The Geography of the Holocaust in Italy: Spatiotemporal Patterns of Arrests for Families and Individuals and a Conceptual Model

Abstract

Holocaust and genocide scholars have long recognized the family as a relevant, if neglected, topic of research. In this article, we examine the spatio-temporal patterns of Jewish arrests during the Holocaust in Italy, concentrating on family patterns and building on previous work on arrest patterns for individuals. Starting from a large historical GIS of individual victims, we devised a methodology to identify family groups and determine if and when family members were arrested together, thereby achieving the objective of studying the event from multiple resolutions and scales of analysis. Results show considerable differences in spatio-temporal patterns for families and individuals, suggesting a higher vulnerability of families to round-ups and marked differences as concerns the nationality of both perpetrators and victims. In addition to contributing to the geography of the Holocaust, the conceptual model we devised for this study can be used in other contexts where the family is the object of research.

GIScience III: Questions of time

“…To place history is to enable specific temporal and spatial analytics. As Le Noc, Giordiano, and Cole (2020) suggest in their historical GIS that documents the spaces and times of Holocaust victims, the analysis of “spatial and temporal closeness” results when arrests were grouped by families in Italy (2020: 581, see also Giordiano et al, 2022 for a similar analysis in Hungary). For historians, this kind of spatial history is perhaps understood as “an approach to history,” where space is characterized as both “an object of study and a methodology (employed to learn more about a distinct object of study)” (Campbell 2018: e44).…”

Spatial social networks for the humanities: A visualization and analytical model

“…The Holocaust disrupted and destroyed many families, so in the aftermath of the genocide, individuals increasingly relied on—and lived with—extended family members to palliate the disappearance of nuclear family members. In previous research (Figures 2 and 3), we have proposed two representational models to: (a) explore the spatio‐temporal structure of families of Italian Jews arrested between 1943 and 1944 (Le Noc, Giordano, & Cole, 2020); and (b) visualize the structure of the spatio‐temporal trajectories of two individual victims of the Holocaust (Giordano & Cole, 2019). Of the two models, the latter is explicitly built around three components of place discussed earlier—location, locale, and sense of place—while the first is especially about extended families.…”