By using case studies of camps in northern and southern Italy, this lecture shows how former Jewish refugees and local Italians have maintained and forgotten the memories these crumbling structures hold. It demonstrates that the struggle to preserve these old buildings is reminiscent in many ways of the struggle to preserve the lives and culture of the Jewish refugees who once lived inside them. 

In this lecture, Bieke Van Camp presented some of the findings of her ongoing doctoral research on social interaction and group survival strategies in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. She explored how network analysis of Italian testimonies from the oral collections of the Visual History Archive and the Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea of Milan suggests that a very large majority of Italian Jews were deported initially to the same Nazi Lager (Birkenau) during a rather small lapse of time (October 1943 – 1945).