Conference: Quantifying The Holocaust

Quantifying the Holocaust. Classifying, Counting, Modeling: What Contribution to Holocaust History?

When: May 14 – 16, 2024

Where: Centre Malher-Paris 1 University and Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, France.

Keynote: Annette Wieviorka

PROGRAMME:

DAY 1
TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2024
CENTRE MALHER

– From 8.45am: Welcome

– 9.30-10.30am: Keynote Annette Wieviorka

  Making numbers: the measurement of events by contemporaries and their longer-term impact

– 10.30-12.am: Counting during the Holocaust 1/ moderator: Tal Bruttmann

• Maria FERENC (Assistant Professor, University of Wroclaw), “Quantifying the Holocaust real live: Oyneg Shabes group and the numbers”
• David RICH (Visiting Researcher, History Department, Catholic University of America), “The Holocaust’s most thoroughly counted Aktion: Four life cycles of the Hungarian Operation statistics”
• Jan KREUTZ (Researcher, Europa-Universität Flensburg), “Turning murder into a benchmark. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewskis daily reports as higher SS- and police leader Russia centre”

– 12am-1.30pm: Lunch

– 1.30-3pm: Counting during the Holocaust 2 / moderator: Christoph Kreutzmueller

• Michal GROCHOWSKI (Researcher, Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw), “Combat losses in the Warsaw ghetto uprising”
• Tal BRUTTMANN (Historian, Université de Cergy), “Numbers at the Wannsee Conference”
• Arnoud-Jan BIJSTERVELD (Professor, Tilburg University), “One-way trip from police camp Amersfoort to Auschwitz. The second mass transport from the Netherlands, July 16, 1942”

– 3-5pm: Foreign nations’ view of Nazi crimes / moderator: Thomas Chopard

• Paula CHAN (University of Oxford), “Accounting for the Holocaust: Soviet death tolls as wartime methods of understanding”
• Jean-Marc DREYFUS (Professor of History, University of Manchester), “Quantifying French corpses. The statistics of the Délégation générale du ministère des Anciens Combattants in Germany in search of the corpses of deportees”
• Anne SCHULT (Assistant Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis), “From persecution to displacement: the use of Holocaust-related statistics for quantifying refugees”
• Michal KRAVEL-TOVI (Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University; WIKO, Berlin), “The Holocaust as a demographic event: post-Holocaust counting among American Jewry”

– 5-5.15pm: break

– 5.15-6.45pm: Estimating death tolls/moderator: Claire Zalc

•  Oren STIER (Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Holocaust & Genocide Studies Program, Florida international University), “The asymptote of memory”
• Johanna LEHR (Independent Researcher, USC Shoah Foundation, the Institute for Visual History and Education), “Arrests, liberations, deportations. The benefits of quantifying individual arrests of Jews in the Seine department.”
• Frank VAN DOORN (PhD-candidate, Tilburg University), “The Jews of North Brabant. Examining survival rates, scope, and the quantification of social integration”

DAY 2
WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024
MÉMORIAL DE LA SHOAH

Measurement as an a posteriori knowledge tool

– 9.30-11am: The living and the dead: counting in the post-war era / moderator: Emmanuel Didier (subject to change)

• Lewi STONE (RMIT University, Melbourne), “Estimates of murders resulting from the Operation Reinhard death camps” VISIO?
• Tehila DARMON MALKA (Researcher, Head of the Program of Multidisciplinary Studies, Herzog College, Bar Ilan Universty), “Counting the uncountable-missing persons in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Israeli angl.”
• Anton WEISS-WENDT (Research Professor, Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), “The number of Romani deaths during the Nazi era reconsidered”

– 11-12.30 pm : Variations in scale for counting victims /moderator: Audrey Kichelewski

• Claire ZALC (CNRS-IHMC ; EHESS, Paris), “Comment compter les victimes de la Shoah à l’échelle de Lubartów, Pologne”
• Jan GRABOWSKI (Ottawa University), “Estimates of Jewish Losses at the Hands of the Poles, 1941-1945”
• Eva KOVACS (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies), “‘Can we still be normal?’ Hungarian Jewish forced laborers at the Jewish hospitals in Vienna, 1944-45”

