INVITATION | Wednesday 22 June 2022, 3:00 PM CET

You are invited to join the second EHRI webinar, which will be presented by Dorien Styven, researcher and archivist from EHRI partner Kazerne Dossin in Belgium, with the support of Wolfgang Schellenbacher, who is involved in the mapping and visualisation aspect, from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI) and the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW).

Dorien Styven and Wolfgang Schellenbacher will present the project Left Behind: The impact of forced labour by Organisation Todt on survival chances of Antwerp Jews.

Between June and September 1942 over 2.250 Jewish men were deported from Belgium to Northern France where they were forced to work for Organisation Todt, the German enterprise responsible for building the Atlantic wall. Living conditions at the labour camps were poor and, in October 1942, most of the men were deported directly from Northern France to Auschwitz-Birkenau where the majority of them was murdered.

When taken to France, the men left their families behind in Belgium. Kazerne Dossin has created a dataset containing information on the 1.625 Antwerp OT labourers and a sample of 1.500 of their relatives. The aim of the project was to determine the impact of OT forced labour on the survival chances of the families left behind in Antwerp. Macro-analysis led to conclusions regarding the augmented deportation risk of the relatives of OT labourers in comparison to Jewish families in Antwerp in general. Micro-analysis of archival items such as journals, photos and letters led to explanations for this higher deportation rate.

This webinar will focus on both the macro- and micro-analysis conducted during the research project, and contains a brief introduction to the project website containing maps created with ArcGIS.

Please join this webinar on Zoom. 

Zoom details:

Topic: EHRI Webinar

Time: Jun 22, 2022 03:00 PM CET

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82854375998?pwd=NzhtaHR3UmZJR1JwWXZKcE9jN0VHQT09

Meeting ID: 828 5437 5998 | Passcode: 741759

Image courtesy of Kazerne Dossin