Author: lauraaukgib

An Online Exhibit of Jewish Evacuee Paths from Soviet-Occupied Poland to the Gulag during the Holocaust

By using Google MyMaps and PowerPoint, my digital project aims to create an annotated map and a graphical depiction of the paths taken from Soviet-Occupied Poland to the Soviet Gulags in Central Asia and Siberia by Jewish evacuees during the Second World War. Joseph Stalin sent over 200,000 Polish Jews to the inner parts of the Soviet Union because: 1. He considered them to be “suspect nationalities” prone to treason, who needed to be far away from the front line; 2. There was labor shortage, so they were used for forced labor. Dynamic cartography can better display the development of the their movement because it considers time and space in a different manner. Print maps do not show the fluid and changing relationship between pace, geography, concentration, movement, and place. Moreover, digital map annotations provide more information about the changing events and conditions. Lastly, a graphical depiction clarifies a complex series of events and improves the audience’s visual understanding of the process that evacuees had to undergo. These tools could facilitate new findings by assessing numerous geographic and topographical factors that affected the evacuees: for instance, if an evacuee was released from the Gulag on the terms on Polish Repatriation of 1946, the proximity of a town could be a matter of survival.

In particular I want to focus on a family history that depicts that displacement. Ellen G. Friedman’s Seven: A Family Holocaust History tells a story of one extended Polish-Jewish family that survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven—a name given to them by their fellow refugees—were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related.

The project will complement the digital mapping dedicated to the book with a more general digital map of Polish Jewish evacuees’ journey. Their displacement tended to begin with 1. the arrest of Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Poland on charges of spying. It was followed by 2. an interrogation, and the subsequent 3. train journey to 4. a prison where they awaited “a trial” as a “suspect nationality.” After that, many women and younger children were sent to 5. Soviet settlements, while Jewish evacuee men were typically placed in Stalin’s labor camps. Soviet guards and a resentful local population were likely to be a part of their daily lives. 6. The Polish repatriation act of 1946 allowed Polish evacuees to try and make their way back to their homes where Polish Jews were likely to find hostile and murderous neighbors. Every experience was different, and this project merely hopes to help people learn and understand their stories by using the available digital tools.

Google MyMaps would allow me to add points and draw shapes, which would be useful to differentiate between a Soviet labor camp, a prison, and a closed settlement. It also lets you add pictures and videos, which opens up an enormous and exciting opportunity to use digital archival collections (e.g. USHMM Online Photo Archive and Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies). My project is about communicating and telling people’s stories through digital maps and graphic depictions. The project would result in an online exhibit of Jewish evacuee paths from Soviet-Occupied Poland to the Soviet Gulag during the Holocaust.

Audience

General public and scholars interested in the Holocaust and the Soviet Union

Existing projects

There are several related existing projects, including Holocaust History animated maps and Holocaust Geography Collaborative. USHMM uses animated maps such as the map on the Aftermath of the Holocaust to help the viewer understand the enormous scope and impact of the Holocaust. While the Holocaust Geography Collaborative underlines the importance of location, scale, resolution, territoriality and the space/place dichotomy for an expanded understanding of the Nazi genocide. The scholars of the collaborative use the dynamic digital environment and the use of GIScience to allow for visualizations of these spatial concerns in more robust and innovative ways. Another important inspiration for my project is Waitman Beorn’s graphical depictions. His project A Geography of Complicity concludes that the more willing soldiers often found themselves closest to the killing, spatially. It shows that extended physical contact with the Nazi genocidal project over time led most soldiers to become more deeply complicit.

Plan for Outreach and Publicity

For outreach I aim to create a WordPress blog post about my project. In my description, I will kindly invite people to the readers to express their thoughts and suggestions. This should allow to get some feedback from the general public. The post will include the relevant tags and categories to make it easier for people to find it. I will also kindly write emails to scholars involved in the spatial geography project for some possible feedback and hopefully even a discussion.

