As a historian focused on teaching and research about the Holocaust, modern Europe, Slavery and Emancipation, the Sustainable Development Goals are not on my mind every day. Yet there are surprising connections. In particular the urgent need to address and eradicate hunger and poverty, and the awareness of the value of the right to family life can be found and preserved in historical research, writing and presentations referring to situations and times of need.
At the beginning of 2020, I was at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on 27 January, for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, known as Holocaust Memorial Day. The UN Plaza outside contains monuments and a variety of artistic presentations remembering atrocities, such as slavery, and encouraging peace and international dialogue and cooperation. Inside, several exhibitions connect past and present. It was a very impressive event with dozens if not hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their children present. All speakers connected their experiences and memories with present-day and urgent wishes and hopes expressed to make historical knowledge and insight about the crimes against humanity sustainable and permanent.
There was significant concern about the current level of knowledge, as well as concern about the amount of common ground and consensus about what to know and what to remember. Among the speakers were fewer survivors of the concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz, and more survivors of hiding and escaping the Nazis somewhere in Europe. 75 years after 1945, the survivors alive today were young children at the time. They evoked and remembered ancestors, their grandparents and their parents.
For the organizers at the UN, actively keeping the memories intact and alive as living history is a work of conscious preservation, in deep awareness of the inevitable fact that within the next twenty years, no first generation survivors of the Holocaust will be alive to tell their story. I cooperated and planned activities for the spring semester with the UN representatives. Due to corona the in-person student presentations could not happen. Yet the cooperation and contacts are intact for new initiatives and opportunities. The same afternoon I was able to present and discuss my research with a large group of Jewish survivors of hiding, together in the organization The Hidden Child foundation. Dozens came to share their stories about the places where they were hidden. Little did we realize that day that this would be – until now – the last event of the organization where survivors came together physically, alive and well, full of stories and memories in one room.
The Mapping Hiding Places research project (at VU Amsterdam and CLUE+) is an initiative which seeks to make an inventory and database of locations where Jews were in hiding during the Holocaust, in order to enable a historical analysis of relevant networks and patterns. The project will put these locations in digital maps. Maps are a powerful tool for transferring and visualizing information. Hiding places were all secret and illegal, therefore this information has been mostly kept in the memory of surviving relatives or of survivors, of helpers and in various books, interviews and other sources. Intensive and long-term research will bring this dispersed information together, to gain more insight into the histories, memories and legacy of Jewish hiding in Europe during the Holocaust. Students in the Netherlands and in the US are engaged in the research. We hope to present some of the first results in a public meeting at VU Amsterdam at the end of January 2021, around Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as later in 2021 during remembrance activities within Amsterdam and the Netherlands as well as in international meetings.
Dienke Hondius
For more information visit the website www.mappinghidingplaces.org.
"It would be a dangerous error to think of the Holocaust as simply the result of the insanity of a group of criminal Nazis. On the contrary, the Holocaust was the culmination of millennia of hatred, scapegoating and discrimination targeting the Jews, what we now call anti-Semitism". - UN Secretary-General António Guterres