Geographies of the Holocaust

8. Afterword

This book began with the truism that the Holocaust was a fundamentally geographical event, a truism that has been acknowledged in the literature for some time but not systematically isolated and studied. The subsequent chapters have shown how profoundly a study of space can aid in our understanding of the complexity of policy decisions, the variable but brutally effective implementation strategies, and the particular experience of the victims. For the historians in our group, space has been a matter of evidence, including among other examples architectural plans, physical landscapes, bureaucratic 8 Afterword Paul B. Jaskot and Tim Cole 227 records of ownership and regulation, as well as descriptions and memories of space; conversely, for the geographers, the term has been taken up more methodologically and conceptually, involving different kinds of spatial visualizations, explorations of variable resolutions in the evidence , probing the geographic questions that arise from an analysis, and interpreting in particular issues of scale. From the scale of the continent to that of the individual body, the different approaches and historical questions addressed here call for a comprehensive spatial analysis of genocide. From buildings to landscapes to military plans, spatial factors were not only a condition of the genocide that would affect, for example, whether your town or the town over the hill was targeted by the Einsatzkommando . Rather, what our analyses have shown is that, although space was certainly a condition for key moments in the Holocaust, the manipulation and creation of new spaces and places could form in addition an instrument of enacting that very genocidal policy: in short, that the Holocaust was implemented through space and not merely in space. Furthermore, the Holocaust produced new spaces and places as a result of those brutal acts, and these geographies in turn would have a historical impact both during the war and after. In arguing for these conclusions, our contributions have tended to focus on process more than is usual in a typical humanities volume. This reflects the shaping influence of geography and GIScience, a disciplinary approach that methodologically emphasizes the analysis of process as a central scholarly objective. Hence, when one is asking a complex question such as how does one map the emotional traumatic response of a survivor to the harrows of a death march, the answer lies as much in considering the parameters and limitations in visualizing geographic evidence at the scale of the human body as it does in a traditional textual analysis of patterns in survivor testimony. A geography of the Holocaust demands each kind of evidence, for together they highlight the material reality that experience is inseparable from space. Where, however, does not exist independently from when in these pages, an equation that showcases the balance between geographic visualizations or spatial analysis and our attention to historical conditions and developments. Tellingly, the temporal dimension came to the fore in the building of the databases that focus primarily on geographical information culled from the archives. This attuned concern with temporality sparked by a focus on spatiality has happened at a range of resolutions. For example, in the case of the Budapest ghetto, thinking about distance between the sites mapped out from the archive triggered new attention to the time it took to move between ghetto houses and market halls or hospitals in the context of the operation of a curfew. The end result was a rethinking of the lived experience of ghettoization Jaskot and Cole 228 as spatially and temporally limiting. Shifting to the more usual way of thinking about time as chronology–found above all in the ongoing debates over causation that have dominated Holocaust Studies–the focus on creating a database of the construction dates of individual buildings in Auschwitz-Birkenau suggests a new way of seeing the life cycle of this camp, with heightened awareness of a “construction phase.” The database for geographic information must also include temporal information –the very stuff of historians! This makes the visualization more geographically accurate but also historically valuable as a resource to help us critically advance Holocaust Studies. It highlights a fundamental argument of this volume, that geography and history are inseparable factors for any analysis of the genocide. The case studies have evident pedagogic value, as they approach tried-and-true topics like the SS concentration camp system with new visualizations. But important as that may be, these chapters also offer a challenge to the field. The camps study, for...