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This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains
originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their
presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It
argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human
remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and
proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a 'second
rate' corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important
to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the
perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the
dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their
fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual
and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to
which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated
human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey
their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction,
objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the
consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a 'second
rate' corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum
exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily
belong.

This paper discusses the role of audio and visual testimonies in safeguarding, understanding, presenting, validating and decentering the history and memory campscapes, be it, for researchers, practitioners, memory activists, or museum visitors. Its primary objective is to present and contextualize two research tools developed within the framework of the project Accessing Campscapes: Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage: the Campscapes Testimony Catalogue, a new directory of oral history interviews devoted to selected camps covered within the scope of the project; and the online environment Remembering Westerbork: Learning with Interviews – a prototype of an online display environment presenting survivors' experiences to today's visitors in an exemplary memorial that opens up, expands and complexifies the paradigmatic narrative offered by the campscape at the on-site exhibition.