Video History of the Holocaust:

The Case of the Shoah Foundation

The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation was established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg with a daring goal: to record the visual testimony of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses so that future generations will have direct unmediated access to their experiences. Spielberg was moved by the power of oral history during his experience creating Schindler’s List. He was beseeched by survivors coming forward to tell their stories and he undertook a public commitment to record fifty thousand testimonies and to disseminate such testimonies in five initial repositories: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Fortunoff Archives of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut.   

          This project was not the first oral history project. The Fortunoff archive was begun in 1978 and has been recording testimonies ever since. And during the 1980s and 90s as video technology evolved, regional and local projects were developed in many communities throughout the United States and Canada. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began its oral history project in the late 1980s and the Hebrew University and Yad Vashem began their projects, which were audio and not video recording projects, as early as the 1950s. Still, no project of this size and scope had ever been developed regarding the Holocaust and none were as global in reach, especially once the project fully developed.

          It was a race against time.  Survivors were rapidly aging.  Within a few years, the last witnesses would be gone.

          It was the right time. Just after the war, many survivors were anxious to tell the world about their experiences, their tragedies.  They were silenced by disbelief or incredulity.  In mid-life, many wanted to share with their children, but they were afraid of upsetting them.

          Now, before it is too late, these survivors were invited to give testimony to ensure that their stories will be preserved.  They understood that it was now or never.  These memories would have to be shared if they were to go forth to the future.

          Now was the time. Schindler’s List and Holocaust museums had heightened interest in the Event.  The more distant we become from the Event, the more the significance of the Holocaust intensifies.  In classrooms throughout the world we have seen the encounter between survivors and students - the transmission of memories, a discussion of values, and a warning against prejudice, antisemitism, racism, and indifference – become intense.

          I believe that it was Mark Twain who once said that there are truth, lies and statistics. The statistics of the Foundation as of February 20, 1999 are listed below. As of that date, the Shoah Foundation has recorded the testimonies of 50,127 survivors and other eyewitnesses in thirty-three languages in fifty-seven countries. It has amassed 232,906 videotapes, more than 31,978 miles of tape – more than the circumference of the earth. It has collected more than 116,453 hours, which would take a viewer thirteen years, three months and twelve days, working night and day, to see in their entirety. The longest interview is seventeen hours and ten minutes, and the average interview is two hours and fifteen minutes. The archive is diverse.  It centers on the experiences of Jews but includes testimonies from each of the Nazis’ victim groups, as well as rescuers, liberators and other important eyewitnesses. It does not, however, include perpetrators, as perhaps a complete video record of the Holocaust should.

          The Shoah Foundation will complete its task of gathering the testimonies within the next few years and thus have collected primary material for interpretation by historians as well as for use by documentary filmmakers, educators, students and scholars. It will provide a visual documentation of the most evil event of our century – perhaps of all centuries.

Why visual history? The reasons are many.  Let the historians tell us why!

          Without oral histories what would we know of resistance? Mere dates and events, German documents and little Jewish testimony. Does the Stropp Report tell the full story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

          Without oral histories, we would know almost nothing of the death marches, the forced marches of the winter of 1944-45 in which beleaguered concentration camp victims walked hundreds of miles without food or shelter. They were stretched beyond the limits of human endurance. Oral testimony fills in the gaps, it gives us a more complete picture of the gestalt, it individualizes and personalizes the event.

          Without oral histories how could we learn of the life of a hidden child, too young to write and to record but still able to remember? How impoverished history would be if the Holocaust remained depersonalized, robbed of the vividness of individual testimony. The victims were nameless and faceless. The survivors are not.

          Why oral history?  Let the poets tell us why!

          Elie Wiesel has said: “Only those who were there will ever know. And those who were there can never tell.” If there is truth to the first part of Wiesel’s statement – those who were there have an unparalleled sense of what it was like to be “there”– we respectfully disagree with the latter half of his statement. Those who were there can speak and their stories can be preserved for coming generations.

          Primo Levi has argued that a new language was needed to understand life in the camps. Testimony provides that language, that access.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.[1]

Lawrence Langer’s work demonstrates that Holocaust video testimonies provide a unique entrée into the life of ordinary men and women who lived through an extraordinary event and hence ceased to be ordinary. Testimony is the “literature” of the non-elite.

Most importantly, let the survivors and their students tell us why!

The survivors had heard two commandments in the darkness. “Remember” and “Do not let the world forget.” Now before it is too late they can assure that their stories will be preserved. In classrooms the dialogue between students and survivors is electrifying. History comes alive to these students and they hear directly from those who were there. Unfortunately, within a short period of time this experience will not be available to future generations of students. Survivors are dying. Within a decade or two, they will no longer be with us. Video testimony preserves the possibility for such an encounter. It also means that survivors need not repeat their whole story each time they meet with students, but merely be present to clarify and amplify. And when they are no longer available, interactive technology will permit active inquiry of the eyewitnesses by students.

