Jessica Wiederhorn, USA Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
- The Shoah Foundation has collected the testimonies of thousands of people who were affected by the tragic events of the Holocaust. In the article that follows, an overview of the Foundation’s development, methodology and philosophy is presented.
The Foundation anticipates that its collection of testimonies, and the scope and specificity of its cataloguing system, will assist researchers working in the sensitive and complex area of traumatic experience. We look forward to the time when this Archive will be available as a resource for research on the subject of trauma in the life of individuals and society.
Please contact Jessica Wiederhorn with questions or comments via phone 001 818 777-6312 or email jwieder@vhf.org
Background
In 1994, after filming Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. His intent was humanistic and democratic: Thousands of Holocaust survivors would be given the chance to testify to their experiences, and each story would be preserved on videotape.
From the outset, the goal was twofold: To give voice to the survivors for their children, their grandchildren, and for the sake of those who had perished; and to create a digitized archive of testimonies that would be catalogued and made widely accessible to researchers, educators, students, documentarians - to anyone with a serious inquiry.
The Shoah Foundation consulted Holocaust oral history projects that had been interviewing survivors and witnesses for years and benefited from their interviewing experience. However, as no other project had operated on so large an international scale, it was necessary for the Foundation to develop an unprecedented outreach program and infrastructure for conducting and videotaping interviews worldwide.
In each region of operation Regional Coordinators (RCs) were hired locally. Many of them were active in the communities in which they lived, and were able to introduce the Shoah Foundation to those communities. RCs were responsible for scheduling interviews and representing the Foundation.
In order to establish a global presence, the Foundation contacted local lay and religious leaders, institutions, and individuals in many communities to seek guidance, support, and an understanding of the culture and issues unique to each country. The Foundation contacted local organizations, synagogues, survivor groups, and Jewish community papers and newsletters. Through announcements, articles, and word-of-mouth, survivors and witnesses heard about the Foundation and either telephoned local or toll-free lines to register with the Foundation or filled out flyers and returned them by mail. Thousands came forward.
Interviewing
While conducting outreach to survivors and witnesses, the Foundation also implemented a comprehensive outreach program for interviewers. Because the Foundation’s mission was to give voice to the thousands who were coming forward, hundreds of interviewers and videographers were recruited and trained. The Shoah Foundation held interviewer-training sessions in 24 countries and established offices throughout North America, Europe, and South America, as well as Israel, Australia, and South Africa.
"Professional" interviewers were not recruited. Interviewers were volunteers who received a small stipend for their services. Potential interviewers were accepted to training sessions on the basis of an application requiring lengthy responses to questions about their knowledge of the Holocaust, the interviewing process, and their motivation for doing this work.
Interviewers were required to attend three- to four-day intensive training sessions covering history, methodology, and practical exercises. The training sessions were led by bilingual teams from the United States, and supported by local historians and psychologists. Simultaneous translators were hired where necessary. At each training session, interviewer-trainees interviewed survivors as a final practical exercise.
Interviewers came from a wide range of backgrounds. Most commonly they were educators, psychologists, journalists, graduate students, and historians. Many were children of survivors. During the four years of the primary interviewing phase of the project, more than 2,300 trained interviewers conducted interviews for the Foundation. From the beginning, the interviewing process was a race against time. The survivor population was aging. Many had died and many were declining.
The Shoah Foundation Interviewing Methodology requires that the interviewer meet with the interviewee on at least two occasions. During the first meeting, the pre-interview, interviewers establish a rapport with interviewees and complete a Pre-Interview Questionnaire (PIQ). This document was designed to gather specific information about the interviewee's experiences, in order to create a biographical profile. The PIQ has been translated into 14 languages and is as many as 41 pages long.
Once the pre-interview is completed, the interviewer uses the information from the PIQ to research the interviewee’s experiences. In preparation for the interview, interviewers familiarize themselves with the interviewee’s history and formulate questions appropriate to his/her age, education, social and religious background, as well as his/her Holocaust experience. The Foundation provides additional research support and specific bibliographies when necessary.
The interview covers experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. When available, relevant photographs, artifacts and documents are videotaped. Relatives are invited to appear on camera for the final moments of the interview. Interviews are conducted in the language of the survivor’s choice, and are taped in the survivor’s home (unless another location is requested) using Betacam SP equipment. The average length of an interview is two hours and 30 minutes, but varies depending on a number of factors such as the memory and experience of the survivor. Every person interviewed by the Foundation receives a copy of his/her testimony for personal use.
During the interviewing phase of the project, the Interviewer Resources Department was established to provide support for interviewers worldwide. "Reviewers" watched the interviews, evaluated the work of the interviewers, and telephoned them with feedback. Coaching was provided for particularly complex interviews and under-documented experiences. The Foundation also coordinated local gatherings for interviewers worldwide. At gatherings, interviewers shared their experiences with one another, received updates about the Foundation, and participated in continuing education.
