Epress.am News from Armenia
A video archive, set up 18 years ago by Steven Spielberg, of tens of thousands of Holocaust testimonies has arrived in Britain.
The extraordinary catalogue of personal testimony, collected by the Shoah Foundation Institute since the film director made Schindler’s List in 1993, is housed at the University of Southern California, but on Friday it was formally shared with academics and students at the research centre at Royal Holloway to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The archive footage, which can be viewed by members of the public by appointment, chiefly features the memories of Jewish survivors, but some of the 52,000 videos also tell of the experiences of other persecuted groups, such as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well of those of the liberating troops.
This year, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is broadening its archive to incorporate testimony from survivors of other genocides. It will be adding Rwandan and Armenian testimony to the visual history archive.
David Cesarani, of the Holocaust Research Centre at the University of London, believes the archive will give much needed historical weight to the experiences of survivors.
“It is going to have a huge impact,” he said. “This is an authentic resource for British researchers and historians which will give them access to the experiences of people who have never written anything down. Too much of the history of the Holocaust has been about the perpetrators. The survivors, with a few exceptions, have tended to disappear from the scene.”
Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and his brother James M. Smith, who founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire and the British-based Aegis Trust, noted, “It’s a mistake to think of it as a historical archive. It contains historical data, but it’s a look at how society can unravel and unfold.”
“This is a voice of a conscience of our age. It’s there to help guide us and has a social value of conscience which I really hope can make a difference, and if it doesn’t, we’ll come to rue the day, but it won’t be because the survivors didn’t warn us,” Stephen Smith said.
Compiled from an article published by The Guardian.