United States Holocaust Memorial Museum International Database of Oral History Testimonies
Neal Guthrie, Director, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center
Ina Navazelskis, Program Coordinator, Oral History
As Joan Ringelheim, the Director of Oral History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. from 1992–2007, wrote in the introduction to her 1992 A Catalogue of Audio and Video Collections of Holocaust Testimony, “Testimonies must not be overlooked if the Holocaust is to be fully exposed.”[1]Almost thirty years ago, Ringelheim developed the first systematic effort to compile information about the location and content of Holocaust oral testimonies around the globe. The Museum’s current online International Database of Oral History Testimonies is the latest version of Ringelheim and the Museum’s efforts to provide as much information as possible about the vast and disparate collections of Holocaust oral histories and includes 139 organizations—from museums and universities to local community organizations—in 21 countries, representing at least 115,000 testimonies worldwide. The information was gleaned from questionnaires sent to hundreds of institutions and organizations known or believed to hold Holocaust-related documentation. To date it is the only database of its kind and as such offers the most thorough overview of oral histories about the Holocaust.[2]
History
The first oral history testimonies were recorded soon after WWII by Latvian Jewish psychologist David Boder. His 130 interviews, representing approximately 90 hours of testimony recorded on 200 wire spools, were conducted over a period of nine months in 1946 across the displaced persons camps and refugee centers in Western Europe. Boder’s work was well before its time, both in subject and medium, and contains the earliest extant audio recordings of Holocaust survivors and other refugees. In the years following his project, Boder tried to interest publishers in funding the transcription of his work, and apart from one slim volume and one longer article, was unsuccessful. He spent years transcribing the majority of interviews himself and self-publishing them. Today, they have been translated into English and can be found in whole at the Voices of the Holocaust website of the Illinois Institute of Technology. In many ways, Boder’s experiences were a sign of the difficulties that would frustrate oral historians in later decades, from convincing scholars of their unique historical value, to production costs, to making the interviews discoverable and accessible.
In Israel, institutions such as Yad Vashem, the Ghetto Fighters House, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had been producing interviews throughout the post-war decades. In the United States, recording survivor testimonies began later, often as community projects once recording on audio or video had become more affordable. One of the first was developed in Connecticut.
A grassroots project developed in New Haven, when sensitive neighbors found they knew next to nothing about the survivors in their midst. By the time Yale [University] offered its support, the “Holocaust Survivors Film Project” initiated in 1979 by Laurel Vlock , Dr. Dori Laube, and William Rosenberg, had pioneered the videotestimony concept and deposited two hundred witness-accounts. The Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale was founded in 1981 and opened its doors in October 1982.[3]
In 1983, Ringelheim participated in a conference on women and the Holocaust in New York. Two results of this conference, she wrote, were that survivor testimony was “an underutilized and undervalued resource,” and that very little metadata about this resource were available.[4] In 1984 with a grant from the Goldsmith Foundation, Ringelheim began a nationwide search for collections of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Notices were placed in hundreds of journals, newsletters, and Jewish newspapers; and letters were sent to Holocaust archives and survivor groups. Out of this grew a “master list” of oral history repositories and projects that represented the major sources of survivor testimony in the United States. However, Ringelheim soon realized that this list was only a partial solution, noting, “While it was critically important that information on the location of these interviews be collected, it was equally important to make the content of these collections accessible”.[5]
To gather the information on content, a comprehensive questionnaire was developed and reviewed by scholars in an attempt to gather a broad range of metadata about each collection, including victim groups, experiences, and locations. As a pilot, Ringelheim first sent the questionnaire to six pre-selected institutions with Holocaust oral history holdings before broadening the appeal[6]. In the end, 37 repositories responded to this first questionnaire, reflecting about 6,700 individual interviews. Unfortunately, very few organizations were able to provide the information requested since efforts and funds were being directed to recording the interviews. Cataloging and transcribing could be, and therefore often were, postponed. Only 17 out of 37 of the respondents had any sort of finding aid, and only one collection was completely transcribed although several indicated plans to do so. Despite the lack of details about content, results from the survey did show some universal tendencies, for example that the proportion of men to women among the recorded testimonies was essentially equal[7].
In 1986, Ringelheim together with Esther Katz published these findings in an occasional paper entitled “A Catalog of Audio and Video Collections of Holocaust Testimony.” However, it soon became apparent to Ringelheim that many collections were not included. As the survey was being conducted and analyzed, more and more new Holocaust oral history projects were being conducted across the U.S. In fact, the majority of Holocaust-related oral testimonies were produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Only a few years after this first catalog had been published, research for the second edition began, and in 1989, Ringelheim sent out questionnaires to more than 70 Holocaust repositories and received 43 responses.[8] The 207-page hardback second edition, A Catalog of Audio and Video Collections of Holocaust Testimony, was published by Greenwood Press in 1992 and represents more than 11,600 interviews, as well as a copy of the questionnaire.
