Scholars, museum representatives, and educators alike are challenged to question our understanding of the past and the ways that the past has been studied. The question remains - how can we, as scholars of a modern era, look back at the same spaces others have already considered and apply new modes of seeing? Digital methods offer an opportunity to look anew at not just where things happened but also to consider what else was present in both a qualitative and quantitative sense. The close listening of survivor experiences can be brought together with the far-seeing, distant views of mapping technologies. Visualizations can be investigative avenues into reconstructing environments for purposes of interrogating the past to understand histories of violence, of trauma, of place-making, and of spaces that no longer exist.1
In this thesis, I use historical research and digital methods to create visualizations that might help us better understand experiences of the Kraków Ghetto. While this project is driven by overarching interest in histories and narratives of oppressed or interned populations, Kraków offers a unique path to studying spaces of confinement. Stories of the Kraków Ghetto are dominated by popular interest in the heroic actions of Oskar Schindler. Yet there remains so much more remains to be studied. The ghetto was located in a suburb of the city that existed before Poland was occupied and many of the buildings inside the imposed boundaries remain to this day. It is a space that both exists and is lost forever. It is impossible to recreate the ghetto, but testimonies from survivors can bring us closer to grasping nuances of what it was like to live within its walls.
1 Forensic Architecture is a research agency that uses architectural technique and visualizations to investigate cases of human rights violations and state violence around the world. Their methodologies and research can be found in a volume written by the group’s founder. Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture (Project), Forensic Architecture:
Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019).
This project does not pretend to construct a simulation of what life was like in the ghetto;
that would be impossible to capture.2 Instead it asks, how can an experience of the ghetto be communicated? Too often perpetrator narratives are dominant. An understanding of the Kraków Ghetto can just as must privilege what survivors remember and share in audiovisual testimony.
The body of collected testimony far surpasses what can be studied or viewed by one person, but there remains a wealth of details in specific memories that can elicit new questions about the ghetto – how it was experienced, where are the unseen spaces, and which sites have greater significance than previously understood?
In developing an encyclopedia of Nazi-era ghettos, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) worked with a definition that formulated the ghetto as “a place where the Germans concentrated Jews” before making case-by-case decisions on other circumstantial conditions.3 The Kraków Ghetto of occupied-Poland was certainly compulsory, though permits for residency in the ghetto were in demand – authorization to exist in a designated living quarter was still safer than trying to find a place outside the city. It was segregated, signs were installed outside each gate, residents were forced to wear armbands, and the Yiddish text was applied to the ghetto’s main gate. This enforced that the space was for Jewish people. Moreover, while the ghetto was enclosed, the residents were not always confined. There was constant movement into and out of the ghetto mainly concentrated on hours when individuals returned from their work
2 I am reluctant to describe components of my project as a simulation and instead use terms like model, illustration, and visualization. Willard McCarty offers a mode of thinking that reminds us that in grammatical terms, modeling is indicative and simulation as subjunctive. Models approximate an unreachable truth while simulations actively operate with a willing suspension of disbelief. Simulations proceed from models similarly to approximate a truth, but also insists on alternatives to the truth. While McCarty’s distinction offers ample opportunity to debate the semantics of how these components should be described, I remain steadfast in not invoking the word simulation. Willard McCarty,
“Modeling the actual, simulating the possible,” in Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, eds., The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-Based Resources, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019).
3 Martin Dean (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Volume II:
Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), xliii.
placements in the city. Hundreds of ghettos existed yet no two ghettos are ever the same, just as the experience of the ghetto can never be conflated into a narrative representative of the whole.
This research creates an opportunity to look at these tough places. A digital map or reconstruction of the ghetto offers a compelling space for both analysis and visual exploration.
