The remote location of Beshankovichy's mass grave for Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide reflects the exclusion of local Jews during the German occupation of Soviet territories and limits their memory to a few knowledgeable survivors and witnesses. In contrast, local commemorative practices focus on memorials for Soviet soldiers, partisans, and their aides. The paper reveals an incongruence of the place of historical experience on the one hand, and the locale of popular commemoration on the other, highlighting the impact of the Holocaust in Belarus to destroy Jewish history and its memory. The spatial division reflects the trauma of loss as much as shame for local participation in the mass murder. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and field visits, the study builds on a growing field of scholarship on the role of space and place in the construction of memories and identities in the aftermath of atrocity and trauma to discuss the geographical dimensions of memory and amnesia.
Memories of Soviet Jews who were born during the first two decades of the existence of the USSR show that the destruction of the Soviet society and its ideological tenets is central to their experience of the Nazi genocide. Elderly survivors of the Nazi genocide remember their lives based on comparative evaluations of their lives in the Soviet Union and under the Nazi regime, making a strong case for understanding memory as a relational construct. Interrogating the significance of growing up secular and Soviet for experiencing and remembering the Nazi genocide reveals that in order to understand Soviet Jews' responses to German occupation and genocide and how they remember them, we must turn to their prewar socialization as Soviet internationalists and patriots.
Databases are central to the digital, spatial, and geohumanities. There is surprisingly little scholarly literature, however, on the process of database construction in humanities projects. This article describes a process of interdisciplinary database design that emerged in the course of building the core sections of an historical GIS of Holocaust ghettos. The process foregrounds collaborative design, testing that purposely flushes out paradigmatic differences and ontological problems, and revision to incorporate group decisions and agreed-upon meanings into data structures, field definitions, and instructions for data entry. The result is a deeply integrative form of mixed methodology that incorporates ethical standards along with data entry instructions and team training.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.