Photo: Martin’s map “Deportation and Revolt, October 1944”; the four Jewish girls who smuggled the explosives to those who blew up the crematorium were Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Ester Wajcblum and Regina Safirsztajn; they were tortured and hung on 6 January 1945.
620 words / 3 minute read
At the annual fundraising dinner for the UK Holocaust Educational Trust, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer reiterated the government’s pledge to mandate Holocaust education, and specified that it will now be taught in schools where it is not already on the curriculum: “For the first time, studying the Holocaust will become a critical, vital part of every single student’s identity.”
But how do teachers approach such a vast period of history and geography in which brutality and murder was the stated Nazi goal? How did it develop and progress in an area nearly the size of the continental United States? And how to see such huge statistics as the lives of individuals, the young, the old, the children, their parents, their families and communities?
How and why did Martin take on this challenge? Beginning in 1959 in a university exchange visit to Communist-ruled Poland which took him to the sites of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Martin became intrigued by the history and the geography of the Holocaust and began collecting documentary material until he was able to publish the first edition of this atlas in 1982. He told me he used these maps to write his main Holocaust history, to be able to see how the chronology and development of the war affected the Jewish communities of Europe. Unlike any of his other 8 atlases, Martin made the decision to add text to describe, elaborate and give context to the maps on each two-page spread.
Beginning with the thousand-year old history of Jewish communal life and culture in Europe and the ages of European Jewish communities country-by-country, the atlas proceeds from anti-Jewish violence before the First World War through every country and region affected in the Second, and on to Liberation . In 363 maps, stories and journeys of individuals and that of communities destroyed by Nazi Germany and her collaborators bring the whole of German-occupied or dominated Europe into view. Both the macro and the micro stories are told – and mapped, including those of revolt and resistance both by Jews and by non-Jewish help they were able to receive, along with the mass murder sites and routes of troops and of individual Jews trying to find a way to escape. The recent fifth edition, which I had the honour to update, includes ghetto and town-plan maps for Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Novogrudok, Kovno (Kaunas), Lodz, Lublin, Cracow and Budapest, along with the death camp maps and the deportation routes to them. The updated index of places and individuals alone covers 32 pages of three columns on each page.
This October 7th marks the 80th anniversary of the destruction of one of the four crematoria at Auschwitz, an explosion that permanently put Crematorium IV in Birkenau out of commission. In this atlas, Martin describes it in his concise and yet complete way:
“In Auschwitz, recently arrived Polish, Hungarian and Greek Jews who were being forced to drag the bodies of those gassed from the gas chambers to the crematoria, having secretly managed to gather some explosives from four Jewish girls working in a nearby munitions factory, blew up one of the four crematoria on 7 October 1944. all those who took part in the revolt were subsequently killed, except for a single Jew, Issac Venezia, from Salonica, who managed to get back into the main camp. In the final evacuation of Auschwitz … he was among those sent to Ebensee, where he died of starvation.”
The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust serves both as a graphic view of the history and an illustration of the unique quality of the term coined to describe what happened to the Jews of Europe: Genocide. It continues to be an important resource and partner in teaching and learning about the Holocaust.
For more on the Auschwitz Revolt and the blowing up of the crematorium: Click here
From Esther Gilbert
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