Library to offer access to massive archive of Holocaust testimonies

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McMaster University has become the first Canadian institution to offer full access to
videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, nearly 52,000 in all,
contained in one of the largest archives of its kind.

Recorded in 56 countries and in 32 languages-mostly between 1994 and 1999-the
interviews are contained in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's Visual History Archive,
which can be accessed either remotely or on campus through secure access to McMaster
University Library.

The USC Shoah Foundation was established in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg to
collect and preserve the testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.

There are accounts from Jewish Holocaust survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah's
Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and
aid providers, Sinti and Roma survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies and war crimes
trials participants.

Nearly three thousand survivors were interviewed in Canada, with 34 interviews
conducted in Hamilton.

“The testimonies will serve as a remarkable research tool for our students, faculty and
the much wider community,” said University librarian Jeff Trzeciak. “This tremendously
rich archive can and will be used across all disciplines at the University, providing
scholars with tremendous insight on the Holocaust.”

A special launch event is to be held on campus Thursday evening, 7 p.m. at CIBC
Centre, with keynote speaker Branko Lustig, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler's
List and one of the founding figures of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. His own
testimony is preserved in the Institute's archive.

In each testimony, a survivor speaks of life experiences before, during and after the
war. Many show photographs, documents and artifacts or introduce family members
and friends on camera. Approximately 150 of the interviews feature walking tours,
some conducted at former concentration camps, ghettos, mass graves or in front of a
former family home.

“Nearly 52,000 survivors and witnesses have shared their voices, shared their messages
with the world,” USC Shoah Foundation Institute Executive Director Stephen D. Smith
said. “They are eyewitnesses who have testified about what they saw and experienced
during the Holocaust and across their lives. Their testimony is allowing historians to
enter the past as never before, and scholars of wide-ranging disciplines are finding the
archive to be of utmost value to their research. The Institute commends McMaster
University for making such learning opportunities possible in Canada.”

“These unique holdings are a mosaic of experiences that not only speak to the
Holocaust in terms of a historical past, but also inform our current and future social and
moral obligations,” said Noah Shenker, an expert in Holocaust testimony and post
doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and McMaster University Library. “This has a
tremendous influence on how we document and respond to other genocides, including
those in Armenia, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur.”

Acquiring the archive is part of a commitment by the University to collect primary
sources from the Holocaust, he said, such as the development of the Madeleine and
Monte Levy Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and the Resistance.