Video History of the Holocaust:

The Case of the Shoah Foundation

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!