Atlas
Every place this archive can put a date to
It runs from a Pomeranian market town to the Indian Ocean and back to the Atlantic, and the shape of it is the twentieth century.
Red lines are the deportations. The dashed one is Oskar, who went to Theresienstadt first and reached Auschwitz nineteen months later. The faint dashed line running south is Kurt. The year on it is the family tree’s and is now in doubt — his own driving licence puts him in Berlin on 30 January 1934. The green ones are Ivone: four hundred miles of railway from Lourenço Marques, and at the end, Porto.
The places, with what happened at them
The same sixteen rows the map is drawn from, because a list can be read straight through and a map has to be clicked.
| Place | What happened |
|---|---|
| Hammerstein (Czarne) | Sally Leibholz born 1847. Georg born 1884 — which is why he cannot be Jacob’s brother |
| Szubin (Schubin) | Sally married Friederike 1874. Samuel 1877, Jacob 1884, Oskar 1887 all born here |
| Allenstein (Olsztyn) | Joachim Luwinski born 1865. A Landwirt |
| Sauerbaum (Zerbuń), Kreis Rössel | Johanna Thimm born 1871; Auguste born 1893 |
| Berlin | Kurt born 1912. Four addresses: Meraner Str. 2, Kommandantenstr. 29, Waghäuseler Str. 9/10, Michaelkirchstr. 26 |
| Sommerfeld | Where Siegfried was hidden, January 1943 to April 1945 |
| Łódź | Georg and Lydia, in the ghetto from 1 November 1941 |
| Chełmno (Kulmhof) | Georg and Lydia, 13 May 1942 |
| Theresienstadt | Oskar, 17 March 1943 |
| Auschwitz | Jacob 26 Feb 1943 · Samuel 10 Apr 1943 · Oskar 16 Oct 1944 |
| Kraichtal | Auguste died 1975 |
| Eixo, Aveiro | Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo baptised 1883 — candidate only |
| Porto | Ivone died and was buried |
| Amadora, Oeiras | Augusto died 21 August 1954 |
| Lourenço Marques (Maputo) | Ivone Mota Figueiredo born 4 March 1922. Henrique born 1941 |
| Johannesburg | Kurt from 1933. Married 1948. Kurt buried 1968 — Westpark, block L, grave 211 |
| Santa Comba Dão, Viseu | Ivone's parents' home concelho — her father of the parish of VIMIEIRO, her mother of NEGOZELA. Named in her 1922 birth assento, read 27 September 2026. |
What the shape of it says
Two families that began four hundred kilometres apart — Jewish at Szubin, Catholic at Allenstein — converge on one city, and inside Berlin on four streets. Then the line breaks in two directions at once. One son goes eight thousand kilometres south and lives. His father, his uncles and his aunt go three hundred kilometres east between 1941 and 1944, and do not.
The other half of the map has nothing to do with any of it. Lourenço Marques to Johannesburg is a railway line and four hundred miles; it is how Ivone arrived, and it is the only reason these two halves are on one page. She ended at Porto, which nobody else in this archive ever saw.
This page used to draw that distance itself, on a plain frame with two panels, because one hand-drawn picture could not hold both. The distance is measured now — and it is the same argument, made by the map instead of by the drawing.