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DALLAS—The items are haunting.

Tangles of empty frames of eyeglasses snatched from people’s faces. Gold-plated wedding rings stripped of their jewels. Black-and-white photos showing piles of bodies in boxcars at concentration camps.

These relics of the Holocaust fill boxes, shelves and filing cabinets in an office at the Dallas Holocaust Museum.

Nearly every week, unsolicited items arrive at the downtown museum. Some come from Holocaust survivors or the people who liberated them. They also come from families of survivors who discover items tucked way in their attics, garages and other areas. Some items are found at estate sales.

History lives on in these items, say survivors like Rosalie Schiff, 85, of Dallas.

“Some people say the Holocaust did not happen, and this is evidence that it did happen,” Schiff said. “We were eyewitnesses to it, as survivors.”

She met her future husband, William, at a dance in Krakow, Poland. Soon after they were married, they were sent to different labor and concentration camps and didn’t see each other for a few years.

The museum donations are especially valuable because many survivors walked away with nothing. The Nazis “were taking everything away from us,” said William Schiff, 89. He donated his prison uniform to the Dallas museum.

The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and believed that Jews were inferior. They eventually killed about 6 million Jews, most of them during World War II.

“Shouldn’t we tell the world what happened?” Schiff said. “I think it helps. We have a lot of problems with Saddam Hussein, bin Laden. People like this, they’re unpredictable. It can happen again. ... We have a chance to protect ourselves.”

Items are also donated by relatives of Holocaust survivors who want to make sure their loved ones are remembered, said Pamalla Anderson, the museum’s archivist.

“It allows their legacy to go on,” she said.

Corinna Valencia-Flores sent pictures to the Dallas museum that her deceased brother, Robert Valencia, an Army paratrooper, took when he was liberating concentration camps in Poland. The Texas native’s pictures included “piles of bones, just bones, bodies.”

“That’s where they belong,” at the museum, she said. “I didn’t want them laying around.”

The twisted eyeglass frames and tarnished rings—likely taken from people who were sent to labor or concentration camps—came from a man believed to be a Nazi sympathizer, museum officials said. The items were donated this year after they were discovered at a Dallas estate sale and experts determined they were authentic.

Other items that are in the museum’s collection include a doorknocker with a swastika on the handle that hits the caricatured face of a Jew. There’s a rock from Auschwitz; shoes with wooden soles worn in a concentration camp; a Star of David patch that Jews were forced to wear; bracelets and lockets with pictures of family members; German propaganda books; and pictures from concentration camps.

Anderson says she’s never quite sure what’s going to land on her desk.

“I try to file it and not look at it,” she said of some of the items. “I don’t think you can ever be desensitized. You hear the stories, you see the items. It spurs you on.”

There isn’t enough space in the museum to display all of the items, but that will change when a new facility opens on land acquired near the Sixth Floor Museum. The museum is organizing a fundraising drive, but an opening date hasn’t been determined.

Jack Repp, who survived several concentration camps, donated his prison uniform partly because he didn’t want to look at it every day. He lost almost all of his family members in the Holocaust. The 84-year-old Dallas resident also donates his time, speaking with children who tour the museum.

“Everything that a survivor has ... these items, for historical purposes, shouldn’t only be given but be seen by people for generations to come,” Repp said.