At first, it was a small museum in a nondescript office building in Kabul, with a seemingly mundane collection — like a 14-year-old’s schoolbooks and black sandals. The teenager had died in Kabul in a 2015 attack on civilians by a branch of the Islamic State, ISIS-K, which has been responsible for several deadly campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The schoolbooks and sandals were among hundreds of items that belonged to Afghans who died in the many conflicts that have roiled the country.
The physical facility — known as the Afghanistan Memory Home Museum — no longer exists. Because the Taliban had threatened the museum’s organizers, they decided to close when the Taliban marched into Afghanistan’s capital city in 2021 and took power.
But the museum still survives. Documents and artifacts were hidden, buried and smuggled out of the country. And eventually a virtual incarnation emerged. In addition, some of the rescued artifacts were displayed at the U.N. Convention for the Afghan War Victims, held in The Hague, on December 3. “Truth telling and bearing witness are important … helping to acknowledge, honor and memorialize what victims have suffered — and their resilience as survivors,” said Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, addressing the event.
Making ‘memory boxes’
The idea for the museum came from a nonprofit group: the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO). “We started contemplating what to do with these stories, how to share them widely, and we realized that survivors often made reference to certain objects and personal belongings,” said Hadi Marifat, executive director of AHRDO. “For instance, when a dead body was delivered to [the family], they would describe the clothes he was covered in. They would save these items to remember their loved ones.”
The idea culminated in a permanent physical exhibit of personal items from various individuals. The items are displayed in containers that the museum calls “memory boxes,” alongside a note written by loved ones that describes the individual’s personality, hopes and dreams.
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