Overview
The
testimonies of the Shoah Foundation Institute's Visual History Archive were recorded over the period
1994-2005 in 56 countries and in 32 languages. While the majority of the interviews are with Jewish Holocaust
survivors (around 49,000), the archive also includes the testimonies of political prisoners, Sinti and Roma (Gypsy) survivors, Jehovah's Witness
survivors, survivors of eugenics
policies, and homosexual survivors as well as rescuers, liberators,
and participants in war crimes trials.
Each
interview typically follows a chronological pattern, with the interviewee discussing memories from
before World War II, then wartime experiences, and subsequently life after the war. The interview concludes with the interviewee displaying photographs, documents, and artifacts pertaining to his or her family and wartime experiences. Finally, interviewees introduce family members and friends on camera. During some interviews, literary or musical works are performed or original works of art are displayed. Around 150 interviews feature walking tours, in which a portion of the interview was conducted at sites of former concentration camps, ghettos, mass graves, or in front of prewar family homes.
With each
interview fully indexed, the people, places, events, and experiences described can be searched
in detail. For example, the archive includes over 1.2 million name
records—those of the interviewees themselves, their family
members and anyone else they talk about in the interview—in
addition to more than 40,000 specific geographic locations, not only
from
Europe but from all over the world. The varied and detailed subject keywords used to index the testimonies are listed the Keyword Thesaurus.
The languages represented in the archive are: Bulgarian (624 testimonies), Croatian (393), Czech (566), Danish (69), Dutch (1,083), English (24,826), Flemish (5), French (1,880), German (931), Greek (306), Hebrew (6,303), Hungarian (1,349), Italian (434), Japanese (1), Ladino (10), Latvian (1), Lithuanian (45), Macedonian (9), Norwegian (34), Polish (1,565), Portuguese (563), Romani (24), Romanian (129), Russian (7,086), Serbian (378), Sign (5), Slovak (573), Slovenian (6), Spanish (1,354), Swedish (266), Ukrainian (305), Yiddish (559).
Content Descriptions :
