Alternatively, the next chapter, “From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945”5 follows Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners on January 1945 death marches. In order to engage with physical and emotional landscapes of survivors’ traumatic experiences, authors focus on “the intimate scale of individual bodies in space and time.” They map personal testimony "to reconstruct the routes of evacuations and transmute recorded memories into visual representations of emotional experience”.6
Since its inception in 2007, the Collaborative has partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the Spatial History Project at Stanford University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It has received funding and support from National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, USC Shoah Foundation, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
LEARN MORE:
● Holocaust Geographies Collaborative website
● Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, eds. Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
● Beorn, Waitman, Tim Cole, Simone Gigliotti, Alberto Giordano, Anna Holian, Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, Marc Masurovsky, and Erik B. Steiner, “Geographical Record: Geographies of the Holocaust,” The Geographical Review 99(4) October 2009: 563-575.
“Terrain of encoded memories. Aggregating letters from six testimonies and locating traumatic incidents according to route path coordinates reveals the literal verbal density of memories of the experience. The resulting terrain of encoded memories was uneven across the landscape, raising questions about the relationship between space, proximity, and trauma: Why is the geography of memory irregular? How did the landscape shape affective and sensory memory? What memories have been lost in the gaps without testimony? What might those silences signify?” Visualization by Gigliotti, Masurovsky, and Steiner.
Source: Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, eds. Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).