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This article analyzes the journey of the so-called Izieu telegram –a telegram sent by Nazi perpetrator Klaus Barbie to report the raid of a Jewish children’s home in France to his superiors— from its creation to its use in multiple transitional justice mechanisms, including an international military tribunal, domestic trials in France, and various memorialization projects. In doing so the authors apply the concepts of activation and the records continuum approach, both borrowed from archival studies scholarship, to analyze how an individual record becomes continuously recontextualized through its use in transitional justice processes and, in the process, contributes to those same processes. They conclude by highlighting both the benefits of bringing archival concepts into dialog with transitional justice scholarship and practice, and the tensions inherent in that endeavor.