person data. Doing this for 1.501 persons would be too time consuming. Kazerne Dossin has therefore partnered up with the city of Antwerp to use the licensed ArcGIS software. This will allow us to incorporate time, space and personal data in the overview map, but will also allow us to create maps showing the personal journey of some of the families. However, for institutes that want to analyse and show large datasets, Neatline remains highly recommended.
CONCLUSION
This project started with Ms. Gaby Morris searching for answers on the fate of her family, deported from Belgium during the Holocaust. This endeavor led her to Kazerne Dossin as her family members were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from the SS-Sammellager Mecheln in 1942. Microhistorical research further revealed the obligatory slave labour in Organisation Todt labour camps in Northern France to which Ms. Morris’s grandfather had been forced, together with over 2.250 Jewish men from Belgium, including 1.624 fellow-Antwerpians. Without any direct documents from the family itself, it became clear that Ms. Morris’ grandmother was left behind in Antwerp with the youngest children in a most vulnerable situation. Hundreds of other Jewish families from Antwerp found themselves in the same position and little was known about their fate. With the Left Behind project Kazerne Dossin’s research team aims to advance knowledge on this little known aspect of Holocaust history in Belgium and seeks to explore the combination of micro, macro and spatial analysis, incorporating personal stories, analysis of large datasets and analysis of time and space elements on interactive maps into one research project. As such, Left Behind wishes to visualize its findings for both academics and a wide audience. At the same time, the team expects the mapping of data related to time and location to also have an increasing impact on and contribute to in depth academic analysis. The first research results indicate that the OT slave labour of Jewish men from Antwerp and the impact it had on their own as well as their families’ fate may well be an important factor in explaining the higher deportation number in Antwerp as compared to other large cities in Belgium and the country’s general deportation rate.