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Among the workshop’s participants were researchers and archivists from Austria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The workshop therefore actively encouraged and welcomed participants from countries outside the EHRI national nodes, notably France, Greece, Italy, and the USA. The workshop demonstrated the growing importance of GIS-based and spatial approaches in Holocaust research.
The workshop opened with a keynote by Anne Knowles, who reflected on the possibilities and challenges of spatially representing the Holocaust. She emphasized the importance of moving beyond a focus on a limited number of well-known sites and instead considering the broader geography of persecution, displacement, and survival. Her remarks provided a conceptual framework for many of the subsequent discussions.
The first panel “GIS Perspectives on Ghettos and Camps” highlighted how spatial analysis can reveal patterns of persecution, confinement, mobility and survival that are less visible in traditional historical narratives.
The next panel “Mapping Persecution: HGIS Approaches to the Holocaust” explored the spatial dimensions of economic persecution, memory landscapes, and the transformation of archival and testimonial sources into geospatial data by highlighting different HGIS projects.
Day two saw the panel “Geospatial Approaches to Holocaust Narratives” dealing with literature and testimonies. Using survivor testimonies and personal narratives, the panel explored innovative ways of connecting microhistorical perspectives with larger geographical and historical processes by integrating individual experiences.
A hands-on element “Tools, Infrastructure and New Approaches” offered three parallel sessions, focusing on the EHRI Geospatial Repository, GIS in Historical Research and and Atlas of Holocaust Literature in Łódź. The three hands-on sessions were led by representatives of three different EHRI nodes – Israel, Poland, and Czechia – further demonstrating the transnational cooperation fostered within EHRI-ERIC.
In his closing remarks, Benjamin Frommer looked at recurring themes of the workshop like the integration of individual experiences into broader spatial frameworks and showed new insights into them via his own research on the Holocaust in the Czech lands.
Marina Bantiou: “The keynote lecture was particularly inspiring. The combination of innovative methodologies, critical reflection, and practical examples throughout the workshop created a highly engaging and thought-provoking experience.”