On Monday, December 15, 2025, the Mapping Hiding Places (MHP) project hosted a research workshop at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This event consisted of several short presentations from staff and students working on the Mapping Hiding Places, the Local Dynamics of the Holocaust and the Online Atlas of the Holocaust projects. In addition, invited researchers from Venlo, Groningen, Zwolle, Zeist, Bilthoven and Brunssum shared their work and participants of the workshop provided feedback to the MHP and Online Atlas project teams. This workshop was an opportunity to share recent activities, results and developments; existing and potential methods of research, data collection, visualization, and analysis; and suggestions for projects in the coming year.
Dienke Hondius opened the meeting with an overview of the Mapping Hiding Places Project. She discussed how the project is continuing to make progress with grants, the website, data collection and StoryMaps. She also detailed MHP’s partnership with the Local Dynamics of the Holocaust project (Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Kunzel, Roy Shukrun, Catharine Aretakis, Ido de Haan), of which the Online Atlas of the Holocaust project (Daan de Leeuw) is part. She also discussed the possibility for future educational, research and public history projects, and national, regional and local partnerships. Then, Jan Erik Dubbelman outlined sources utilized by the project and summarized the project’s current findings and hypotheses. Lauren Hawkes and Robbie Dubbelman presented an updated version of MHP’s website and discussed the project’s mapping initiatives, which includes the Data Maps and Story Maps initiatives.
Max Raulf, a Bachelor’s student at Universiteit van Amsterdam, discussed his process of creating maps for the new edition of Dienke Hondius’ book Absent: Herinneringen Aan Het Joods Lyceum Amsterdam 1941-1943. The final maps display the original addresses of students and staff and where relevant, visualizes where they hid and/or to which camps they were deported. The maps also showed where they died both before and after the war. Daan de Leeuw explained his work on the Online Atlas of the Holocaust, which is part of the Local Dynamics of the Holocaust project (VU and UU universities, NWO). He presented a timeline of anti-Jewish measures introduced at the national and local levels in the Netherlands. He also outlined how the Online Atlas map will visualize the persecution of Jews in several cities and towns in the Netherlands between 1930 and 1950. Bert Brouwenstijn, a cartographer and graphic designer at Vrije Universiteit, displayed impressive examples of maps he has made over the years.
Dr. Eduardo Simao Da Graca Dias, a senior researcher in the department of Spatial Economics at Vrije Universiteit, provided some guidance for the future of the mapping projects and discussed the importance of partnerships and shared goals among various organizations and researchers. Gerrit Netten, an invited researcher from the Anne Frank House presented a map produced by the Anne Frank House, which follows the arrest of the Frank family, the aftermath of their arrest, their deportation and experiences in the camps, and Otto Frank’s return home across Europe after his liberation from Auschwitz. Finally, Bert Jan Flim, an independent researcher presented his dataset about the history of Jewish war orphans, many of whom survived in hiding in the Netherlands. His findings will be published in a book on the hiding of Jewish war orphans and their families in January 2026.