To ensure consistency in the reviewing process, evaluation forms were created. Special guidelines were developed for interviewing child survivors, the blind, the seriously ill, and those in early stages of Alzheimers or dementia. A toll-free line was available to interviewers seeking assistance.
Interviewers' strengths and areas of expertise were communicated to Regional Coordinators, improving the RCs’ ability to appropriately match interviewee with interviewer. Reviewers, working in every language in which interviews were conducted, communicated the methodology and standards set by the Foundation.
As the Foundation grew and interviews were conducted throughout the world, the interviewing methodology was gradually refined based on the patterns that became apparent through the review process. The reviewing staff allowed for variations in interviewing "style" from one culture to another, but the format of the interview itself - principally the postwar portion of the interview - was flexible depending on the country in which the interview took place.
The interviewing process underwent the greatest modifications in Eastern Europe, where many survivors had hidden their Jewish identity after the war. In numerous cases, they never told their children they were Jewish. Because the postwar years were politically unstable, people were not accustomed to talking about the personal details of their lives. Moreover, these survivors had not emigrated but were living in the countries - the very towns and villages - in which the Holocaust had taken place. The participation of local police and local authorities in persecuting the Jews was central to Nazi policy and in many cases the persecutors and their victims still lived in close proximity.
Survivors were often uncomfortable talking about religious life even in the prewar segment of the testimony. In the postwar segment, the customary reflective questions asked in the United States or Israel about what it means to be Jewish today, were generally not included in the interview. Children of survivors, who appeared in many American and Israeli testimonies, often didn't participate.
Although the great majority of the interviews in the Shoah Foundation collection are with Jewish survivors, the Archive also includes Sinti/Roma (Gypsy), Jehovah's Witness, and homosexual survivors, as well as survivors of eugenics policies, rescue and aid providers, liberators, political prisoners and war crimes trial participants. In January of 1999, the Foundation reached a milestone of collecting 50,000 testimonies. Interviews have been conducted in 57 countries and in 32 languages. Today the Foundation’s focus has shifted to cataloguing its testimonies, conducting interviews only on a limited basis, primarily in Israel and Hungary.
Cataloguing
In order to navigate through more than 115,000 hours of digitized testimonies, the Foundation developed a cataloguing system with the help of historians, archivists, technology professionals, and software engineers. This system was specifically designed to index the unique content of Holocaust testimonies. It allows oral testimony to be indexed with a great degree of specificity, depth, and scope.
In the cataloguing process, testimonies are divided into three- to nine-minute narrative units called ‘segments.’ Cataloguers apply index terms to mark the segments using a controlled vocabulary of more than 15,000 index terms (the Shoah Foundation Thesaurus) consisting of names, events, geographical locations and other concepts. Generally, two categories of index terms are applied to the material: geographical and experiential. Geographical categories are organized in a hierarchy from the largest components (e.g., continents, countries and cities) to the smallest components (e.g., ghettos, camps and barracks). Experiential categories are exemplified by terms such as "seizure of Jewish property," "interaction with family members in the camps" and "environmental conditions during deportation."
After creating segments and assigning index terms, cataloguers write short descriptions for each segment, providing context for all of the assigned index terms. In order to provide context for the testimony as a whole, cataloguers compose a one-page summary of each testimony consisting of the survivor’s experiences before, during and after the war. This methodology will enable end-users to search within the contents of each interview, as well as within the contents of the entire Archive.
On average, a testimony requires approximately 35 hours to index and summarize. To ensure quality, an indexed testimony goes through a review process during which Reviewers verify the proper use of the index terms, and ensure that descriptions and summaries are consistent in tone. Historical Authority Supervisors oversee the review process and work with Reviewers and methodology supervisors, among others, to develop and maintain the continually evolving Shoah Foundation Thesaurus.
Technology
The Shoah Foundation operates a computer system capable of digitally storing and serving its collection of more than 50,000 testimonies. It is capable of storing more than 150 terabytes of information, the equivalent of 100 million floppy disks. To deliver the testimonies, the Technology Department has built an infrastructure that allows for high-quality video to be sent over secure fiber-optic networks to remote viewing sites in museums and public institutions.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is the first institution to receive Foundation testimonies via a secure fiber-optic network. It will also be the first institution to provide digital accessibility to the Shoah Foundation’s Archive for public viewing. This high-speed network for sending video and other digital information to remote viewing sites will next link the Shoah Foundation’s Archive with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Distribution of the archive
With much of the cataloguing of the testimonies still ahead, the full Archive is not yet available to the public. During this period, the Shoah Foundation is assessing the educational possibilities of the material it has collected.
In the meantime, the Foundation is developing innovative ways to disseminate its materials. The inclusion of testimonies in museum exhibits is furthering the Foundation’s goal to reach large audiences worldwide.
Excerpts from Shoah Foundation testimonies have been interwoven into the permanent video exhibits of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York. The survivors’ personal accounts bring the exhibits to life, illustrating Jewish life before, during, and after the war.
Clips from some of the Shoah Foundation’s French-language testimonies are included in an exhibit about the events of the Nuit de Cristal ("Kristallnacht") at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris.
