Boots on the Ground: Footwear, the Body, and Loss

Figure 1

Author's photograph.

Boots, shoes, corsets, and clothing are prosthetic devises, extensions of the body.[1] 

The body speaks when there are no words.

Grief, loss, and trauma are bound up with each other. 

Different losses are often experienced together. 

Losses are embodied, bound together in the body. 

This essay is about entanglements, trips and tripping. The body speaks when there are no words; the death of a beloved parent and a pilgrimage to Auschwitz and its landscape of destruction. It is about the numbness of loss and how it is embodied. This came together for me in Auschwitz as a palpable discomfort, an undoing that I could not otherwise touch. This is a story I am still piecing together; a narrative whose logic is associative. It takes its title from a phrase bound to battle, troops in combat, storm trooper invading and claiming ground. 

This is a nested tale told through the powerful enabling words of others. To write this faltering narrative, I have found myself in the company of Judith Butler and Maggie Nelson. I come to Butler belatedly through Nelson’s reflections on her own struggle to tell the story of “the trial of the man accused of murdering [her] aunt,” a tale that enabled me to write about my rape in The Objects that Remain, and now in a different way about my father’s death and this trip to Auschwitz.

As Nelson explains in her essay “The Call” (2022), she kept Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) “close by her side” as she struggled to find words to write about what it was like to be in that Michigan courtroom in 2005 witnessing not only the testimony but the physical remains, the evidence from her aunt’s 1969 murder almost 40 years later.[2] Seeing that evidence, a pair of pantyhose, a wool jumper, a raincoat, and the autopsy photographs of her aunt’s limp body—recognizing her mother and herself in those remains—was her undoing. Maggie Nelson had just published Jane: A Murder (2005), a book of narrative poems about her aunt’s life and death when, in an uncanny turn of events, there was a break in that very cold case. The story came back to life, and Butler’s words were there with her in that courtroom offering some company.

Nelson would later tell this faltering narrative of the trial in her memoir, The Red Parts (2007). As I tried to write about my rape, I held tight to both of Maggie Nelson’s books, Jane: A Murder and, most especially, The Red Parts. They were my companions as I considered the missing evidence in my case—my sweatpants, the blanket and sheets taken from my bed—items that would never make their way to any courtroom.

And so, as I headed off, in the summer of 2005, to the trial of the man accused of murdering my aunt, I kept Precarious Life close by my side. Its observations about grief and storytelling--'I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by those very relations. My narrative falters, as it must' (23)--offered me not only insight and comfort, but also formal inspiration as to how one might allow narrative faltering to act as a powerful presence while one is trying to relay a story."  (Nelson, “The Call” 59)

For Nelson, “the red parts” not only referred to the viscera of her aunt’s mutilated body, but also to the blood of Jesus, his body on the cross and its transubstantiation; she references the 19th century Red-Letter Bibles in which the words of Jesus were printed in red, as if soaked in his very blood.[3]  The interplay between violations that cannot be redeemed and the hope against hope that there will be life after death is something I learned about from Nelson; something she both points to and resists in The Red Parts. What I could not have anticipated after the publication of my own book was how this more recent essay by Nelson could both bring me back to those red parts while also helping me relay this story about losing my father and going to Auschwitz.

I read “The Call” (2022) just before I left for Poland. At that time, I did not yet make these connections. Almost a year later while teaching Nelson’s essay in my graduate research seminar I began to recognize these connections. I had my students read a few of the essays from the special issue of Representations, “Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler” (2022), alongside the Butler texts cited by the contributors. Nelson’s was one of the essays I assigned. In preparation for the class, I decided to read Butler’s “Violence, Mourning, Politics” from Precarious Life first before rereading Nelson.

Reading Butler’s essay, I was struck by a strange sense of familiarity. It was as if I already knew these arguments intimately. So taken by a few key moments in the text, I wrote about them at length. I did this before rereading Nelson’s essay. Once inside Butler’s text, I began to appreciate its proximity to Nelson’s writing. The passages I had singled out were the very ones Nelson had cited: “I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by those very relations. My narrative falters, as it must” (Butler 23, qtd. in Nelson 59). Finding Nelson writing about her aunt’s murder trial in this new piece, I was startled. I had not taken in this reference when I first read “The Call.” It was only later that I appreciated this connection. Because Nelson had had Butler with her then, I had Butler and Nelson with me in the wake of my father’s death and this trip to Auschwitz. As I groped for inspiration as to how to convey this faltering doubled narrative of violence and mourning, I now had both of these writers with me. And with their help, this essay is a kind of enactment that aspires to reveal some of what a faltering narrative can convey.

These experiences of loss and grief are dreamlike and the close proximity in time between the events of my father's death and this belated visit to Auschwitz, mean that I cannot easily disentangle them—and maybe I should have already appreciated this. After all, I had already written a book, American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007), about my father and the Shoah. But at that time, he was still alive. This was a new reckoning.

