Geographies of the Holocaust

Knowles, Anne Kelly et al. Geographies of the Holocaust. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Geographies of the Holocaust is a multidisciplinary collaborative project surrounding the use of GIS in context of studying the Holocaust. The book opens with an outline and summary of how the book is structured and came to be before setting off on a variety of case studies. Creating a unified scholarly approach, such as defining scale, is part of the introduction and explored how each project would use it from the national down to the individual streets and persons. Additionally the defining of space and place in context of the case studies helped provide a universal understanding of each project; traditionally being an abstract concept that would serve to hurt a project, the first chapter explains how GIS can be used to understand space and place in context of their respective project, such as the confining nature of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest or the view one might have of Auschwitz or the paths that many were forced to travel. The opening chapter closes with a statement about a quantitative approach when it comes to data that, for each project, will be then qualitatively analyzed for its context and meaning with a similar approach to the process of mapping itself; straying away from simple and visually striking maps and instead embracing a variety of styles and natures per map per case study. The result is to ensure the scholarly use of GIS and maps grounded in empirical evidence with clear conceptions of their limitations to provide a platform for quality analysis.

         The case study of particular interest to me was about the spatial nature of Jewish ghettos in Budapest. The use of GIS in this chapter was to approach the Jewish ghettos from multiple angles to create a better understanding of the space that they lived in. The stated reasoning and methodology of assigning Jews to a ghetto did not remain the same after an initial attempt and the city, with its readjustment of ghetto classification, brought the ghetto to the Jew as opposed to mass relocation. Additionally, this chapter viewed a form of a soft wall around the ghetto in terms of average distance one could walk in 30-min and 60-min intervals to determine where Jews were allocated in the city based off of their temporal time constraints. This method, explored through GIS, does not provide hard evidence, but suggests where which hospitals, markets, and streets saw the most Jewish traffic and in conjunction with normal lay transports and streets, how visible the Jewish population was in terms of their routes taken on the street and their apartments. This case study primarily served as context to better understanding the individual stories in Budapest as well as to better understand the life of individuals during the Holocaust as victims and bystanders.