Summaries from the catalogued child survivor testimonies will soon be incorporated into the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s "Passport Program," which assigns a child’s identity to a visitor upon entering the exhibit. Visitors to this exhibit who are interested in learning more about the children’s experiences will be able to do so by watching their testimonies in the Wiesenthal Center’s Viewing rooms.
Educational products
The Shoah Foundation has produced three documentary films, Survivors of the Holocaust, The Lost Children of Berlin, and The Last Days, based on testimonies in its Archive. Study guides for each film, as well as a companion book to The Last Days, have been published.
The Foundation’s first interactive educational CD-ROM, Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, is now being integrated into Holocaust education and tolerance curricula in high schools across the United States. Currently, the Foundation is working in cooperation with a German multimedia company on a German-language CD-ROM, scheduled to be completed in early 2000.
Conclusion
As the survivors and witnesses sit before interviewer and camera, there are moments in which they are not so much remembering as reliving. The circumstances of their lives may vary, their experiences are wide-ranging, and they convey their memories in very individual ways. But always, the historical events they recount are also the accounts of their own personal tragedies. This is the commonality the testimonies share, no matter what the language or the country in which the survivor testifies.
It is anticipated that the Foundation's Archive, once catalogued, will provide research opportunities of a scope and scale beyond our expectation or imagination. The overall social impact of the Foundation's work is yet to be realized, but this and other oral history projects have already shown that the voice of the Holocaust survivor is an essential addition to the historical record. This collection of oral histories will stand in perpetuity as a powerful antidote to a collective historical understanding whose details are often clouded by abstraction, and have often been based on the records of the perpetrators.
But whatever the ultimate social benefits may be, an already-realized outcome of the project is that through it, more than 50,000 people have been given a chance to tell their stories and leave a lasting record of their memories of the Shoah.
Appendix 1
Content of the Archive
A wide range of Holocaust survivor and witness experiences is included in the Shoah Foundation Archive.
Included in the Archive are:
- ghetto and camp survivors
- child survivors (including children born in hiding, in camps or in ghettos)
- those who survived by hiding
- those who lived under false identities
- members of the resistance (including partisans)
- political prisoners
- refugees from Nazi Germany or German-occupied territories
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- Sinti/Roma (Gypsy) survivors
- homosexual survivors
- survivors of eugenics policies
- Jehovah’s Witness survivors
- rescuers and aid providers
- liberators and liberation witnesses
- war crimes trials participants
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Appendix 2
Geographic breakdown
Interviews have been conducted in the following countries:
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Republic of Belarus
Belgium
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Republic of Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Republic of Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Republic of Estonia
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Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Republic of Hungary
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Republic of Kazakhstan
Republic of Latvia
Republic of Lithuania
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
Mexico
Republic of Moldova
The Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
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Peru
Republic of Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russian Federation
Slovakia
Republic of Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Republic of Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Zimbabwe
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Appendix 3
Language of Testimonies of Archive
| Bulgarian |
623 |
1,24% |
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| Croatian |
397 |
0,79% |
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| Czech |
579 |
1,15% |
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| Danish |
72 |
0,14% |
|
| Dutch |
1081 |
2,15% |
|
| English |
24579 |
48,94% |
|
| Flemish |
5 |
0,01% |
|
| French |
1903 |
3,79% |
|
| German |
925 |
1,84% |
|
| Greek |
306 |
0,61% |
|
| Hebrew |
6092 |
12,13% |
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| Hungarian |
575 |
1,14% |
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| Italian |
433 |
0,86% |
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| Japanese |
1 |
0,00% |
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| Ladino |
10 |
0,02% |
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| Latvian |
6 |
0,01% |
|
| Lithuanian |
45 |
0,09% |
|
| Macedonian |
9 |
0,02% |
|
| Norwegian |
35 |
0,07% |
|
| Polish |
1643 |
3,27% |
|
| Portuguese |
564 |
1,12% |
|
| Romani |
28 |
0,06% |
|
| Romanian |
76 |
0,15% |
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| Russian |
6829 |
13,60% |
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| Serbian |
377 |
0,75% |
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| Sign (American) |
3 |
0,01% |
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| Slovak |
570 |
1,14% |
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| Slovenian |
6 |
0,01% |
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| Spanish |
1349 |
2,69% |
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| Swedish |
274 |
0,55% |
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| Ukrainian |
312 |
0,62% |
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| Yiddish |
51 |
1,02% |
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| Total |
50220 |
100,00% |
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Short biographical note Jessica Wiederhorn lives in the United States and is a staff member of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Jessica Wiederhorn
Email jwieder@vhf.org
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
Shoah Foundation
P.O.Box 3168
Los Angeles, CA 90078-3168
USA
Phone 001 818 777-4673
URL http://www.vhf.org/
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Citation Jessica Wiederhorn, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL TraumaResearch.net/focus1/wieder.htm
Copyright © 2000, Jessica Wiederhorn and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. All rights remain with the author. May not be printed or quoted without permission by the author. For any permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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