In the camp it was not just that one of my travel companions was there with a family story; a story of a grandfather close to my father's age who was there as a political prisoner and survived, or the fact that my father was a WWII veteran, or that his parents came to the United States just as the gates to immigration were closing in the early 1920s, that they had more distant relatives still in Eastern and Central Europe during the Holocaust, or the fact that my father grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home but never spoke the language himself, instead learning German in school. 

What I tried to show in that book was how different losses, even incommensurate experiences of grief, can and do inform each other. The iconic landscape of Auschwitz was a part of my father's visual repertoire—all that barbed wire, all those watchtowers, the dark foreboding gloom of so many black and white images in books all around our home as I was growing up but also as repeated figures in my father’s own drawings and paintings despite that fact that he had never been there.

There is a small watercolor painting I have in my office at Temple that depicts just these things. The painting includes no faces, my father’s usually ubiquitous signature as an artist. Instead, it simply shows a snippet of this dark landscape. The mood is ominous. The watercolors are in shades of black, deep olive green and brown. Returning to this small painting, I note a streak of red on the horizon.

My father’s painting feels connected to this photograph I took in Auschwitz (see Figure 5), my attempt to place myself in this strangely familiar place. The ubiquitous barbed wire fencing and those watch towers are in so many of my photographs from that day. I think it was their familiarity that made me take all those pictures. 

This photograph stands out among the many I took that day; a partial rendering. You can see only a portion of my face but what is clear is the backdrop. Behind and beside me is Auschwitz, a small sliver. But unlike the Auschwitz of my imagination, the watchtower is captured in the light of day. And yet, despite the brightness of the sky, my eyes are down cast, at least the eye in view appears this way. My brow is furrowed. The lines on my face are pronounced, the grey in my eyebrow and my now curly hair are quite evident. This is a late shot.

My father never imagined this place in the warm light of spring as I was seeing it. Yet, here I am. I am in this place and not another.

I promised to talk about boots on the ground.

The relationship between the self and the garment, simultaneously bodily and not of the body, may be encapsulated in the verb “to cleave.” To cleave… means both to join together and to spilt apart. We may refer to things cleaving together and also cleaving apart (Sampson 119).

Before I went to sleep one night while writing a version of the talk that would become the basis for this essay, what insinuated itself into my internal recitation of this narrative was the memory of an 8mm film my father made in the 1950s, a film I had written about in American Jewish Loss. I started thinking about “the feet”—my boots, my feet and the film’s title, The Thud of His Defeat—an homage to a poem by Stephen Crane about the fragility of justice, and also about death, a strangely Christian poem.[4]  But it was not so much the poem or the film's narrative that came back to me, rather, it was a small moment in the reel—the director's, my father’s, signature.

In this silent 8mm production, there is a scene when the protagonists, desperate and poor, clothes in tatters, stumble through the streets of Albany, NY and cross paths with a dapperly dressed gentleman. Just after offering them some money, this debonair character, about to cross the street, trips at the curb, loses his footing and stumbles. This is my father, his projection on the screen in what is otherwise a film he worked on behind the scenes as writer, producer and director. This stumble was not scripted but remains a part of the final cut. The scene depicts “the thud of his the/de feet" as a performance studies scholar once suggested to me as I presented these frames at NYU many years ago.[5]  What are these connections—feet, tripping, taking a trip, boots and shoes, but also the fear of falling, an actual fall, and the return to my own fears about falling as my boots came apart in Auschwitz?[6] Slowly, these musings brought me back to this halting narrative about my father’s death and Auschwitz.

I bought this pair of boots at a small consignment shop that I had, at the time, only recently discovered, three years before my trip.[7] These were practical boots and once I learned that the weather in Auschwitz would be rainy, I decided to take them with me.

I wore the boots on the flight to Poland. In retrospect, I remember noticing that the lip at the front of one of them seemed a little loose, but nothing to worry about. The boots seemed fine. I now suspect that this small clue may have been the beginning of their coming undone; although I am not sure how to explain both boots coming apart. 

Figure 6

My boots. Author’s Photograph.

I kept wanting there to be a right way to honour what happened in this place. I wanted something solid to hold onto, a correct procedure, and I didn't have it; we didn't have it. I left feeling nauseous and irritated. I did not want to come back and spend more time. I wanted out. But Auschwitz was the camp of camps and as a scholar of Holocaust memory, I felt compelled to go there at least once in my life, and this time, I was prepared. My friend hired an excellent guide, and we spent the day with him making our way through both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.[10]

I felt like I was walking on pieces of rock that were stuck to the bottom of my shoes. The grounds at both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau are, in fact, covered with gravel. When I initially began to feel this discomfort early on at Auschwitz I, I turned over the foot in question and checked the sole of my boot to be sure that there weren't stones stuck to the bottom, like what happens when you step on a piece of chewing gum and other things begin to accumulate. There was nothing there but still I kept feeling those stones. They became an abiding irritant, a part of my experience at Auschwitz.

