Colloque international Quantifying the Holocaust, mai 2024

DAY 1
TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2024
CENTRE MALHER (9 rue Malher 75004 Paris/amphi Dupuis)

– From 8.45 am: Welcome

– 9.30 am-10.30 am: Keynote Annette Wieviorka

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

– 10.30 am-12.00 pm: 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 »

– 12.00 pm-1.30 pm: Lunch time

– 1.30 pm-3.00 pm: Counting during the Holocaust 2 / moderator: Eva Kovacs

• Michal GROCHOWSKI (Researcher, Warsaw Ghetto Museum), « Combat losses in the Warsaw ghetto uprising »
• Tal BRUTTMANN (Historian, Université de Cergy) & Christoph KREUTZMUELLER (Freie Universität Berlin), « Wannsee protocol’s page 6 : numbers, geography, fantasy »
• 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 »

– 3.00 pm-5.00 pm: Foreign nations’ view of Nazi crimes / moderator: Robert Braun

• 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 »

– 5.00 pm-5.15 pm: Break

– 5.15 pm-6.45 pm: 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 Shoah in North Brabant. Quantification of social integration and assessment of its effects on survival rates »

DAY 2
WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024
MÉMORIAL DE LA SHOAH (17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier 75004 Paris/amphi Edmond J. Safra)

Measurement as an a posteriori knowledge tool

– 9.30 am-11.00 am: 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 »
• 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 »

– 11.00 am-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 slave laborers at the hospitals of the Ältestenrat in Vienna, 1944-1945″

 – 12.30 pm-2.00 pm: Lunch time

 – 2.00 pm-3.00 pm: Measurement of looting and spoliation / moderator: Yacine Chitour

• 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 »

– 3.00 pm-4.00 pm: How to quantify testimonies? / moderator: Constance Pâris de Bollardière

• 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 »

– 4.00 pm-4.30 pm: Break

– 4.30 pm-6.00 pm: 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 Holocaust »
• 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 »

– 7.30 pm: CONFERENCE DINNER (for the speakers)

DAY 3
THURSDAY MAY 16, 2024
CENTRE MALHER (9 rue Malher 75004 Paris/amphi Dupuis)

 Diversity of quantified approaches to the Holocaust

– 9.30 am-11.00 am: 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) »

 – 11.00 am-12.30 pm: Spatial approaches to the Holocaust / moderator: Maël Le Noc

• Maja KRUSE (Interdisciplinary PhD Student, University of Maine), « Quantifying Holocaust landscapes »
• Na’ama SERI-LEVI (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), « Mapping wandering routes »
• Grégoire COUSIN (Independant Researcher, EHESS, Paris), « Quantification and spaces of Roma deportation. The case of the ‘Ţiganii nenomazi' »

 – 12.30 pm-2.00 pm: Lunch time

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

• Ivan YOTZOV [written with Sascha Becker & Sharun Mukand] (Researcher, Bank of England), « Hope for the hopeless. ‘The righteous’ and the rescue of the Jews »
• Renana KEYDAR (Assistant Professor of Law and Digital Humanties, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) & Maxim IFERGAN (Assistant Researcher, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), « Identifying narrative patterns and outliers in Holocaust testimonies using topic modeling »
• 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 pm-4.30 pm: General Discussion and Conclusive remarks (Scientific Committee)