While filming Schindler's List in Poland in 1993, Steven Spielberg kept meeting people who had lived through the Holocaust and wanted their stories told. He decided that every one of those stories deserved a camera of its own.
A film, and a promise
Spielberg grew up hearing about the Holocaust. Born in Cincinnati in 1946, he has said his parents talked about it all the time, and his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors who had settled in the city. His father lost many relatives in the genocide.
Decades later, he brought the story of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than a thousand Jews, to the screen. Filming began in Krakow on 1 March 1993. The film was released that December and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Spielberg's first Oscar for Best Director. For its closing scene, the producers found surviving Schindler Jews and brought them to Jerusalem, where they walked past Schindler's grave and placed stones on it in the Jewish custom of remembrance.
Spielberg refused to take a salary for the film. Moved by the survivors he met during production, he used proceeds from it to set up something that would outlast any movie.
Racing the clock
In 1994 he founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Its goal was simple and urgent: to videotape the life stories of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses while they could still tell them themselves.
The founders set an ambitious target of 50,000 interviews, and insisted that every one meet rigorous scholarly standards so that historians, not only filmmakers, could rely on them.
What followed was one of the largest oral history projects ever attempted. Between 1994 and 1999 the foundation recorded nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 56 countries and in more than 30 languages. Interviewers sat with Jewish survivors, and also with Roma survivors, LGBT survivors, political prisoners, rescuers, liberators and other witnesses. Survivors were invited to tell their stories in their own words, in their own language.
Recording was only the beginning. More than 100 indexers spent about seven years cataloguing the interviews, building an index of tens of thousands of terms, most of them places, and more than two million searchable names. A student today can search for a single town, a camp, a profession or a family name and find the minute in a testimony where it is mentioned.
A home at USC
In 2006 the foundation moved from trailers on the Universal Studios lot to the University of Southern California, becoming the USC Shoah Foundation, the Institute for Visual History and Education. Spielberg has continued to support it, and in March 2019 the institute opened a new global headquarters on the USC campus. In 1998 Germany awarded Spielberg its Order of Merit, in recognition of Schindler's List and his work with the foundation.
Its Visual History Archive now holds more than 60,000 searchable testimonies, which the foundation describes as the largest collection of its kind in the world. Over time it has widened its scope to include survivors and witnesses of other genocides and mass atrocities: Tutsi survivors of the genocide in Rwanda were added in 2013, alongside testimony relating to the Armenian, Cambodian, Guatemalan, Nanjing and other atrocities.
The archive is available in full at dozens of universities and institutions around the world, and in part at around 200 access sites. Scholars have drawn on it for hundreds of university courses on several continents. The foundation also works with partner institutions such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Claims Conference and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, so that the testimonies reach as many learners as possible.
“To tell their own stories in their own words.”Susan McKibben, USC Shoah Foundation, on the archive's purpose, American Libraries, 2024
Teaching with testimony
The foundation's deepest purpose is education. Its free website for teachers and students, IWitness, lets classes watch testimony clips, build their own projects and reflect on what they have heard. The foundation says its educational work has reached about 407,000 educators and 27 million students.
Its most striking tool may be Dimensions in Testimony. Survivors were filmed over three to five days answering a bank of around a thousand prepared questions, from open-ended questions about their lives to more personal ones. Using natural language technology, visitors can now ask a question aloud and hear the survivor answer in a recorded clip, as if in conversation. The witnesses include Eva Kor, who survived Nazi medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz; Eva Schloss, stepdaughter of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank; Edward Mosberg; and Peng Zhuying, a witness to the Nanjing atrocities. These interactive testimonies appear in museums from Illinois and Texas to Buenos Aires and Sydney, and in classrooms through IWitness.
For a teenager who has never met a Holocaust survivor, the effect can be powerful. History stops being a date in a textbook and becomes a person looking back at you, telling you what happened to their family and what they hope you will do with that knowledge.
Memory as a gift to the future
The foundation states its mission plainly: to collect, preserve and share survivor testimony so that people understand the Holocaust and build a future that rejects antisemitism, hatred and genocide. The survivors who sat for those interviews in the 1990s are now very few, but their voices remain, indexed, preserved and freely shared.
Thirty years on, the archive that began with a film director's promise has become a classroom without walls. Each time a student asks a question and a survivor answers, the testimony does what its speakers hoped it would: it teaches empathy, warns against hatred, and passes the duty of remembering to a new generation.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- About Us, USC Shoah Foundation
- Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation
- USC Shoah Foundation, Wikipedia
- Conversations with Holocaust Survivors, American Libraries, 2024
- Schindler's List, Wikipedia
- Steven Spielberg, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
