The city of Szeged, a major regional centre in Southern Hungary, was the main deportation centre for the surrounding villages (Csongrád County) and parts of current Northern Serbia (Bačka region) that time under Hungarian occupation. Many Jews living near the city of Novi Sad in Bačka were ultimately transported to Auschwitz or Strasshof in April-May 1944 via Szeged. In June 1944, approximately 8600 people (Braham 1997, 2: 694), including all the Jews of the surrounding cities and villages, were deported from Szeged in only three days.

The research team aims to restore the identities of all victims deported through Szeged. This reconstruction work necessitates integrating the fragmented information in the numerous but scattered sources, such as ghetto and deportation lists, lists of survivors, the digitized documents of the Szeged and Novi Sad Jewish Archives, interviews with survivors, memoirs, memorial walls, written and oral testimonies.  
The methodological approach targets to create a comprehensive database of the victims deported from Szeged by complementing historical research with state-of-the-art data science. Modern data technologies, like knowledge bases, support semantics-driven merging of unstructured and even incomplete information from distributed data sources (using graph databases). Moreover, the support for searching and generalizing typical patterns may assist historical and genealogical research on the Holocaust. 

The currently introduced project is still ongoing and could serve as a pilot project for a methodology on how to use and, if needed, to replace missing primary documents when reconstructing the history of the Holocaust.

A database on the deportations from Szeged - An international project to reconstruct the fate of Hungarian and Bačka Holocaust victims

The international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age will bring together more than 60 scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies. The conference is organised by the [Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH).](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/) 

[For more information, and a PDF download of the program, please see also here.](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/events/dhjewish-jewish-studies-digital-age) 



In order to meet other participants and for informal chats in the breaks, join us in our [wonder.me room](https://www.wonder.me/r?id=73a12756-8d93-4871-9374-143253bfbf59).