KABUL, Afghanistan — A brother’s sandals. A flag of Afghanistan. A daughter’s favorite toy.

These are some of the remnants of lives lost to violence.

The prosaic belongings, collected in handmade wooden containers, are displayed in the frigid basement of a house in Kabul. They are the possessions of the dead, lovingly preserved by family members of Afghans killed during the past 40 years of conflict.

An exhibition of these everyday items — from scarves and robes to teacups and poems — seeks to memorialize a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died violently since 1979 in Afghanistan, a country that rarely pauses to remember its victims.

Each so-called memory box includes a narrative composed by loved ones about the life lost, making each tragedy personal.