It was only as we stopped at the cafeteria for a bowl of soup before leaving Auschwitz I that I was able to examine my boot more carefully. I slowly realized that gravel had wedged into the welt, the leather rim sewn around the edge of the boot’s upper to which the sole is attached. Using my hands, I worked the rocks out and hoped that, more conscious of the problem, I could avoid this happening again as we made our way through Birkenau. Despite my optimism, the situation worsened. By the time we worked our way back from the Sauna Building at the far end of the camp, both of my boots began to flap. The gravel had unhinged both soles. It would have been funny, clownlike, had it not been so dangerous. I was increasingly worried about tripping as we made our way back to the car.

At the end of the day, I was grateful that I had brought a pair of sneakers with me. What I cannot explain is why I did not change into those sneakers on the way to Birkenau. 

For this essay, I asked my friend in Poland to send me her pictures. I was hoping to see my boots on the ground. When her images arrived, I was struck by the fact that I had not remembered what I was wearing. There is something strange about seeing unfamiliar images of oneself but especially in this place.

There were not many pictures of me outside that show my full body and boots on the ground among those she sent. The only one I have is this one taken at the entryway into the remaining crematorium at Auschwitz I. We were near the gate that leads to the house of the Kommandant where his children once played.[12] This proximity has always upset me having read about it and seen it depicted on film but being there and seeing it for myself was even more devastating, especially on a bright sunny day.

These jarring juxtapositions are part of why the beautiful light, the warm weather, and the lilacs in bloom at Auschwitz I were so upsetting. This place should be in black and white, or at least in dark and somber colors like my father's paintings. But it is not. In the photograph (see Figure 8), I am with my colleague Matt. I am holding my lower back. I don't know if my back hurt, but the gesture feels familiar. You can see our backs as we are about to enter this underground space.

Figure 8

Laura and Matt walking outside. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska

Figure 9

Wall of Pictures in the Sauna Building. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska.

This is a photograph taken in the former Sauna Building, the last place we stopped on our tour. It is a bit off the beaten track, but of course the track, even out there, was covered in rubble, those same insinuating rocks and my boots were already in pretty bad shape. In this picture, I think I can see the accumulation of dust all over them.

I am standing in front of a vast wall of family photographs. These are images from the last Polish transport to Auschwitz that I wrote about at length in American Jewish Loss. It felt right for me to be there with them. Before this trip, I had a hard time imagining what a Sauna Building might actually look like and how the images would be displayed.

Figure 10

The Names. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska.

The photograph my friend finds most compelling was taken at Auschwitz I. Here, the names of all those who perished are documented. Like a huge over-sized collection of phone books all arranged in alphabetical order, the names go on and on.[13] The pages are vast. They remind me of a perverse version of Helène Aylon's The Book that Will Not Close.[14] In the picture, I am standing with our guide at the far end of the display. The photograph shows the compendium on the left, a long display of manila pages, but the size and vastness of the exhibit is confusing. Is this some kind of sculpture tangibly signifying the magnitude of the horror? What about all those names? My body at the far end of the room makes clear the scale of this memorial.

In “The Call,” Maggie Nelson writes about becoming undone as a political act. Like Judith Butler, she draws connections between intimate injury and loss, her mentor and my friend Christina Crosby’s broken neck and paralysis, and grand political and social disasters, 9/11 and patriarchy. My grief is both about my father and about Auschwitz. Nelson writes:

Figure 11

Maggie Nelson Quote from “The Call”, Author’s photograph.

This last piece from Nelson’s essay brings me back to my experience at Auschwitz. My numbness comes, at least in part, from all of the expectations that I brought with me, all of the lessons and understandings of this place that already shaped what I was supposed to enact—to do, to feel. I think I wanted to be open to what it was that I felt and perhaps the lack of sensation in that encounter that was only slowly growing in intensity as my feet began to hurt and my boots began to fall apart. This was my way in. 

