Mapping Jewish slave laborers' trajectories through concentration camps

After victims had been deported from their home countries to concentration and death camps, the Germans transported prisoners selected for forced and slave labor to places where the war industry needed them. The movement of Jewish slave laborers from camp to camp was a central feature of the Holocaust. This paper scrutinizes this phenomenon through the experiences of a group of Dutch Jewish women selected in Sobibor. For most of their time in the Nazi concentration camps, they managed to stay together. Drawing upon wartime and postwar documents in the Arolsen Archives and survivor testimonies, this paper reconstructs and visualizes their pathways through geographic information system (GIS) and cartographic tools. The maps are not mere illustrations; they help us grasp and understand the protagonists' trajectories and experiences. The microhistory case presented in this paper is part of a larger doctoral study which follows over two hundred Dutch Jewish slave laborers through the concentration camp system.