Na’ama Seri-Levi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alfred Landecker Digital Humanities Lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Dr. Renana Keydar. She has completed her dissertation at the Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Eli Lederhendler and Prof. Yfaat Weiss. 

The project “Remapping Wandering Routes: Exile and Nomadism among Polish-Jewish Refugees during World War II” deals with the biggest group of Polish-Jewish survivors, about 230,000 people, who spent the war as refugees in the Soviet Union. The project focuses on the geographical and spatial experiences and aspects of this story. Using tools from Digital Humanities, Seri-Levi will analyze and map the flight and exile routes of the refugees and deportees from Poland toward the Soviet Union and within it during WWII for the first time, by examining personal and familial narratives appearing in questionnaires, early and late testimonies, and memoirs found in archival materials and other sources written immediately after the war and onward. By visualizing the geographics of this experience, the goal of this project is to create an open-access map that will reveal the vast dispersion of these refugees throughout the Soviet Union.