As Sampson explains, these vestiges of once vibrant lives can’t help but remind us of those who once wore them. All those lost pairs of shoes continue to cleave to those now long-absent bodies. The open bins of shoes on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—shoes that regularly make their way back and forth between Poland and the United States—bring visitors there into proximity to this horrific place and that time.[15] Perhaps having finally seen all of these shoes on permanent display at Auschwitz I, my own boots could not bear the weight of this reckoning.[16]

What is the legacy of Auschwitz, of the Holocaust? Is it really already known? I don’t think so. I think we need to let it undo us, to feel this for ourselves. Without doing so, we simply reiterate a familiar litany. We don't allow ourselves to feel our own vulnerability. We don’t take in what Auschwitz means for us now in the present. And perhaps, more importantly, what we take with us as we leave this place. What I am trying to get at is the slow process of undoing, of unravelling even what we thought we knew. This is part of what it means to perhaps commemorate the Holocaust in the present noticing the small things that are our own experiences of being in Auschwitz. Perhaps this is, in part, what we need to say and do now in order not to be complacent with the litany, the ones we already know. Part of what I take away from my trip to Auschwitz is the way that even knowing about “the Holocaust” or writing about it at this distance of time and geography does not stop us from being undone in the present, but only if we pay attention to what might appear to be the small things, a pair of boots whose undoing offer a clue to what it means to submit to a transformation, “the full results of which cannot be known in advance” (Butler 21, qtd. In Nelson, 60). 

My undoing at Auschwitz was slow. It began small—an irritation—and then grew larger and larger so that by the time I was leaving Birkenau, at the end of our long day's visit, I could hardly walk in my own boots. I felt my precarity keenly. I was afraid of tripping and falling. I had to carefully navigate my way back to the car.

The dismantling of unjust systems is a long, slow process. We experience it through accretion. Although accretion suggests a building up, in this case, it is an unbuilding, layer by layer. Undoing is not about easy slogans like the Holocaust-inspired slogan against genocide, “never again”; it takes time, and it demands that we not try to fix it or to tidy it up. Witnessing this history in this place is a form of grieving. We need to feel our vulnerability in the face of the profound injury that haunts this place. My boots brought me to this understanding. They forced me to confront my own vulnerability. After we left the camp, I wrapped up my broken boots and carried them home where I had them repaired. And when I wear them now, I remember.

Boots, shoes, corsets, and clothing are prosthetic devises, extensions of the body.

The body speaks when there are no words.

Grief, loss, and trauma are bound up with each other. 

Different losses are often experienced together. 

Losses are embodied, bound together in the body. 

“Auschwitz”. The Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz.

Aylon, Helène. Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Orthodox Jewish Girlhood, My Life as a Jewish Feminist Artist. 2012, The Feminist Press at SUNY.

“The Book of Names-New at Yad Vashem,” https://www.yadvashem.org/museum/book-of-names.html#:~:text=Yad%20Vashem's%20Book%20of%20Names,with%20memorial%20sites%20and%20more%20%E2%80%93.

Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 2004, 19-49. Verso.

Feldman, Jeffrey. "The Holocaust Shoe: Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Memorial Experience." Jews and Shoes (Edna Nahshon, Ed.), 2008, 119-130. Berg Publishers.

Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen. "Medical Care and Crime. The Infirmary of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945. https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/medical-care-and-crime/

Glazer, Jonathan, director. Zone of Interest. A24, Extreme Emotions, Film4Productions, House Productions, 2023. 1:45. 

Grigg, Russell, “On Linguistry and Homophony”. PyschoanalysisLacan Volume Three Papers, n.d. Lacan Circle of Australia. 

Jones, Ellen Carol. “Empty Shoes” Footnotes: On Shoes (Sherrie Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, Eds.), 2001, 197-232. Rutgers University Press.

Levitt, Laura. American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust. 2007, NYU Press.

Levitt, Laura. The Objects that Remain. 2020, Penn State University Press.

Levitt, Laura. “Telling Stories Otherwise (or Revisiting My Father’s Visual Archive).” [Distinguished Lecture]. The Center for Religion and Media, March 2006, New York University.

Nelson, Maggie. “The Call.” Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, special issue of Representations, vol. 158, 2022, 57-63.

Nelson, Maggie. Jane: A Murder. 2005 [reissued 2016], Soft Skull Press.

Nelson, Maggie, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. 2016, Greywolf Press.

Nelson, Maggie. The Red Parts: A Memoir. 2007, Free Press.

Sampson, Ellen. Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear. 2020, Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

“Shoah, Block 27,” accessed February 6, 2025.  https://www.auschwitz.org/en/visiting/national-exhibitions/shoah-block-27/.

“Welt.” Oxford Language Dictionary, n.d. https://www.google.com/search?q=Welt&rlz=1C5CHFA_

Author Bio

Article Citation

MLA: Levitt, Laura. “Boots on the Ground: Footwear, the Body, and Loss.” Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2025, 1-20. 10.38055/FCT040102.

APA: Levitt, L. (2025). Boots on the Ground: Footwear, the Body, and Loss. Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies, 4(1), 1-20. 10.38055/FCT040102.

Chicago: Levitt, Laura. “Boots on the Ground: Footwear, the Body, and Loss.” Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies 4, no. 1 (2025): 1-20. 10.38055/FCT040102.