Evaluation Plan

I aim to evaluate my digital project by assessing my WordPress blog post’s comment section. Another important type of feedback would be my email communication with the scholars of the Holocaust on their thoughts, questions, and suggestions regarding my project. I also hope to take advantage of living in Washington by making an appointment with one of the specialists on the Holocaust museum’s digital map project. I am particularly excited by the prospect of collaboration. Hopefully, it would be someone who perhaps holds a different set of technical skills or is interested in contributing in other ways,

The Case of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial and Its Representation on Instagram

In the past few years, scholars of the Holocaust made enormous progress in introducing digital media into the field. As a historian, I always aim to use a variety of resources to enhance my research, digital tools and social media among them. In 2016, I attended Lessons and Legacies Conference dedicated to “Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age.” The role of social media in Holocaust remembrance and its ethics became an important part of the discussion. One of the more controversial conversations involved some visitors of Holocaust memorial sites posting their self-portraits or “selfies” on social media. Some attendees defended the visitors’ decisions by claiming it was one of the ways that they interacted with the memorial, that they publicly shared their experience in the form of photography, instead of speaking or writing. However, others rightly pointed out that many of them did so in a disrespectful and trivializing manner.

A year later this topic resurfaced, but this time among general public when an Israeli-German writer Shahak Shapira published pictures of tourists at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial on the website that he designed and audaciously named “Yolocaust,” a combination of the popular social media hashtag YOLO – “You Only Live Once” – and the Holocaust. He uploaded pictures he deemed disrespectful to teach young visitors a lesson. Shapira stripped away the background of the memorial and replaced it with scenes of emaciated bodies and corpses from concentration camps. The photoshopped images went viral, sparking outrage: some expressed their anger at the young people in the pictures for disrespecting the site, others criticized Shapira for doing the same by tempering with the original material for shock value, thus trivializing the suffering of victims by using them as a background. Since those images were public, he could use them, but after the outcry, he provided an email address – “undouche.me@yolocaust.de” – so that people on those viral pictures could request that an image be removed. Those who hailed Shapira as an online social justice warrior (SJW) made me question the role and impact that any Internet user could have in determining the ethics of the memorial visits and the Holocaust remembrance at large.

Most official social media accounts of the Holocaust memorials tend to feature archival photographs with educational captions, promotional pictures of upcoming events, and photographs of survivors visiting. It is typically the visitors who upload pictures of themselves at memorials. In Sergei Loznitsa’s 2016 powerful documentary with almost no dialogue called “Austerlitz,” he shows thousands of tourists as they look around, chat, yawn, and take selfies at the former sites of Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps. What we do not learn is what makes the visitors behave the way they do. It seems that many visitors fail to grasp the intended message, especially, despite the tremendous effort of the memorial staff and their contributors to educate visitors about the horrors of the Nazi persecution and genocide.

It is absolutely critical that we address the issue of on-site and digital footprint of those who visit Holocaust memorials, particularly as antisemitism and misinformation, including the Holocaust denial, are on the rise across the world. The debate on what constitutes free speech and hate speech continues, while worldwide platforms like Facebook refuse to take responsibility and the justice system at large are still figuring out ways to handle digital crimes and misdemeanors. Today, as white nationalists express their opinions more and more boldly, we cannot let the message of those memorials be misrepresented and misinterpreted. A study published in April, 2018 showed that awareness of the Holocaust is fading in the United States, where more than one-fifth of millennials either have not heard of it or are not sure, if they have.

In my print project, I will examine the role of social media users in Holocaust remembrance by analyzing Instagram images, captions, hashtags, and comments from the past two years, that were “location-tagged” at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. By examining these public social media posts, my goal is find out more about the way people discuss the memorial, their experiences, and the topic of the Holocaust at large. I aim to explore the decision-making process behind the visitors’ posts: from choosing to be in the picture, appearing in a certain way, to possibly editing and then posting it. The ultimate goal is to facilitate a larger discussion about the impact of social media users on the representation of the Holocaust.

Hi! My name is Laura, I am a second-year History PhD student. My research interests include the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. In this class, I aim to learn how to use digital tools and improve my ability to navigate digital sources and platforms as I think it is important that historians keep up with the ever-evolving technology. My another goal is to produce a research paper that I would be able to submit for publication to an academic journal. This time however I hope to also enrich my projects by the methods learned in this class; as I believe that digitizing archival material in a safe and responsible manner can ensure its proper preservation and also make its use more egalitarian. Historians who belong to marginalized groups do not always have the privilege of traveling in order to conduct research, and the digitization of sources certainly helps. Having access to the Internet allowed me to use digitized archives, and that opportunity has tremendously helped my academic and professional career. I am also enthused by the format and structure of the course, it is unlike any other History class I had before.

P.S. To save everyone time, and if you prefer: books by Flanagan, Gitelman, Jockers, Kirschenbaum, Rinehart are available to AU students in the ebook format.