          The last exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presented survivors’ testimonies because survivors could effectively bridge the gap between that world and our world. Their testimony is one of the high points of the Museum’s exhibitions and also creates sacred living space within the exhibition.

Professional movie makers recognize its power and respect the effectiveness of oral history.  In two of the past three years, the Academy Award Winner for the best documentary has been based almost exclusively on survivors’ testimonies.

          Some historians are uncomfortable with oral history. They contend he information is unreliable, or at best far less reliable than documentary evidence or evidence created at the time such as diaries and notes. They are correct but they miss the point. No oral history should be viewed uncritically as historical evidence. It must be evaluated within the context of everything else we know. If some oral histories are self serving, so too are some documents, speeches, memos and other accounts of the time. Oral histories should be considered alongside other forms of documentation and they should at least be considered by historians, subject to verification and classification. However, even historians who most vociferously object to oral history do rely upon it to provide context and texture. They do interview people who were participants in historical events. They read their memoirs and review court testimony. And the material assembled by these oral histories will provide the possibility of a people’s history of the Holocaust. It will be of interest to historians, but not to historians alone. Sociologists and psychologists, students of literature and language, filmmakers and documentary makers will find this material of interest. It will provide unequaled visual recollections of the world before the Holocaust, vital information about the transition between the Holocaust and the post-war years, and, of course, vivid recollections of the Holocaust.

          The Shoah Foundation treats each of these testimonies as precious. We never rush the survivor in an interview. Quality Assurance staff work with each of our interviewers to prepare them. Each interview is reviewed and each interviewer is coached as to how to improve, to better phrase a question or better elicit information -- to make them equal to the task of being midwives to testimony.

          Each testimony is catalogued, moment by moment, in a pioneering way that will allow people not only to see entire interviews, but to explore segments of many interviews through a keyword search which specifies the huge range of historical, biographical, and geographical data, even names, offered by the witnesses. A keyword authority has been developed by a team of historians, geographers, and archivists. The key words emerge from the spoken word. They provide for both lateral and hierarchical classification. They are dynamic rather than static terms and they reach toward the specificity of experience.

          Two examples may illustrate. Terms must be specific. Thus if we organized with the word “ghetto" as a key word, we might get five million citations, and the researcher or filmmaker would face a daunting, almost impossible task. But if we use such key words as “acquisition of food” and then specify place and means:

acquisition of the food

   acquisition of the food during deportation

   acquisition of the food during forced marches

   acquisition of the food during transfer

   acquisition of the food in forced labor battalions

   acquisition of the food in hiding

   acquisition of food in prisons

   acquisition of food in the ghettos

   acquisition of food by resistance groups

   acquisition of food in the          by smuggling

   acquisition of food in the          by bartering

   acquisition of food in the …….. by rationing

   acquisition of food in the           by growing, etc.,

We define place in a dynamic rather than a static way since geographical concepts change over time and in response to situations.  For example, Poland is specified according to time, geographical situation and political conditions. The listing under Poland is:

Poland  1918 (November 3)- 1939 (August 31)

Poland 1918 (November 3) - 1920 (May 12)

Poland 1920 (October 13) - 1926 (May 11)

Poland 1926 (May 12) - 1935 (May 12)

Poland 1935 (May 13) - 1939 (August 31)

Poland 1939 (September 1)- 1945 May 7

Poland 1939 (September 1) 1945 (May 7)

   Poland 1939

   Poland 1940

   Poland 1941

   Poland 1941(June 21)- 1945 (May 7)

      Poland 1941 (June 21) - 1944 (July 21)

      Poland 1942

      Poland 1943

      Poland 1944

      Poland 1944 (July 22)-1945 (January 16)

   Poland 1945

      Poland 1945 (January 17) - 1945 (May 7)

      Poland 1945 (May 8 - Present

Poland 1945 (May 8) - 1948 (December 20)

Poland 1945 (December 21) 1956 (June 27)

Poland 1956 (June 28) - 1967 (December 31)

Poland 1968 (January 1) - 1980 (August 13)

Poland 1980 (August 14) - 1985 (November 5)

Poland 1985 (November 6) - 1989 (June 4)

Poland 1985 (June 5) - Present

Transcribing more than fifty thousand interviews was financially and logistically prohibitive, so rather than prepare transcripts of each interview, a verbatim summary is prepared as well as an organization of segments according to keywords. The entire interview is digitized and entered into the computer so that the keywords are linked to the interview and permit immediate access to that point in the interview where the keyword is mentioned. Thus, there is no need to play the entire interview, no requirement to fast forward or rewind. Keywords can be coordinated with other data such as age or gender, village or town, camps or ghettos, to allow greater comparative information to be accessed. Such a task has never been done before. The system is still evolving, getting more complete with each catalogued testimony and with the addition of each new language.

