Livingmaps Network are delighted to welcome Helen Lewandowski of The Wiener Holocaust Library and Ed Jones from Humap, the online story mapping platform, to present at this Livingmaps event. They will be presenting on the Library’s Refugee Map, which vividly brings to life the intimate stories of hundreds of refugees who fled Nazi persecution in the 1930’s and 40’s. At a time when tragic stories of refugee fatalities are rarely out of the news and heated debates about the political response to migration are raging, this resource drawn from the Wiener Library archives has even greater poignancy.
Summary
In late November 2021, the Wiener Holocaust Library launched its Refugee Map on the Humap platform. Around this time, the news of hundreds of refugees arriving in Britain across the Channel made headlines, and today thousands more are fleeing war torn Ukraine. Journeys made under such extreme duress are impossible to imagine, but the Library’s Refugee Map achieves the feat of making visible those convoluted routes and the families and individuals that made them.
Drawn from the Library’s unique refugee family papers archive, each collection in this digital resource traces a refugee family or family member’s journey, with individual records related to a specific location and period within their travels. Each record includes material such as handwritten diaries, photograph albums, identity and emigration papers, Red Cross letters and audio-visual recorded interviews.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading archives of the Holocaust. Founded by Dr Alfred Wiener in 1933, it supports learning and teaching about its causes and consequences, aiming to be “a living memorial to the evils of the past by ensuring that our wealth of materials is put at the service of the future.” The Refugee Map serves that aim.
Helen and Ed will be joined by discussants Miriam Glucksmann and Anthony Clavane.
Biographies
Helen Lewandowski is Assistant Curator at The Wiener Holocaust Library and the project lead for the Refugee Map. Helen has a curatorial background working in museums, galleries and archives, with an academic speciality in documentary and vernacular photography.
Ed Jones is Co-founder and Director of Humap, a platform to tell stories with maps. He has 20 years' experience in software development, project and programme management, operations and business analysis.
Miriam Glucksmann was active in the student, women’s and Vietnam movements. For many years she researched women’s work, focusing on the gendered international division of labour, as Professor of Sociology at Essex University. Her parents, both scientists, were refugees to England from Nazi Germany and in recent years she has been working on a history/memoir about their different routes to and experiences of being refugees in the wider political/historical context.
Anthony Clavane is the author of two groundbreaking books on the Anglo-Jewish experience in Britain and Jewish involvement in football, Promised Land: A Northern Love Story (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) and Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here? (Quercus Publishing, 2012). He is Lecturer in Multimedia Journalism at the University of Essex, a visiting research fellow at Leeds Beckett University and an associate at the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, Birkbeck College.