Final Presentation

A presentation of the work of the Holocaust Geographies group will be held at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in late October.

geographies of the Holocaust

This site chronicles the efforts of a two-week multidisciplinary research workshop, "Geographies of the Holocaust", sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, from August 6-17, 2007, with Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Anne Kelly Knowles as coordinators. Various aspects of our public presentation held at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on August 17 will be made available on this site. A transcript of the presentation and Q&A session will soon come. The website will also document work in progress on the topic, collaborations, and projects of relevance.

Participants:
Waitman Beorn (History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Tim Cole (History, University of Bristol, UK)
Simone Gigliotti (History, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand)

Alberto Giordano (Geography, Texas State University, San Marcos)
Anna Holian (History, Arizona State University, Phoenix)
Paul Jaskot (Art History, DePaul University, Chicago)
Anne Kelly Knowles (Geography, Middlebury College, Vermont)
Marc Masurovsky (Registry of Survivors, USHMM, Washington DC)
Erik B. Steiner (InfoGraphics Lab, Geography, University of Oregon, Eugene)

August 17 public presentation content:

Part I: Introduction (Anne Kelly Knowles)
Geographic Methods for Holocaust studies: Case Studies
1. Use GIS to map and analyze deportation by region, place, identity, and time (historical maps, testimonials, transport lists and databases).
2. Examine Auschwitz camp experiences in the context of physical and perceptual space (camp plans, photographs, oral histories).
3. Map individual stories to, through, and from Auschwitz (all of the above).

Part II: Mapping the Holocaust in Italy (Alberto Giordano and Anna Holian)
• Overview of the project
• Database: CDEC Milan
• Database sample: Verona and Borgo San Dalmazzo
• Analysis
• Time period: September 8, 1943 – April 25, 1945
• Goals
Case study: Salmoni Family Journeys (slides)

Part III: Witnessing Auschwitz (Paul Jaskot)
Contributors: Waitman, Simone, Anne, Paul, Marc, Tim and Erik
I. General issues: location and intimacy of the local. Establishment of visual patterns. scale but also questions of different kinds of spatial experiences, and views of space.

II. Auschwitz I, mapping the perpetrators: Tracking of places of fear and using different kinds of evidence.

III. Individual stories: mapping explains limitations of experience and spaces. Emplotting the testimony of Ya’akov Gabai. Born in Athens (1912), mother Greek/father Italian; worked in the Sonderkommando. Arrived in Auschwitz April 11, 1944; Selected and marched to Birkenau. Note number of spatial experiences, e.g. starting in infirmary. Lived in the loft of Crematorium II; began work on May 15, 1944.
IV: Perpetrator and Individual Evidence: What do you do with different kinds of evidence? for example, photos from The Auschwitz Album: Visual representation of ramps, description of ramps from victim’s perspective, and actual space of ramps tell different parts of the history; what is important to each constituency? Attitudes and motivations.

V. Conclusions

Part IV: Mental Mapping and Mobility timelines (Tim Cole)
Mapping Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi
The Camp: ‘The Market is always very active. Although every exchange (in fact, every form of possession) is explicitly forbidden, and although frequent swoops of Kapos or Blockälteste sent merchants, customers and the curious periodically flying, nevertheless, the north-east corner of the Lager (significantly the corner furthest from the SS huts) is permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng, in the open during the summer, in a wash-room during the winter, as soon as the squads return from work’. (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 78)

The Barracks: ‘The ordinary living Blocks are divided into two parts. In one Tagesraum lives the head of the hut with his friends. There is a long table, seats, benches, and on all sides a heap of strange objects in bright colours, photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches, imitation flowers, ornaments... The other part is the dormitory: there are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three levels, fitted close to each other like the cells of a beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize without wastage all the space in the room up to the roof. Here all the ordinary Häftlinge live, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks... The corridors are so narrow that two people can barely pass together; the total area of the floor is so small that the inhabitants of the same Block cannot all stay there at the same time unless at least half are lying on their bunks’. (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz p. 32) ‘No one had time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals, instinctively collect in the corners, against the walls, afraid of being beaten’. (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 38)

The Bunk: ‘I do not know who my neighbor is; I am not even sure it is always the same person because I have never seen his face except for a few seconds amidst the uproar of the reveille, so that I know his back and feet much better than his face. He does not work in my Kommando and only comes into the bunk at curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes me aside with a blow from his bony hips, turns his back on me and at once begins to snore. Back against back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw mattress: with the base of my back I exercise a progressive pressure against his back; then I turn around and try to push with my knees; I take hold of his ankles and try to place them a little further over so as not to have his feet next to my face. But it is all in vain: he is much heavier than me and seems turned to stone in his sleep’. (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 59)

Part V: Prospects and Challenges (Anne Kelly Knowles)
- Long-term Agenda for "Geographies of the Holocaust"

- Analyze deportation with spatial analytical techniques using victims' databases

- Comparative studies of ghettos, camps, and other spaces of confinement

- Build full HGIS of all camps and killing sites, military fronts, transport network, resources, manufacturing, and slave labor, to study the systematic nature of the Holocaust.

Link to .ppt of the presentation (15MB file): http://geography.uoregon.edu/infographics/projects/holocaust/HolocaustGeographies.ppt