To gather, to catalogue, to disseminate:

In establishing the Shoah Foundation, Steven Spielberg pledged to make the material available at five repositories. We are not there yet, but the material is now available at two repositories: New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage (according to a Washington Post review, “it forms the most powerful part of the exhibition”) and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where data is received from the Foundation over broadband fiber optic lines. Within the next period, material may be available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. But one hopes this will only be the beginning. The new University-based broadband fiber optic closed system known as Internet2 should allow access to 133 research universities in the United States and some forty more in Canada. Thus, the archive will be accessible in diverse locations by different populations, and this technology should only become more widely available in the coming years.

To gather, to catalogue, to disseminate and to educate:

Once the painstaking work has been done,. History will be incarnated.  It will come alive to students. Imagine what we could learn of American slavery if we could listen to the voices and see the faces of former slaves? Stories are transmitted powerfully and emotionally by narrative witnesses.  The Passover story of the Jews, the Christian’s reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter time - imagine direct access to the testimonies of those who were there as these great religions were formed!

          We have already begun to make the contents of our archive available. Three documentaries have been released as well as a CD ROM. And the Shoah Foundation will not be the only ones to use this material. Our task is to share. Our material is already being made available to researchers and scholars, students, documentary filmmakers and educators.  Our methodologies, technology and experience will be made available to other groups to document their experiences: survivors of Rwanda and Bosnia, cancer victims, those who triumphed over apartheid or segregation, and others.

For the new generation, new ways will have to be found to impart information, to teach values, to speak of our past and to our future. To some traditional scholars, this is a source of discomfort. But creative education need not be the antithesis of scholarship, precision and seriousness.

The task of the archive will be to serve as a resource to preserve and to transmit the memory of the Holocaust, and to educate against hatred and bigotry, for tolerance and decency.  The mission is an urgent one!

There is an ancient Talmudic story about a heathen who came to two rabbis.

First he came to Shammai, a harsh and disciplined scholar and said:

“Tell me the whole Torah while I stand on one leg.”

Shamai showed him the door and dismissed him from his presence.

He then turned to Hillel, the compassionate and saintly head of another school of thought and asked him the identical question. Hillel thought carefully for a moment and responded:

“What is distasteful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” “The rest is commentary,” he added. “Go study it.”

Auschwitz must be preserved.

Why?

“Because Auschwitz is Auschwitz.”

The rest is commentary, important commentary but commentary nonetheless.

Permit me to elaborate. Allow me to say some things that many of you know so well, that many of you experienced in your bodies as you endured incarceration and as your families and communities were annihilated.

Let me first speak as a scholar and then as a pilgrim.

I need not tell you what Auschwitz was, but together we must tell the world again and again.

Auschwitz was the most lethal and the most complex of the six Nazi death camps established in German-occupied Poland. Actually, three camps in one: it was a prison camp (Auschwitz I), a death camp (Birkenau Auschwitz II) and a slave-labor camp (Auschwitz III- Buna-Monowitz and the surrounding camps). The three camps were interrelated; Birkenau and Buna-Monowitz worked together to bring slavery to its ultimate perfection. It was at these complexes that between 1.1 and 1.3 million people were murdered – nine out of ten of them Jews -- and during its most intense period of operation, during the time when Auschwitz surpassed Treblinka as the most lethal of the killing centers, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary primarily to Birkenau in the 54 day period between May 15th and July 8th on 147 trains, where most of them were killed upon arrival.

They were deported after everyone knew that Germany would lose the war, that the 1,000 year Reich would last – at most -- but a dozen years. They were killed after authorities in the West could have known – and should have known – of the scope and the scale of the killing process and of its location at Auschwitz and but little was done to halt the deportations or even to impede their progress. As Walter Laqueur wrote in the book we edited on The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? “In the end the pessimists won. They said that nothing could be done and nothing was done.”

In my own work I have focused particularly on the interrelationship on the structure of evil, the means by which the killers killed and its implications not only for history, but also for our collective future.

As you well know, death by gassing did not originate at Auschwitz; its roots are in the so-called “euthanasia program” that was used to kill those deemed “life unworthy of living.” Six death centers were established where killing was by gas. Gassing was employed after passive, what sociologist euphemistically call “clean” violence such as starvation, and more active means like sedatives and shootings proved too cumbersome to the killers. Gassing and cremation became the preferred means of murder; they were disguised as medical killing. The murder of the handicapped was a prefiguration of the Holocaust. . The killing centers to which the handicapped were transported were the antecedents of the death camps. The organized transportation of the handicapped foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. All their moral, professional and ethical inhibitions had long been lost.

During the German euthanasia program, psychiatrists were able to save some patients, at least temporarily, but only if they cooperated in sending others to their death. In the Jewish communities of the territories later conquered by the Nazis, Judenrat leaders, Jews appointed by the Germans to take charge of the ghettos, had to make similar choices. Unlike the psychiatrists who faced no danger if they refused to participate, Judenrat leaders were made personally responsible for carrying out German orders.