“Who here has seen Schindler’s List?” asked Susan McKibben, head of project management at University of Southern California’s (USC) Shoah Foundation.
In 1993, director Steven Spielberg told the story of Oskar Schindler, a German factory worker who became an unlikely hero. Spielberg’s experiences working with survivors on set served as the genesis for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which today is the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. It is now in its 30th anniversary year.
McKibben presented the foundation’s work to collect audio-visual interviews with Holocaust survivors at “In Their Own Voices: Documenting and Accessing Survivor Testimonies with the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive,” a June 30 session at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego. She was joined by moderator Emily Bergman, ALA coliaison from the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), and Sean Boyle, president of AJL.
“The institute remains committed to its core purpose,” McKibben said, “the opportunity for survivors and witnesses to the Shoah—the genocide of the Jews—to tell their own stories in their own words in audio visual interviews, to preserve their testimonies, and to make them accessible for research, education, and outreach for the benefit of humankind in perpetuity.”
The Visual History Archive (VHA) is a digital testimony repository with nearly 57,000 testimonies available at nearly 200 access sites worldwide. McKibben said there are more than two million searchable names and 778,000 photographs and secondary materials in thirty-seven languages.
Origins
Between 1994 and 2000, regional coordinators around the world organized interviews in 56 countries with what VHA calls “Experience Groups,” including Jewish survivors, LGBT survivors, Roma survivors, camp liberators, rescuers, witnesses, and non-Jewish political prisoners. “There are no perpetrators in VHA—we don’t collect testimony from perpetrators,” McKibben said.
Before any testimonies were recorded, interviewers and videographers were trained in a methodology developed in consultation with historians, psychologists and experts in oral history.
After the 50,000th testimony was recorded in January 1995, cataloging work began in earnest. A team of more than one hundred indexers spent seven years indexing the original collections. Testimonies were archived minute by minute, using controlled vocabulary for the specific topics, people, and geographic locations discussed.
There are currently 68,000 index terms, McKibben said, the majority of which are geographic locations. Each term includes a definition based on research and consultation with primary and secondary sources and “as our understanding of the Holocaust expands,” McKibben explained, “the index is continuously updated to reflect more inclusive terminology.” For that reason, the definitions include a date to add context.
New technology
McKibben also explained how recent technological innovations have significantly enhanced the VHA’s outreach and educational activities, including the opportunity to bring interviewees to historic sites to allow viewers to feel like they are standing in the location with the survivor. The site might be a childhood home, a ghetto, or another significant place. This way, viewers can learn from both the testimonies and the surroundings.
Another innovation was the Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony (DIT) project. Available through IWitness, its free educational website, it uses natural language processing and conversational artificial intelligence to allow students and educators to converse in real time with survivors.
Approximately 1,000 questions were created for DIT and interviews with each participating survivor over a three to five day period. DIT interviewers asked open-ended life story questions as well as some personal questions. For example, children usually ask what someone’s favorite color is, McKibben said, and the DIT wanted to be prepared for that.
The DIT recordings were subsequently cut into response clips and assigned metadata to match questions with answers, allowing for variations in how each question might be phrased. The result is a natural conversational experience which educates users in a personal and interactive way.
McKibben addressed increasing accessibility through uploading testimonies to other platforms. VHA had uploaded a few full testimonies (between 30 minutes and an hour long) to YouTube; a year later, those videos had approximately 5 million views. “We were kind of blown away by that,” she observed, and as result, VHA started including more and more testimonies on YouTube.
