The battered cardboard suitcases have been placed in neat rows. Some of the smaller ones carry white lettering - KT or Kindertransport - marking them out as having been used by children whose desperate parents begged charitable organisations to take them to England or any other country prepared to accept these small refugees from Hitler's Germany. Most of them never saw their parents again.
It is the mundane details which strike the most powerful chords in the piteous rooms of the Holocaust Exhibition, which has just opened in London. Here are just a few of them: the piles of worn-out shoes, old combs, broken spectacles and toothbrushes taken from inmates of the death camps; hurriedly scribbled notes thrown from the shuttered trains carrying prisoners to Auschwitz, dependent on strangers to stamp and post them to their destinations; a child's school exercise book, in which she has meticulously drawn and coloured every item of the uniform for her school in Birmingham, to send to her parents.
There are also the large and harrowing images of evil: the piles of unburied bodies at Belsen, a scale model of Auschwitz demonstrating the extermination process, photographs by SS officers of prisoners throwing themselves against the electrified barbed-wire fences.
Some of these have become almost familiar as ghastly icons of man's inhumanity to man. It is the personal testimony of letters, journals and, crucially, of some 30 survivors who speak from television screens placed throughout the exhibition which give a terrible immediacy to the suffering of millions of individuals.
One man says he spent his whole time in Auschwitz swearing that, if he survived, he would tell the whole world of his experience. It was not so easy. It took 20 years for him to tell anyone and that was only when one of his children said: "Dad, we read such terrible things about the camps. What was it really like?"
One of the exhibits is a clockwork bear, its fur coat rubbed almost threadbare. It belonged to Paul Sondhoff who, as a child in Vienna, was hidden for four years by his elderly piano teacher. The small cupboard was so cramped that his bones became deformed. There were good people who tried to resist what was happening.
One of the most telling photographs shows the smiling doctors and nursing staff at a hospital, one of many, where tens of thousands of disabled patients were assessed for the T4 euthanasia programme.
The exhibition is at the Imperial War Museum, but there is no attempt to draw a veil over Britain's lack of response to the plight of the Jews and other victims: homosexuals, Romany gypsies (wearing the distinctive clothes we see on our city streets) and other outcast groups.
As early as 1939 the British government knew what was going on. Its scientists had broken German codes, but the decision was taken not to publish the information because it would have meant revealing the fact that it was monitoring radio communications.
We are shown the editorials in British newspapers warning against the threat of "an influx of refugees", which could destabilise society at a time when unemployment was running high. It was not until l944, under pressure from church leaders and others at home, that the allied leaders met to discuss "the refugee problem". By then five million Jews had been killed.
A recurring theme is the way the whole panoply of law-abiding society in Germany was deployed to create and sustain the image of the Jews as subhuman, abnormal, threatening. The law, schools and universities, artists and the media, factory workers printing the Star of David on great bales of yellow fabric were all drawn in.
It would be inappropriate, perhaps even insulting (albeit unintentionally), to the memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust to draw comparisons between the evil that gripped Europe in the l930s and 1940s and the challenge which faces us in Ireland today. But I defy any Irish person who visits this exhibition not to feel an uneasy sense of recognition. It is not just the cardboard suitcases and the vile cartoons depicting the Jews as subhuman, the children refused refuge in this State, which stir uncomfortable memories.
We have a Government which seems bent on labelling refugees as alien, different, threatening to our society. Already we refuse to allow them to work, disperse them without warning into fearful and perplexed communities, give them vouchers instead of cash. There are proposals to fingerprint new arrivals and to incarcerate them in flotels. Newspaper headlines warn us of hordes of refugees.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, we see the result of all this in the increasing number of racial attacks on people deemed to be different from us. An English couple, who came to Dublin last weekend to celebrate their wedding anniversary with their son who is working here, were set upon by a group of youths shouting "Niggers out" and wielding knives. Now they have been told not to have "any false hopes" for their father, who is in intensive care in St James's Hospital.
We have a duty - politicians, priests, ordinary citizens - to shout "Stop". It would be a major contribution to that process if this deeply troubling exhibition, which has been four years in the making, could be shown in Ireland.
The Museum of Modern Art at Kilmainham, with its fine lofty rooms, would be an ideal setting. Perhaps Declan MacGonagle, the talented and innovative director of the gallery, could propose the idea to Sile de Valera.