Visualizing intimate geographies of genocide: A spatial analysis of the Holocaust in Węgrów County, Poland (1942–1944)

Highlights

• Unearths relationships between the murder of Jews and physical and social features.

• Highlights ArcGIS′ ability to display trends obfuscated by qualitative analysis.

• Exposes the extreme violence of the ghetto liquidations through cluster analysis.

• Proves the commonality of attempts to escape the trains to Treblinka.

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between physical and social space and the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust in a small county in rural Poland: Węgrów County, located north-east of Warsaw. The focus of this article is a cluster map representing the murders of 3771 individual Jews – 35% of the Jewish population as it was recorded in 1940 – in the years 1942–1944. This cluster map is supplemented with alternative maps – a deep map and a story map – in response to ethical issues associated with quantifying Jewish lives and human tragedy. The cluster map shows the extent of brutal violence that took place during the 1942 liquidations of the ghettos, and the different survival strategies undertaken by Jews afterwards. Particularly, it unveils that many individuals fled to forested areas in response to the liquidation of the ghettos, and that attempts were made to escape the trains leading to the Treblinka death camp. This article demonstrates the value in applying spatial tools to research new fields of history, and the innovative ways in which visualizations can engage existing historical research.

Introduction

Before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the Eastern Polish town of Węgrów was home to a large and vibrant Jewish community consisting of approximately 5900 members, whose origins in the town could be traced back to the early sixteenth century.¹

Although hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews called rural Poland home in the years prior to the Second World War, much remains unknown about life and death during the Holocaust in small towns such as Węgrów. The reasons are numerous: linguistic barriers (nearly all source materials are in Yiddish or Polish), a lack of key source materials – since few Jews from these smaller towns and villages survived to leave testimony and certain archival collections were largely destroyed during the war – and finally, difficulties accessing the sources that do exist, since much of the relevant material is buried in local Polish archives. While access to traditional source materials may be limited and challenging for students of the Holocaust unfamiliar with the Polish language and methods of archival research, digital visualization can relate historical themes and events that shaped the lives of Jews in rural Poland between 1939 and 1945 and place these regions at the forefront of our knowledge of the Holocaust.

This interdisciplinary research project, a collaboration between a historian of the Holocaust and a physical geographer, aims to contribute to knowledge of the Holocaust in rural Poland by using ArcGIS software to represent and analyze archival data concerning the murder of Jews during the Holocaust in Węgrów County from 1942 to 1944. By mapping the murder of 3771 individuals, we were able to represent 35% of the Jewish population as it was recorded in June 1940. Through the use of digital mapping software, this article considers the spatiality of the murder of Jews during the Holocaust in rural Poland, responding to the following question: how did physical, social, and political geographies relate to the murder of Jews, inclusively by local German authorities, the Polish Blue Police, and Gentile residents of the area, during the third stage of the Holocaust – after the liquidation of the ghettos – in Węgrów County? Responding to the restrictions in available data, we addressed this question by spatio-temporally mapping the murder of Jews and subsequently analyzing the visible patterns and measurable trends². By considering ‘the landscape itself [as] evidence’ as well as historical data, we were able to consider additional, broader questions that span the field and are of great interest to scholars of the Holocaust.³ For instance: what survival strategies did Jews undertake in the post-Aktion period in Węgrów County? How common were attempts to escape the trains to the Treblinka death camp? What was the role of the Polish Blue Police in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, and how did they interact with the German authorities? Responding to such questions necessitates giving close attention to both qualitative historical records as well as the relevant physical and social landscape, placing historical actors in the particular contexts in which they operated from 1939 to 1945.

Based on the limited available data documenting the murder of Jews in this part of rural occupied-Poland, an inductive rather than deductive approach was adopted. By working inductively, spatial and temporal aspects of the data were analyzed prior to making any hypotheses or conclusions. Once the data had been organized and presented spatially, broad conclusions and trends were able to be discerned, which were subsequently related to historical records and the available literature. We looked at trends of murders based on features of the physical geography, such as forests and waterways, as well as the social geography, including the location of police stations and railways. These spaces and places, which Alberto Giordano terms ‘the material landscape’ of genocide, were ‘essential to the implementation of the Holocaust and inseparable from people’s experience of it.’⁴

The aim of this project was to create a collection of maps, both traditional and interactive, to represent patterns of murder in this rural county. The main result of the project was a map that represents the murder of Jews in Węgrów County through cluster analysis. Titled ‘The Murder of Jews in Węgrów County, 1942–1944,’ this map will be referred to throughout the article as the cluster map. In additional to the cluster map, alternative methods of representing the data were considered in order to account for the individual experiences of Polish Jews during the Holocaust in Węgrów. The benefits and limitations of these alternative methods, the deep map and the story map, will be discussed towards the conclusion of the article.

As this field of research necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration, the goals of this project are likewise unconfined to one area of study. In terms of its contribution to the historiography on the Holocaust in Poland, this project and its accompanying maps aim to interact dynamically with existing scholarship to contribute argument and evidence to the study of rural Poland. Furthermore, by conveying knowledge through visual representation, this project strives to make this history more accessible. In museums, literature, documentaries, and other public media, representations of the Holocaust tend to focus on Western Europe and the larger ghettos in occupied-Poland such as Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. The quickly growing trend in the scholarly literature on the Holocaust in Poland to focus on smaller towns and rural areas has yet to fully develop outside of the academy; knowledge of this subject remains accessible mainly in the form of academic monographs, articles, and conference proceedings. We strongly believe in the value of spatial representation in the form of interactive visualizations and maps as a medium that is readily accessible to those without formal academic training in the relevant fields, including undergraduate students, public history workers, and the general public.

This article engages with a growing interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and geographers of the Holocaust, an exchange which has expanded immensely in depth and scope in the past thirty years alongside the concurrent growth of interest in the digital humanities.⁵ Presenting and contesting various methods of representing the past using spatial technologies is central to this interdisciplinary exchange, a conversation in which we will engage considerably. In the following article, different ways of representing historical data through spatial technologies will be outlined, accompanied by a discussion of the difficulties and limitations associated with the various methods. The intrinsically delicate process of representing historical data, specifically of the Holocaust, without reducing the richness of historical experience and extending the crimes themselves by replicating the Nazi gaze, is central to this dialogue.

Ultimately, our five maps allow us to consider how historical actors – Jews, rural Polish authorities, local Gentiles, the Polish Blue Police, and the German authorities – interacted with local physical, social, and political geographies, contributing to our knowledge of the process of the third stage of the Holocaust in Węgrów County and more broadly of the Final Solution during the Holocaust in rural Poland. Few scholars have employed digital mapping tools to represent and analyze archival data from rural Poland during the German-occupation.⁶ While this study focuses on a relatively small geographical region, this project can be conceptualized as an initial step towards mapping the persecution and murder of Jews during the Holocaust throughout occupied-Poland. Digital mapping technologies, although imperfect and fallible (as are the humans who employ them as methodological tools) can supplement qualitative analyses, supporting existing hypotheses and lending evidence to posit new conclusions of the past.