves, diaries written by
victims provide a different and important perspective on history," she said.
"It is one of only a few diaries that survived that period in Warsaw."

Emily Jacobson, the museum's paper and photography conservator, began
working on the diary a year ago, using a tool new to conservation that
became essential to the project, digital photography. Compared with the
original murky photographs of the writing in ink now fading on paper
darkened by heat or fire, the digital images on the computer were far easier
to decipher because she was able to lighten, darken and enlarge them to see
the text and torn areas more clearly.

"The diary looks like it was written on tiny pages, but that is probably not
the case," Ms. Jacobson said. "I'm finding a half line on one page that
matches up with a half line on another page. The writing translated on these
small pages does not make sense. Each line seems to be a half sentence or a
fragment of a thought. We think that Debora probably used larger sheets of
paper to write her diary, folding them at least six times."

In late September Ms. Jacobson cracked the jigsaw puzzle of pages on the
computer, connecting the images of two torn pages out of the 24 on which the
writing goes over folds that separated. On the pages that she joined, the
upper part of the words were the last line on one page and the lower part of
the words were the first line on another page. The match also worked on the
reverse sides of the pages.

The problem of establishing what is a reasonable reality in the exhibits at
the Holocaust Museum was debated long before the museum opened and is still
being reviewed. The debate was shaped by a discussion of whether to show the
hair of victims, a proposal that was rejected.

"This is not just a museum, it is a memorial," Ms. Bloomfield, the director,
said. "And human hair is not just shoes or suitcases or eyeglasses; it's
human. We must not violate the victims or manipulate the visitors."

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