As Director of Oral History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ringelheim began working on a third edition of the catalog that would capture information on new and previously unknown Holocaust oral history archives and include collections outside of the United States. In November 1995, she sent basic questionnaires to 255 organizations in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain asking if they held recorded Holocaust-, World War II-, or genocide-related testimonies. From this mailing, 115 organizations responded, among them 9 organizations with Holocaust testimonies previously unknown to the Museum. In addition there were 5 organizations with testimonies relating to genocides and 63 organizations with testimonies relating to World War II. A second mailing in February 1996 targeted approximately 400 archives, libraries, and memorial sites around the world known to contain Holocaust-related materials in order to determine whether they had recorded oral testimonies and to gather detailed information on their content.
An internal database was developed by Museum staff to hold and track all the relevant information gathered and to make it easily searchable, but creating a “definitive” catalog of Holocaust-related oral testimonies faced the same challenges as before. Some institutions revealed the names of interviewees, others did not. Some had finding aids or even published guides; others had little or no metadata on their collections. In addition, the production of oral history testimonies was reaching its peak. Along with many other organizations around the world, the Museum itself made recording survivor testimony a priority as part of its mission to record and preserve Holocaust memory. And in 1994, Stephen Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation began recording testimonies on an unprecedented scale, collecting most of their nearly 52,000 testimonies by 1999.
With this rate of production, maintaining and updating a catalog was impossible. In 2003–2005, when the Museum again contacted the organizations in its database to update information on their respective holdings, it was decided not to produce another hardcopy catalog but rather an online database that could be regularly updated. On March 16, 2006, the Museum’s current International Database of Oral History Testimonies went live online.
Content of the International Database of Oral History Testimonies
The International Database of Oral History Testimonies can be searched by name of organization or by location. Each entry contains the type of organization, contact information, and an overview of its oral history collection, including a history of the collection itself. Across the 139 separate organizations in the database, the great variety of initiatives—from planned academic projects to initiatives by private individuals with little or no institutional support—becomes visible. Thus, the online database provides an overview of the broadest range of efforts to capture the testimonies of survivors, witnesses, liberators, and others.
The database also provides details, when available, about the creation of the oral history collections, media type, average length, finding aids, summaries, transcripts, and access. Repositories were also solicited for information about gender, victim group, and focus of the collection, if applicable, such as ghetto or camp experiences or geographic areas. While some repositories, such as the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale, had published summaries of interviews from very early on, most did not. This, too, is reflected in the database with content information sparsely described for many organizations.
Issues for the Future:
Today, we are indeed at the final hour of recording new testimonies from the generation of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. At the same time, focus is also being directed toward the preservation of and access to the disparate collections of testimonies already recorded. Although many interviews are now being recorded digitally, the bulk of Holocaust oral testimonies, both audio and video, were recorded on analog magnetic tape, and the limited lifespan of this media is inadequate for long-term preservation. Without proper preservation, these testimonies are now at risk of being lost. Digitization is one solution to both issues, but many organizations, both small and large, lack the necessary funding not only to undertake the digitization of their collections but also to guarantee their preservation through appropriate digital curation.
In the past, smaller organizations often turned to larger institutions to store and preserve their analog recordings. (As an example, the USHMM has in its collection some 9,000 interviews conducted by more than 130 outside organizations.) This model is being repeated today for digitization. In fact, larger organizations are taking a proactive role in identifying these at-risk analog collections before it is too late.
In June 2011, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany invited representatives from six institutions with major Holocaust testimony collections to discuss the current status of audiovisual Holocaust testimony holdings, formats, digitization standards, cataloging, and indexing. Surveys of these six institutions as well as discussions among participants revealed that digitization formats and standards vary from institution to institution, as do preservation strategies and accessibility. Working collaboratively, the participating institutions hope to make the various collections searchable through a universal Holocaust testimony catalog. Eventually the catalog may even provide links to listen to or view the digitized interviews directly from anywhere in the world with internet access.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s online International Database and its predecessors have laid the foundation for this work. Although designed initially as a research tool, it can also serve a tool to identify those collections most at risk and prevent duplicate digitization of collections held by multiple organizations, a top priority at a time when even the major institutions are struggling to finance the digitization, storage, and preservation of all of their collections. It can also serve as a way to identify and share metadata for these same collections and avoid duplicating cataloging, transcription, and translation efforts as well as ensure that these invaluable testimonies are preserved and made easily accessible today and for future generations.
[1]Joan Ringelheim, A Catalog of Audio and Visual Collections of Holocaust Testimony, 2d ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), xviii ↩
[2] The database focuses on oral testimonies in audio and video format. Information about written testimonies is tangential and is included only if such they are connected to audio or video testimonies.↩
[3] Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Learning from Survivors: The Yale Testimony Project,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9, no. 2 (1995), 201.↩
[4] Ringelheim, xvi.↩
[5] Ibid.↩
[6] The six institutions involved in this pilot were the Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust Documentation Project, the Buffalo Holocaust Research Center, the Allentown Jewish Archives of the Jewish Federation, the Oral History Archive of Gratz College, the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale, and the Southeastern Florida Holocaust Memorial Center↩
[7] Ringelheim, xvii.↩
[8] Ibid.↩