What can you learn from a shoe? As I stood in the Maidanek death camp recently, I tried to understand, tried to envision, tried to learn about a woman who died more than sixty years ago. I know almost nothing about her, other than the fact that she came to Maidanek and probably never left. There are hundreds of thousands of shoes at the Maidanek death camp in Poland, all stored behind wire mesh. The shoes are dusty and mangled, most crushed almost beyond recognition. Our guide quoted the number 800,000, but I don’t really believe it matters exactly how...