AUTHENTIC VOICES. DIGITIZING OUR WORDS
MULTICULTURAL CANADA CONFERENCE, SFU, VANCOUVER 2006
CAPTURING A TRAUMATIC PAST:
MY JOURNEY WITH SURVIVORS OF THE HOLOCAUST
ABOUT 10 years ago I was in Budapest, working for the Shoah
Foundation, when I had the opportunity to travel with the local
project coordinator back to her home in Slovakia. Galanta was a
small town that once had a large Jewish population. Only a
handful of families remained. It was typical of so much of
Central/Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. I chatted, as best I
could, with her elderly grandfather who reminded me of so many
of the Holocaust survivors I had interviewed over the years; yet
for me this was something special. Here he was, in his now
modern home, still living among the descendants of his
neighbours.
But I mention this story because of the visit we made to one of his
old friends; a man in his 90's, living in an even smaller village, in
the same wooden house he had grown up in. No plumbing, barely
any electricity, this WAS IT! This was what I had so often asked
survivors to describe, and now, finally I was THERE. I could see,
touch, smell it. After hundreds of interviews I was in that place
and time!
There are thousands of videotaped interviews from these little
towns and villages that were collected and now digitized by the
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. This project,
begun and significantly funded by the Hollywood director, Steven
Spielberg as a result of the response of survivors to his film
Schindler’s List, has what must be the world’s largest collection of
digitized testimonies. Recorded between 1994 and 2000 in 32
languages, in 56 countries, there are 52,000 testimonies. 2840
WERE FILMED IN CANADA. Most are by Jewish survivors, but
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there also represented are Jehovah Witnesses, Roma and Sinti,
Liberators and Rescuers. They will bring researchers, students
and audiences back to that place and time.
I was involved with the Shoah Foundation for several years,
mostly training their volunteer interviewers. Today I’d like to talk a
little about what brought me there, and how oral testimony has
shaped my research.
While oral documents have only slowly gained acceptance within
the academic world, they have become a major source of
information about the ignored of history -- in particular women and
ethnic groups. Many immigrant groups left little written
documentation of their lives and experiences. Of course the Jews
of Canada were a comparably literate bunch. Still, there were
many gaps in their records. What about their participation in
Labour movements, women's organizations, and
landsmanschaften? ( organizations based on hometown ties)
How did they reconstitute families? What was the role of religion
in their everyday lives? Where did they live, how did they interact
with their non-Jewish neighbours, what role did they play in interethnic relations, how did they integrate into Canadian society yet
maintain their identities? How did intermarriage affect families?
Where in the standard histories did we hear the voice of the
Jewish homemaker, the rag picker, the tailor, the corner storeowner? How else to give voice to the anonymous Jew than to
hear that voice?
The late Robert Harney, writing in the 1970's about oral
testimony and ethnic studies, stated that traditional written
sources failed to "answer questions about the intensity of ethnic
feeling and the impact of psychic and cultural baggage from the
Old World on all aspects of life in North America. We now also
understand" he wrote, that ethnicity is :
“as much a dynamic North American invention as it is a
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holdover from the country of emigration. Oral testimony can
elicit the perceptions of personal and group history, of
identity, and of response to immigrant life which shape that
invention and cause ethnic persistence. The record of this
gradual altering of identity and culture forms the interior
history of immigrant groups; it is ethnicity, and it is especially
accessible through interviewing.”
In the late 70's it became clear that several generations of Jewish
history in Europe had been lost with the passing of survivors born
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So projects to record the
living testimonies of these last witnesses of European Jewish
culture were undertaken. The quality of the interviews was erratic.
The methods, varied. Yet time was of the essence, and the fact
that academics were sceptical of the worth of oral documents was
ignored in the hope that they would come round.
The first Holocaust project in Canada was begun by Dr. Robert
Krell, a UBC professor of psychiatrist and himself, a child survivor.
Later, Dr. Krell conducted a series of content analyses on the
collection. In one study he looked at strategies of survival and the
way survivors place their Holocaust experiences in the context of
their lives. In another, he studied how stressful events affect a
group’s internal behaviour. These type of studies have both
personal and global/societal significance
I began working with Oral Testimony in the late 1970's while a
graduate student at the U of T. Robert Harney and Harold Troper
had just published a book called “IMMIGRANTS” which inspired
me to look at the Jewish community. I worked with both of them
on my topic of Male Austrian and German Refugees who were
interned in Canada for several years during WWII as so-called
“enemy aliens”. During the early years of the Multicultural History
Society of Ontario, I was fortunate to be among a group of
students doing early research on various Canadian ethnic
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histories. We learned oral history techniques as we worked on our
degrees.
In 1981 a Canada-wide survivor testimony project was taken on
by the Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal, and I did all the
Ontario interviews. These 80 testimonies are held in the Montreal
archives. I then went to the Toronto Holocaust Centre where I
organized and ran a volunteer project that, between 1986-94,
collected 400 interviews with survivors. These 800 plus hours are
now on DVD and ready to be placed online, thanks to the work of
one retired survivor of the Vilna ghetto who has devoted untold
time to this project.
