DIGITAL MAP HELPS HISTORIANS GET GRANULAR WITH HOLOCAUST RESEARCH
Katie McNally, University of Virginia
Looking at the list of names on Waitman Beorn’s computer screen is staggering. The eye blurs almost automatically as it searches through the 18,000 people – recorded by name, approximate birthdate and address – on the list compiled by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet, these 18,000 are only a small fraction of the nearly 160,000 Jews who were placed into forced labor or systematically murdered under the brutal Nazi rule in Lviv, Ukraine, a city that was once part of Poland.
“It’s hard to look at this as a list and see anything but magnitude, because it’s so much data,” Beorn said, “but there’s so much rich information here for us.”
For that reason, he turned to the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library for help in creating a clearer, more comprehensive way to share this data.
Beorn, a lecturer in UVA’s Corcoran Department of History and a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has studied the Holocaust from a geographic perspective before and was looking for a way to create an interactive map of the Lviv ghetto and the nearby Janowska concentration camp.
The city and the camp are an important case study for historians. Janowska was unusual as a hybrid institution that served as a forced labor camp, a transit camp for deported Polish Jews and a killing center – at least 80,000 Jews were killed there. It was also unusual for a camp like Janowska to be so close to a city and local Jewish ghetto.
Mapping the names and identifying data of the Jews who lived in Lviv ghetto gives scholars
a clearer understanding of how the Holocaust was perpetrated at the local level.