This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Mapping Mobility in the Budapest Ghetto
WARNING: This application may not emulate properly. View a video version of it here.
Authors: Erik Steiner, Alberto Giordano, Tim Cole, Sophia Paliza-Carre
Budapest was one of around 150 towns and cities in Hungary where Jews were restricted to urban ghettos in the spring and early summer of 1944, and just one of hundreds of towns and cities across occupied Europe where ghettos were created. The process of ghettoization was profoundly spatial -- where perpetrators explicitly used tools of concentration, and segregation to carry out their objectives.
In the summer and fall of 1944, Jews in Budapest lived in a dispersed ghetto (a published list of just under 2000 buildings) and were initially only permitted to leave their residences during a three hour window in the afternoons. This spatio-temporal restriction meant a shrinking in the everyday use of the public spaces of the city, and limitations on the ability of Jews to interact with each other. But in this three-hour window, Jews could breach the segregatory logic of ghettoization in the shared public space of the city streets. How much freedom did this offer?
In practice, it meant that Jews could merely trade the walls of their ghetto houses for invisible barriers formed by the time restriction itself. The fact that there were food shortages and long lines at the markets each day potentially meant that as Jews flowed out of their residences at 2pm, they formed a kind of self-organized ghetto moving along the shortest corridors to gather in the market halls.
This visualization seeks to represent these flows to answer several questions. What form did this new ghetto take? How visible was it to the rest of the city's inhabitants? Where were points of exchange and interaction?
Produced by:
Spatial History Project, CESTA, Stanford University
Lead Investigators:
Tim Cole, University of Bristol
Alberto Giordano, Texas State University
Design and Programming:
Erik Steiner, Stanford University
Audio Production:
Sophia Paliza-Carre, Stanford University
Archival Photo Credits:
Bundesarchiv
Magyar Nemzeti Muzeum
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Yad Vashem
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Special Recognition:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
Music:
"Without Redemption" by Kai Engel
Participation in the 2007 Summer Research Workshop, Geographies of the Holocaust, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies contributed significantly to the development of the research presented in this project.
RELATED VISUALIZATIONS:
Arrests of Italian Jews, 1943-1945
The Evolution of the SS Concentration Camp System, 1933-1945
RELATED PUBLICATIONS:
Building the New Order: 1938-1945
