Famed Director Contributes Holocaust Testimonials
Shawna Ohm - Associated Press
Sep 25, 2008
JERUSALEM - Visitors to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial are getting access to the world's largest visual Holocaust archive, officials at the institution said Thursday, because of the work of famed film director Steven Spielberg.
Yad Vashem said the three-time Oscar winner was inspired by his own Holocaust-theme epic "Schindler's List" to form the Shoah Foundation, which gathers video testimonials from Holocaust survivors. The collection now has nearly 52,000 testimonials. Shoah is the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Yad Vashem's visual center, part of its Holocaust museum, opened in 2005 and included 100 testimonials from the Shoah Foundation. Spielberg promised to transfer the full archive in the "not too distant future."
Copying and moving the files from Los Angeles to Israel took nearly two months of work, but now the foundation's testimonials are available at Yad Vashem, along with its own 10,000 testimonials.
Friends and relatives of Holocaust survivors and other visitors can search for testimonials by using survivors' names. Michael Lieber, a Yad Vashem official, said he hopes visitors will be able to search using more abstract criteria, like life details or family connections, within a year.
The Shoah Foundation has catalogued in detail more than 90 percent of its 200,000 hours of footage, Lieber said. Copying and transporting the footage with basic logs, like name and country, took about two months, but he said it will take more funding and time to transfer more detailed logs.
"The obvious problem is that it requires not just technological people doing it," Lieber said. "You also need people who understand the content," because testimonials are in 32 languages and from 56 countries, making uniform key words difficult to find.
Yad Vashem also hopes to make the testimonials available globally by putting them on the Internet, but Lieber said this a complicated task.
"One has to notify in many cases the people who gave the testimony to get their permission that they are willing that everyone on the Internet will be able to see it," Lieber said. Also, many of the testimonials are hours long, and the question of whether to use excerpts is also an issue.
Ideally, Yad Vashem hopes to bring the testimonials to as wide an audience as possible.
"Easy access to personal testimonies will allow the public, and especially the younger generations, to be exposed to these materials and deepen their knowledge of the Holocaust," Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, said in a statement. "This is essential in an era where the generation of Holocaust survivors is dwindling, and the demand for knowledge in these areas is growing."
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Copyright 2008 by Associated Press