The pliable landscape of a digital environment creates room to look at the form of a place with open ended questions - of what ifs, how, and where – without the restrictions of a more traditional approach of merely what happened and to whom. It is difficult to translate textual evidence into databases, yet the process of doing so forces the scholar to work with and embrace the nuances of deeply human events and stories. Through databases and digital tools, material of disparate scale and mediums can be represented together. Volumes of physical newspapers can be broken into data cell entries and millions of cloud data points extracted to create building. 3D models can be layered upon 2D cartesian maps, with plotted points representing individual businesses all coexisting in the same system. The process of constructing the digital project fosters a deep familiarity with the spatial qualities of the ghetto that goes beyond what conventional historical or literary methods can achieve. There is an opportunity to test and experiment with visual
representations and approaches to spatial analysis.
At the core of this thesis is a proposal to explore broader questions of how spaces of confinement may or may not be better understood through digital visualization. While this case study focuses on the Kraków Ghetto, this project also poses the question of whether or not a methodological approach to testimonial visualization can be developed for studying histories of other oppressed and interned communities. The limitations of GIS and 3D modeling techniques are acknowledged in this thesis, but I argue that they can be used as tools for new ways of understanding certain experiences of the ghetto and grappling with the emotive qualities of survivor testimonies.
The visualizations approach the possibility of capturing experience but ultimately rejects the impulse. The final animation gestures at something closer to an experiential illustration of a survivor’s memory of the ghetto. I was able to use digital tools to mediate in the presentation of disparate bodies of evidence. The complexity of testimony and subjective memory demands a multi-faceted approach. Audio editing, database creation, and 3D modeling were necessary digital approaches to managing the auditory, textual, and spatial modes of evidence that create a better encompassing model of the Kraków Ghetto. I operate with the desire to create a digital model of the ghetto that can be queried iteratively, transformed and adapted, by other scholars interested in Kraków Ghetto. The methodology developed for this project explores how studies of other spaces of confinement could similarly mediate and unify traditional modes of evidence to grapple with the difficulties of capturing deeply emotional and complex experiences.
This thesis does not offer change-over-time visualization of the space, or analysis of the ghetto’s development or impact on the city. One reason is that camps had to be planned and constructed over time, but ghettos for the most part took over pre-existing parts of the city.
Instead, this project presents a space after it was designated as a space of confinement, while committing to study some of the individual lives lived inside the ghetto. The visualizations are part of an attempt to capture specific moments - pauses in long journeys that survivors endured during the war. Holocaust scholarship often focuses on camp life, but for the thousands that spent interim years in ghettos, what can be done to aid further study of their experiences?4 Survivor testimonies are rich sources of inspiration for informing us of how the space was experienced. All information has spatial qualities, but they are not necessarily expressed clearly or explicitly.5
4 Even studies on ghettos have a tendency to focus on the evidence from ghettos rather than experiences.
5 Stuart C. Aitken and James Craine, “Into the Image and Beyond: Affective Visual Geographies and GIScience,” in Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood, eds., Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach, 1st ed (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 2009).
Recorded testimonies demand close listening of witness narratives to identify places, however ambiguous and unclear, that carry significance to their experience of the ghetto. The maps and building models in this project create the environment in which testimonies can be visualized.
And survivor narration returns the viewer to moments of individual significance to create a more nuanced view into spaces in the ghetto that are actually places of deep meaning in their
memories.
The first half of the following chapter reviews the history of the Kraków Ghetto and is followed by a section that critically engages with the major collections of audiovisual testimony.
In looking at the narratives of how testimonies are collected and the mediating effects of
interviewer, institution, and digital archives alike, this section aims to examine the evidence at the core of each visualization in this project. The rest of the chapter tracks the way testimonies have been integrated into historical studies of Nazi ghettos. The third chapter looks at
multi-disciplinary approaches and the ways knowledge and methods from geography, archaeology, and the humanities have been combined to study and create virtual landscapes. The fourth chapter presents the three case study testimonies and the spatial qualities driving the visualization. The methodology of the project and the choices made in this reconstruction of the Kraków Ghetto are presented in the fifth chapter. The final chapter considers possible future steps for the project. The argument concludes by evaluating both the process of this research and the impact of the final visualization in future spatial studies of spaces of confinement.