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.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway University of London where he teaches and researches on the history and memory of the Modern Mediterranean. His work explores questions of transition from empire to nation-state bringing together the entangled histories of Jews, Muslims and Christians from the late Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust. In recent years, his research and publications have expanded to Balkan War refugees, Salonica in World War One, Greek interwar Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Holocaust of Sephardi Jewry and digital Holocaust Studies. He was a member of the scientific committee developing the Database of Greek-Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies and is currently spearheading a digital history project on the social networks of Greek Jewish Holocaust deportees and escapees. His forthcoming book, The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, will be published by Stanford University Press in October 2024.

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The webinar is free and no registration is required.

Topic: EHRI Webinar
Time: Jun 11, 2024 03:00 PM Prague Bratislava

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