Holocaust Geographies

In April of 1993 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened. As it closes out its third decade of operation, it still boasts an annual operating budget in excess of $100 million and continues to promote rich scholarship on the most infamous event in world history up to this point, hopefully ever. A little over a decade after the USHMM opened, its researchers “saw potential in GIS for managing and analyzing” enormous data sets they had compiled (p. 7). Marc Jean Masurovsky, a senior researcher at the museum, contacted Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Anne Kelly Knowles, to organize a workshop on using GIS analysis. “The two week workshop brought together nine scholars from historical geography, GIScience, cartography, history, and architectural history to consider how spatial analysis and geographical visualization of the built environment and forced movement of people during the Holocaust might inspire new research questions and pedagogical applications” (Geographical Review, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” p. 564).

Six essays ultimately resulted from the two years of research launched by that August 2007 workshop, and they are combined in Geographies of the Holocaust. In their introduction, the three organizing scholars summarize their distinct contribution in two clusters of dense text, dubiously combined below:

One of the most unusual aspects of our approach to the Holocaust is our conviction that spatial analysis and geovisualization can complement and help specify the humanistic understanding of space and place by exploring and quantifying relationships among things and people to discover and visualize spatial patterns of activity. This complementarity is at the core of our research method. […] By using these methods, we do not claim to be describing the reality of experience; rather, we have done something different by modeling the physical conditions of the reality in which victims, perpetrators, and bystanders operated, in order to ask new questions and see historical circumstances in a new light. (pp. 4-5, 8)

The key questions for me are:

1.     Are the new questions profound?

2.     Is the new light truly illuminating of human experience?

Alas, I’m afraid that the best I can offer is a hung jury on these questions. I fear that I selected the weakest case study for my test case, “Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest” by Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano. Cole is a social historian and Giordano a professor of geography, and unfortunately they both seem to suffer from on of the most acute cases of hyper-specialization I have yet encountered in the academy.

Their geo-chronological frame is Budapest, Hungary, from May to November, 1944—one city for six months. Within their frame they show that Jews in Budapest were confined to ghettos that consisted of the traditional “Jewish” parts of town. Yellow starts were painted onto the sides of apartment buildings, and Jewish movement was increasingly confined, but they still lived fairly integrated within the city’s urban core. According to the authors, this runs contra to the grand narrative of “concentration and segregation” presented by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of European Jews. To compare to a less academic source, the notion of the “dispersed ghetto” of Budapest contrasts sharply with the depiction of the ghetto of Krakow, Poland in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The essay is strongest when focusing on how this affected the experience of Budapest’s increasingly sequestered Jewish population. “Jews were segregated not only from non-Jews but also from other Jews, and from the means of survival, through the erection of invisible walls of distance” (p. 148). This is a valuable contribution.

Almost totally unaccountably, Cole and Giordano never state the obvious reason for Budapest’s anomalous status from the “classic” ghetto model: it was assembled ad hoc in the last year of the war. The Germans did not even being to implement the ghettoization process until June 16—ten days after the D-Day invasion that added the Western front to the Eastern and Southern. To be fair, they acknowledge that the ghettos were late in the war, but fail to identify that context as at least a major part of the explanation for why time and resources were not spent cordoning off several blocks of the city’s periphery to concentrate the tens of thousands of Jewish people who had not escaped by that point in the war. By this point Jewish victims—two thirds of which would not survive the year—would have looked at the Allied advance with hope, while their Gentile neighbors would have probably experienced some mixture of dread and ambivalence.

In the opening to their chapter, the authors note that Budapest was one of 150 Hungarian cities and towns that went through ghettoization in 1944. Four years after the publication of Holocaust Geographies, the USHMM published a list of 42,500 ghettos and camps. GIS has a role to play in helping to visualize these places and the people who lived within them, but it must not disregard the historical forest for the spatial trees, or one might say rather a different spatial forest. Otherwise the “complementarity” will be lost.