 – 12.30-2 pm: LUNCH

 – 2-3: Measurement of looting and spoliation / moderator: Yacine Chitour (subject to change)

• Shannon FOGG (Professor, Missouri University of Science and Technology), “Restitution dossiers and ‘data feminism’: the limits of counting and describing material persecution”
• Markus ROTH (Researcher, Fritz Bauer Institut Frankfurt), “Counting the loot. Counting and quantifying and the plunder of the Jews in occupied Poland”

– 3-4:30 pm: How to quantify testimonies? / moderator: Constance Pâris de Bollardière

• Noah SHENKER (Monash University, Melbourne), “Oral history and quantification: a “mixed” approach to an interview collection” VISIO ? as Lewi Stone ?
• Alexander PRENNINGER (Senior Researcher, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History), “Let them speak: archival convergence and the quantitative turn in Holocaust testimonies”
• Anne KNOWLES (McBride Professor, University of Maine), “‘As they were taken, she fled’: mapping mass removals with individual narratives to grasp the trauma of community destruction in the Holocaust”

– 4.30-4h45pm: break

– 4.45-6.15pm: Archival and museum institutions facing with quantification / moderator: Eva Kovacs

• Dorien STYVEN & Veerle VANDEN DAELEN (Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen), “‘The one with the complete and exact numbers is lying. The one with the best estimations should be applauded’. Belgium’s Jewish population and specificities during the Second World War and the Shoah”
• Rachel PISTOL (King’s College London), “Quantifying the archives of the Central British Fund (CBF) and understanding the full scale of refugee rescue to the UK during the 1930s and 1940s”
• Karen TAIEB (Mémorial de la Shoah), “Les bases de données du Mémorial de la Shoah”

– 7.30pm: CONFERENCE DINNER (for the speakers)

DAY 3
THURSDAY MAY 16, 2024
CENTRE MALHER

Diversity of quantified approaches to the Holocaust

– 9.30-11am: Modeling persecution / moderator: Robert Braun

• Thomas CHOPARD (maître de conférences, Centre de recherches historiques EHESS) & Gabrielle ESCAICH (PhD candidate, ENS/EHESS/IFS-NYU), “Circonscrire l’arbitraire : la place des liens dans l’émergence, l’action et le sort du Conseil juif et des organes de gouvernement d’un petit ghetto de Pologne à partir d’une analyse de réseaux”
• Peter TAMMES (Researcher, University of Bristol), “Escaping Nazi-deportation and temporary protection status: applying causal modelling in a pilot study on Amsterdam Jews”
• Anton PERDONCIN (Researcher, CNRS-CENS, Nantes), “Does class matter? Polish Jews facing persecution (Lubartów, 1939-1943)”

 – 11am-1pm: Spatial approaches to the Holocaust / moderator: Maël Le Noc

• Maja KRUSE (Interdisciplinary PhD Student, University of Maine), “Quantifying the landscapes of the Holocaust”
• Na’ama SERI-LEVI (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “Mapping wandering routes”
• Grégoire COUSIN (Independant Researcher, EHESS, Paris), “Quantification et espaces de la déportation des Roms”
• Isabelle BACKOUCHE (EHESS-CRH), Sarah GENSBURGER (Full Research Professor, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Sciences Po Paris) & Eric LE BOURHIS (Inalco-CREE), “Comment quantifier la spoliation ? Les appartements volés aux Juifs dans le département de la Seine 1940-1945”

 – 1-2pm: Lunch buffet

 – 2-3.30pm: Using artificial intelligence to write history / moderator: Anton Perdoncin

• Ivan YOTZOV [written with Sascha Becker & Sharun Mukand] (Researcher, Bank of England), “Rescuing the hopeless”
• Renana KEYDAR (Assistant Professor of Law and Digital Humanties, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) & Maxim IFERGAN (Assistant Researcher, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “Beyond fragmented voice: harnessing technology for collective listening to Holocaust testimonies”
• Christine LIU (PhD Candidate, University of Maine) & William MATTINGLY (Postdoc, Smithsonian Institution, Data Science Lab), “Where did the Holocaust happen? Locating place in testimonies through machine learning”

 – 3.30-4.30pm: General Discussion and Conclusive remarks (Scientific Committee)