Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s)

Project Information

LUBARTWORLD

Grant agreement ID: 818843

DOI

10.3030/818843

Project closed

EC signature date 3 April 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 985 083,00

EU contribution

€ 1 985 083,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - LUBARTWORLD (Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s))

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Lubartworld project is at the intersection of two fields currently undergoing major renewal: the microhistory of the Holocaust and the transnational history of migrations. It combines a transnational history perspective with a microhistorical methodology by reconstructing the individual trajectories of each Jewish inhabitant from the Polish village of Lubartów between the early 1920s and the early 1950s, whether they emigrated or stayed behind, and whether they were exterminated or survived the Holocaust.
The goal is to explore this chronological sequence in its original biographical density by presenting the viewpoint of those subjected to migratory events and the process of persecution in its different stages. Consequently, this project addresses important challenges both methodologically, as it proposes to apply the prosopographic method in a transnational way, and empirically, as it applies it to a central topic in both Holocaust and migration research.
The project’s primary goal is to examine the dynamics of a social structure undergoing major disruption by studying social conditions and the consequences of a group’s destruction. Who fled? When and where? With whom? Who survived and who did not? One of the original aspects of this investigation consists of reflecting on the effects that interpersonal links had on the behaviors. This broaches the question of “who knew what” among the victims, namely by studying the circulation of information among them.
Secondly, this research sheds new light on the history of ordinary relations between individuals and state administrations. It helps explore the different national practices for managing foreign populations and (for some of the countries) persecuting Jews, in addition to their effects in shaping individual trajectories.
Third, the accumulation of sources helps explore how people expressed their social, ethnic, or national affiliation in different contexts or time periods. One challenge is to identify the latitude that was available in a particular territory at a specific point in time, an issue that is simultaneously historical, epistemological, and eminently topical.
Then, the asset of this research is its entirely new, wide-ranging, and rich documentation reconstructing the trajectories of Holocaust victims. This is a key issue, since the few remaining witnesses of this history will disappear in the years to come.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Lubartworld project retraces the social and migratory routes of more than 3,500 individuals across all continents, along with their persecution trajectories. Such an approach requires large-scale archival research. Polish archives pertaining to the starting point of the investigation were systematically collected (State Archive in Lublin, Central Archives of Modern Records, te Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, Institute of National Remembrance, municipal archives). This work is the subject of a doctoral dissertation which is currently being written by Franciszek Zakrzewski, Phd Student in the ERC Team since November 2019. A first comparison of these different bodies of materials was undertaken in an article co-written by the PI and the Phd Student in the Revue d'histoire de la Shoah (2022).
Adèle Sutre, post-doctoral researcher, is in charge of the collection of archival data from genealogical websites such as Ancestry.com or Familysearch. Thanks to these documents, we were able to identify nearly 400 Lubartówians who left Europe during the first half of the 20th century for the US, Australia, Argentina, Brazil...
We deployed our archival exploration on transnational networks and hometown associations at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as in the archives of the Joint Distribution Committee. Unfortunately, the pandemic prevented us from pursuing this line of enquiry.
We gathered a large part of the documentation relevant for the project from International Tracing Service Archives (Bad Arolsen). This allowed Thomas Chopard, post-doctoral researcher, to initiate a research on the survival of 200 Jewish Lubartówians in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
Quantitative data collection was carried out at a steady pace. The inputting of the population register of Lubartów resulted in the creation of a database with 11,950 individuals and more than 200 variables. This work led to the publication of an epistemological article published in Genèses (2021).
All the other sources are also computerized. The team created a set of databases which holds at the present time 74 types of sources, 9,410 entries for individuals and 916 variables. This provides a vast corpus of data for studying the social morphology of Lubartów's Jews and their trajectories on a transnational scale. As a post-doctoral student, Anton Perdoncin supervised the inputting process, the matching process between the several databases in close association with the P.I. Workshops (in Paris and in Roscoff) helped introduce the team to the quantification techniques.
In order to figure out whether individual records with slightly different surnames and/or first names refer to same person, Anton Perdoncin with Pierre Mercklé designed the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex algorithm in the R software. This tool facilitates the identification of duplicates in the project.
Three workshops with the scientific committee took place to discuss the main orientations of the project. The team members presented papers in major international conferences (European Sociological Association Conference, SSHA Annual Conference, Louvain Quetelet International Seminar…). Our research agenda and our main results are accessible to a large audience thank to the website (https://lubartworld.cnrs.fr both in French and English) and our Twitter and Facebook accounts. The monograph published by the PI, Z ou souvenirs d’historienne (2021), gave the opportunity to present the project in several medias (podcasts, radios).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project shifts the paradigm in research devoted to both migration studies in the 20th century and the historiography of the Holocaust. Its originality resides in linking these two domains to better understand the interrelation between migrations and persecutions. The methodological and archival challenge is to reconstruct the trajectories of a group of persecution victims over the long term, across the different places they travelled through. It proved to be possible thanks to the access to an impressive body of archives and the affordances of the digital humanities.
From an epistemological and methodological point of view, this project develops innovative ways of multi-level life-course information (cross-border and inner migrations, citizenship and political statuses, professional positions, networks and family relationships).
The production of a collective biography on a global scale contributes to some prominent theoretical issues: the dynamics of a social structure (by the study of social conditions and the consequences of the destruction of a social group), the variability of social categorizations in diverse contexts, the complex forging of identities (by the study of professional, ethnic and family affiliations, in a context of persecution, extermination and mass migrations), and the issues of showing how diasporas define Europe itself and its connection to the world.

copyright Lubartworld (Emeline Néant)