new analytical approaches to even the most familiar evidence from the period.2” In other words, the Holocaust Geography Collaborative culls from historical data sets (like the Holocaust Museum archives and Registry of Survivors databases) to then capture, represent, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze its geographic aspects, which in turn serve as a starting point for new original academic inquiries.
While the scope of this research is broad, the group decided to focus on six themes that, in turn, constituted the basis of their 2014 book 'Geographies of the Holocaust': the spatio-temporal aspects of the Nazi concentration camp system in Europe; the arrests during the Holocaust in Italy; the spatialities of the Shoah in the East; the shifting geography of the Budapest Ghetto; the materiality of construction and physical rendering of the spaces of power in Auschwitz-Birkenau; as well as the visual representation of evacuations from Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. Constantly zooming in and out between different levels of scale, authors engage with notions of national, regional, local, and individual/personal experiences of time and place. As a result, this “geography of oppression” allows us to understand the Shoah as a “profoundly geographical phenomenon.”
Each case study featured in the book 'Geographies of the Holocaust' highlights a collaboration between at least one Holocaust historian and a technically expert geographer. While all the chapters share the methodology of exploring data from visual and textual records through visualization, they operate at different levels of scale. For example, the chapter “Visualizing the Archive: Building at Auschwitz as a Geographic Problem3” zooms in on a particular location: Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Overhead simulated viewshed from the ramp of Birkenau, circa February 1944. The analysis shows both spaces of relative visibility and invisibility looking up and down the ramp for those who experienced the site. Visualization by Chester Harvey.
Source: Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, eds. Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
“Spatialized testimonies of Rajsko prisoners. Each mention of individuals of groups in the testimony was placed (“geocoded”) as a dot in accordance with route path coordinates. As the journey wore on, prisoners’ identities were less associated with their position in the camp hierarchy than by significant flashbulb events that placed the prisoners in conflict with unfamiliar SS guard. Terms signifying togetherness (for example, ‘friend’, ‘we’, and ‘us’) stayed consistent over time, tied to the descriptions of these events and other moments when the perverse relationship to the guards was reinforced (for example, “we were told to rest”).
Source: Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, eds. Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).