From Camp Survival to Camp Life: Digitising Greek-Jewish Social Networks in Auschwitz-Birkenau
EHRI Webinar | 11 June 2024 | 3:00 PM CET | On Zoom
Since the mid-1980s, the structure of all major audiovisual Holocaust archives has rested on the conceptual triangulation of ‘testimony’, the ‘witness’, and ‘survival’. The audiovisual testimony becomes the organising unit of the digital Holocaust archive and thus determines its serial logic. It fulfils the moral imperative of restoring the integrity of the survivor, yet by downplaying the survivor’s social milieu it promotes an anachronistically individualistic understanding of his/her identity.
This webinar will discuss these conceptual problems and suggest a novel approach to Holocaust audiovisual archives, through the digital reconstruction of social networks. It will present an ongoing project to visualise the social networks of Greek Jews from the city of Salonica/Thessaloniki in the concentration camps based on datamining of audiovisual testimonies and the development of digital visualisation tools appropriate for network analysis. By digitally documenting the forms and structures of relatedness, historians can better understand how Holocaust survivors attempted to reconstruct a social universe in the camps.