A few words about the uniqueness and universality of survivor
testimony:
ORAL TESTIMONY may be difficult to rely on for facts, dates and
names. THE KNOWLEDGABLE, WELL-PREPARED interviewer
can elicit ,not only facts about events, but IMPRESSIONS,
ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS WHICH ARE CENTRAL TO THEIR
UNDERSTANDING. What is revolutionary about the recorded
interview lies in its' very humanness. For through the recounting
of the personal experience of an event, the witness reveals a
sense of IDENTITY, PERSONALITY, CULTURE AND
RESPONSE not found in traditional sources. And these
impressions are relayed in that person's exact words -- words
which reveal clues about their attitudes,-- their honesty --,
uncertainties as well as certainties, -- every nuance is there to be
considered.
A young girl watches her mother suffocate in a crowded boxcar
on the way to Belzec. Determined to die, she jumps out of the
train. Shots are fired yet she somehow survives. She returns to
her town to warn them of the certain death that awaits, yet no one
believes her.
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Another Polish woman spends years in cold, cramped
underground hiding places. She recalls what they spoke about
and how they kept one of the men from snoring so the noise
wouldn't give them away.
A Dutch woman show photographs of her brother's wedding. On
his rented tuxedo a large Jewish star is sewn.
A Rumanian Jew listened to BBC new broadcasts in Hungary
before he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. "Why didn't they
broadcast warnings?" he still asks. "Why didn't they tell us the
Jews were being exterminated? We would have hidden, we would
have run away!"
We hear the ANGER that these people still live with; we
encounter memory blocks they cannot explain. THIS IS HISTORY
ON A VERY PERSONAL LEVEL.
I Recall an interview with a 70 year old woman. There were many
vivid images -- the loss of family, the horrors she endured, the life
she reconstructed. Yet, for me, one story stood out from all the
rest. As she told of her early life, before the war, she recalled that
for her the happiest memories were of the sabbath. Every
saturday she would visit her grandmother and her grandmother
would give her an apple. All the grandchildren would visit, and
each would receive an apple: there were 69 grandchildren. A big
basket of apples.
These Stories recreate a past with a colour that traditional history
cannot capture. It is the WORDS of these witnesses that paint a
pix which has the power to TRANSPORT ALL OF US BACK IN
TIME.
An excellent example of how these oral images can be
incorporated educationally and on line comes from the Vancouver
Holocaust Centre. In conjunction with Historica, it has created a
cd rom that incorporates oral testimony with a variety of other
historical records, highlighting how all these sources can be
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combined in an educational digital package. CANADA
RESPONDS TO THE HOLOCAUST 1944-45 was prepared by
Prof. Richard Menkis of UBC, Ronnie Tessler and Freida Miller.
[free download www.canadaresponds.ca] It is a powerpoint
presentation in 4 parts, which introduces the Holocaust then
shows how Canadian journalists, soldiers, and Canadians at
Home responded to news of the atrocities. Included with
interviews with participants, are press reports, artifacts, photos
and newsreels, as well as the impressions of war artists like Aba
Bayefsky and Alex Colville. It provides teachers with access to
notes to go with the basic presentation, and can be used for
history, art, and journalism courses.
Since I think I am the only person presenting on Canadian
Jewish sources, I thought I’d add that the Canadian Jewish
Congress Archives in Montreal holds a collection of 150,000
negatives and 20,000 photos; about 2,000 have been digitized
and are available on request. Also digitized are a sampling of
documents that have been used in exhibits regarding Jewish
immigration to Canada. They have the equipment and a price list
and do digitize documents on request.
Concordia: Genocide studies collected Canadian Holocaust
autobiographies and about 30 of these are completed for an
online library.
Ontario Jewish Archives: putting their Ontario synagogues project
online.
Www.cjvma.org Canadian Jewish Virtual History Archives
My most recent project has been about the post-war lives of
Survivors in Canada. Now, Holocaust documentation projects
usually focus on the war-time lives of the participants. Short shrift
is given to anything after, in particular their later immigration, work
, and family experiences. I looked at several hundred of the
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Shoah interviews and realized I would have to do my own
interviews to get the information I needed for this project. I did this
by looking at the whole interview tape.
But now that cataloguing has been completed on their English
language collection, I would not have to do this. So to conclude, I
will talk a little about why their 120,000 hours of tape are so
interesting.
I will quote from their website :
Providing access to the testimonies is fundamental to the Shoah
Foundation's vision...a team of historians, technology
professionals, software engineers, and experts in information
management developed the Shoah Foundation's cataloguing and
indexing systems...At the core of the Shoah Foundation's
indexing system is a controlled vocabulary currently consisting of
30,000 index terms (the Shoah Foundation Thesaurus). Index
terms include cities, villages, and other geographical locations
(e.g., Oswiecim, Poland) and place names (e.g., Auschwitz
[Poland: Concentration Camp]), as well as experiential content
(e.g., "sense of time in the camps").The Foundation's Cataloguing
Department catalogues and indexes each testimony. The
cataloguing consists of the entry of brief biographical information
about each interviewee.In addition, staff members also index
each testimony by assigning index terms to every one-minute
segment of video viewed. This level of indexing permits
researchers to locate all instances in which interviewees discuss
a given topic in detail, and provides access by time-period, place,
and theme. The names of individual people are also indexed,
using a set of basic biographic data associated with each person
in the testimony.The process is similar to the indexing of a book,
with the index terms referring to digital time code instead of
pages....t takes an average of 7 hours of combined efforts to
catalogue, index, research, and review a single testimony.
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This is the gold standard for digitizing oral testimony. No one else
has the funding to do it. But we can dream...!
And those aged survivors in Galanta? They are gone, but their life
stories and those of tens of thousands of others live on, thanks to
the mostly volunteer efforts of people like us – who VALUE the
power of historical testimony!
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