Sources
In 2021, Mapping Hiding Places spent considerable time reviewing literature, including several dozen publications on—mostly local or personal—Jewish histories of hiding, and hundreds of online sources. This stream of publications continues to grow as many more are published each year. While this yields an impressive amount of information, it also proves fragmented, and the stories sometimes contradict each other or contain gaps. We did not believe it would provide a sufficient and useful basis for a scientifically sound “theory of hiding.” In 2022, we began systematically building a database of names of Jewish people in hiding and addresses of hiding places used by Jews. Our sources are listed below.
Source 1: Pre-Interview Questionnaires from USC-Shoah Foundation
Our initial source to build the database was the 2,300 Pre-Interview Questionnaires (PIQs) from the USC-Shoah Foundation interviews conducted between 1994 and 2001 with Holocaust survivors who lived in the Netherlands during the occupation. More than 950 questionnaires were made in the Netherlands, the remainder in other countries with survivors who had emigrated abroad after liberation (primarily to the US, Canada and Israel). These fifty binders of paper questionnaires, now housed in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, formed the basis of an initial database containing biographical information (date of birth, place of birth, last address before going into hiding, and, where relevant, locations and addresses during the period).
Many interviewees also provided information in the questionnaires and interviews about the fate of immediate family members (parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins), and this is where we first noticed patterns in the fate of persecuted families. Some survivors described how they were the only ones to experience liberation; for others, the entire family survived the war. After reading hundreds of PIQs, we concluded that the decision to go into hiding was, in most cases, a “family affair” with serious consequences. Deciding to go into hiding often resulted in a family consciously trying to accommodate all family members. Far more often than we initially suspected, the family members, whether or not scattered across multiple locations, survived. In other cases, after the arrest of one person in hiding, all other family members, and sometimes even uncles, aunts, and so on, were also arrested, and virtually no one survived.
This finding, an initial research outcome, led to a different approach: instead of focusing entirely on individual stories of hiding, we should try to build a database focusing on the wartime history of Jewish families.
Source 2: Jewish Coordination Committee
In the fall of 2022, researcher Bert Jan Flim shared a large digital file with us containing biographical information on nearly 25,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1940 who appeared to have survived the persecution between 1944 and 1945. These are lists from the Jewish Coordination Committee (JCC). In 1944 and 1945, the JCC took on the task of registering camp survivors, those from hiding, and returning Jewish refugees so that families could be reunited after the liberation. In 2003, the NIOD (Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) created a digital (searchable) version of these lists.
These JCC lists are consulted by many researchers, but they appear to contain a large number of inaccuracies, which is entirely understandable given the time in which they were compiled. For more than half of the names, essential information (place and date of birth) is missing. Names are also often misspelled, and address details are incorrect. In hundreds of cases, names appear twice, with different spellings, and so on.
An important, but very time-consuming, step is therefore to improve the data in the JCC lists. This is now much more feasible than before by linking the biographical data to online sources (particularly wiewaswie.nl, MyHeritage, Geni, and Jewgen).
Source 3: Jewish Council Cards
The data from the tens of thousands of so-called Jewish Council Cards provide important additional information. During the occupation, the Jewish Council Cards were an instrument of persecution, essential for registering and arresting the deported Jews. Today, that same map index serves as the starting point for many relatives and historians to investigate the fate of the persecuted. By correcting the names from the JCC list and supplementing them with information from the Jewish Council Cards, it is usually possible to determine whether and how a family survived the war. In this way, we can gradually reconstruct the fate of the survivors, family by family. This yields valuable information for relatives and offers knowledge and insight into the history of the persecution of the Jews and the post-war period.
Source 4: Joods Monument
The website Joodsmonument.nl was initially established as a community website focusing on the fate of Jews murdered in or deported from the Netherlands. Since 2010, the website’s editors have also started to include the names and stories of survivors; there are now thousands of names of survivors, and the number is growing every week. We have continuously compared the data we collected from (now hundreds of) Jewish families with the information from Joodsmonument.nl, resulting in numerous corrections and thousands of new names, that cannot be found on the JCC lists.
Source 5: Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles
The next step is to link the names of Jewish people in hiding to the list of names and stories of the around 6,000 people who hid them and who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles since the 1950s. These lists have recently become digitally searchable. We have made a start on this, but this step is also time-consuming, especially because some of the information in the Yad Vashem files was collected in the last century and could not be verified at the time with data that is now available digitally, such as the Jewish Council Card Index. Incidentally, Yad Vashem has a limitation in that only non-Jewish helpers are honored, while many Jews and people of mixed marriages were also involved in resistance work and aiding Jewish people in hiding.
Source 6: Local Partners
We are linking the database to the source material already published, including an estimated 1,200 websites and written publications. The NIOD archive for instance has more than 750 publications that contain hiding histories. We want to work with local partners as much as possible here, partly to carry out the work with a larger group of researchers, and partly because local researchers have access to more sources and can better place the information in the local context.
