Geographies of the Holocaust

Abstract

Elie Wiesel, the most iconic of Holocaust survivors, presents a description that highlights a number of themes that characterize geographies of the Holocaust. In this chapter, three broad approaches are used to explore the ways that scholars have–and might want to–imagine the Holocaust (and genocide) as a spatial event. The first is that the Holocaust was made up of multiple events that took place at particular moments and at particular points. Second is that the Holocaust was a place-making event that saw the creation of new places, ghetto and camp, as well as the reuse (and reimagining) of existing places: the house, the room, the cattle car. Third, the Holocaust was experienced by victims and survivors as an embodied spatial experience. While an emerging literature has explored aspects of Nazi space in both the abstract and concrete, the spatial experiences and spatial strategies of their victims remain less well explored.