The Visualizing Janowska Project
Screenshot of gate area in UnrealEngine along with a Zeev Porath drawing of the same site. (Ghetto Fighter's House Museum)
The Visualizing Janowska Project grew out of my research for my book, Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (2024). The camp is an incredibly significant part of the history of the Holocaust that few know about. In addition, very little remains of the camp and a current prison on the site makes much of it inaccessible. My desire to bring this important story to a larger public and my scholarly interests in spatial history, mapping, and digital humanities combined to lead me to attempt a digital reconstruction of the camp that would serve two purposes.
First, a public-facing Virtual Janowska would allow a larger audience to virtually visit the site and to simultaneously learn about its history via primary sources. Second, I hoped to explore this kind of digital history from an academic perspective looking at the opportunities a digital modelling process offers to scholars and also examining the challenges such a format poses.
The Janowska Camp
The Janowska camp was a hybrid concentration camp located in Lviv, Ukraine (occupied Poland during WWII) where the Nazis murdered as many as 80,000 people (the majority Jews) between 1941 and 1943. It served as a prison camp, a labor camp, a transit camp for deportations including to the extermination center at Bełżec, and a dedicated killing site in its own right. Its perpetrators also figured prominently in the second largest Nazi trial in German history.
Despite its significant role in the Holocaust and in the murder of over 400,000 Jews from Galicia, the camp has received little attention from scholars and is almost unknown to the general public. Today, little remains of the camp and there is still a Ukrainian prison occupying much of the site and making it inaccessible to the public.
:Luftwaffe aerial photograph of the camp on 26 June 1944. (NARA)
The Team
I am very fortunate to have benefited from the support of so many partners in this work. First and foremost, the project would not have been possible without the support of a grant from the UK Research and Innovation and Arts and Humanities Research Council. This has allowed me to work with my principal partners: architect Michael Brown and the team at MAADigital. I am also grateful for the support of a number of other organizations which you can find below. Check out the About section to learn more about how we worked together to create the Virtual Janowska.
