Introduction

The diamond industry in both Belgium and the Netherlands was dominated by Jews. During the Middle Ages, crafts and trade were dominated by guilds that excluded Jewish labor from participation, but no such guild existed for the craft of cutting and polishing diamonds. This meant that the diamond industry was historically one of the few industries open to Jews. During the heyday of the diamond Industry in the Netherlands, which was concentrated in Amsterdam, almost all of Amsterdam’s Jewish families were involved in the trade one way or another. The Amsterdam diamond industry declined during the First World War, but only the murder of most of Amsterdam’s Jews and the concomitant devastation of the diamond trade during the Second World War marked the definitive end of Amsterdam’s influential position in the diamond trade. It was Antwerp that took over Amsterdam’s role as one of the dominant forces in the global diamond market (Laureys 2005; Joods Cultureel Kwartier 2019).

Scholarly work on the Netherlands and the Holocaust shows that three-quarters of the Dutch jews were murdered during the Holocaust, most of them in Sobibor and Auschwitz (van der Boom 2012). In the case of Amsterdam, between 74.3 and 75.3 percent of all the Jewish residents were murdered (Tammes 2017). Men were more likely to be selected to perform forced labor in concentration, forced labor and extermination camps than women, who were more likely to be sent to death camps to be murdered soon after arrival. While this clearly mattered for the gender distribution of Jews regarding the camps they ended up in, Tammes finds that in the case of the Amsterdam Jews, gender differences did not matter much for the survival rate (Tammes 2017).

The intimate connection between the fate of the diamond industry in the low countries and the fate of the involved Jews during the Second World War can be demonstrated and mapped out by using Linked Data. Information about the lives of a large number of Dutch (and also some Belgium) victims of the Holocaust comes from two online databases, namely the IISG ANDB and ADB database and the Oorlogslevens database (IISG 2019). The databases provide information on matters such as when and where people were born, their parentage, where they lived, how they developed professionally within the diamond trade and the General Diamond Workers’ Union of the Netherlands (ANDB) and the General Diamond Workers’ Association of Belgium (ADB) and on when and where people died (IISG 2019; Oorlogsbronnen 2021). Combining such data allows for storytelling exercises about the lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who were at some point involved in the diamond industry and the ANDB and ADB. These stories are essential to keep alive the memory of the horrific fate of the Jews during the Second World War, but also to highlight their great societal achievements and the potential squandered in their murder. That such fine-grained data is available in the first place is due to the professional organization of the unions, which involved well-organized member records, but also to the prominent role played by the ANDB in Dutch trade union history. The fact that the ANDB was the first modern trade union in the Netherlands and achieved significant accomplishments, including the eight-hour working day, benefits in the event of sickness and unemployment and equal wages for males and females, prompted the ISSG to digitize the ANDB’s extensive archive in order to bring its history and achievements closer to the general public (IISG 2019).

In this short data story we ask how Linked Data can help map the lives and deaths of holocaust victims and what the limits of Linked Data are to that mapping. More specifically, we focus on victims who were at some point in life members of the ANDB and/or ADB. Until now, this link between the ANDB and ADB data and the data provided by Oorlogslevens has not yet been made or queried on druid.datalagend.net. Our data story is somewhat funnel shaped, where each element is visualized, discussed and subjected to source criticism. We start by providing the most comprehensive information available for our purpose, namely information about where the victims died. In order to do this we have cleaned the underlying assets with regard to place of death to ensure uniformity and removed al non-person entries in R. We zoom in on gender to see whether the earlier mentioned influence of gender on deportation destination is also reflected in the data provided by the ISSG and Oorlogsverhalen. We then continue with a much smaller sample of people of which the place of birth could also be traced. We subsequently map what the role of these people was in the diamond industry, and who of this small sample lived in Amsterdam and in which street both during their lives and before deportation. We then show the ANDB and ADB membership cards of the individual members of our limited sample to bring the reader closer to the primary sources underlying the mapping of the lives of these individuals. We end our data story with a short conclusion in which we answer our research question.