Although the map is still incomplete, the primary function right now is searchability. Plotting the data in this manner makes it easier to search for residents by birth date, job and address. This allows researchers to visualize how many people were working for a certain company, for example, exposing how these workers may have been grouped and to what extent local companies were exploiting the forced slave labor of the Jewish population.
Beorn and his colleagues at the Scholars' Lab have been working with researchers at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe to uncover further geographic data and add additional details to the map.
“The next step for us then could be adding another layer of important Jewish buildings and institutions within the ghetto,” Beorn said. “This would allow us to do things like show how long it would take someone to walk from their house to that particular location.”
Learning travel times like that would give researchers a better idea of how strict Nazi-enforced curfews would have crippled everyday tasks like a long round trip to and from the grocery store.
Through the University’s Faculty Global Research with Undergraduates program, Beorn has brought on two undergraduate researchers to help him identify new data for this project and his broader study of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Third-year Ryan Wolfe and second-year Matt Poliakoff are helping Beorn sort through information in the National Archives and will travel to Ukraine with him during spring break to conduct further research on the ground. Wolfe, who speaks Russian, has been working to sort through data in many of the primary source documents from Ukraine.
“I’ve been really surprised to learn how many of the day-to-day jobs in these camps and all this administrative stuff was not necessarily done by Germans,” Wolfe said. “The Germans were the ones at the top and they were obviously running the occupation of this area, but a lot of people who were part of the national movement were carrying out this work and aligned themselves with the Nazis.”
Revelations like Wolfe’s are another example of how seeing data at the local and individual level can help Holocaust historians find a deeper understanding of something that happened on such a massive scale.
There’s still work to be done on the Lviv project – additional names to be plotted and layers of data to add – but Beorn hopes to be able to share the map as a tool for researchers to gain this local understanding by some time next year.
“This is the level where ideology meets reality meets situation and environmental circumstances,” he said. “That’s really my approach to doing history – to try and dive into those areas and extrapolate what it can tell us about the larger phenomenon.”
Jewish residents pictured inside the Lviv ghetto in Ukraine.
(Photo courtesy Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Israel)