Holocaust Testimonies Live for Students

The thousands of first-person testimonies of the Holocaust in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive movingly illustrate the dangers of intolerance.

Compiled for educational use to help overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry, the archive soon will be more accessible for research and classroom use thanks to a $123,157 grant from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to Rice University.

Rice is one of three institutions given access to the foundation’s complete digital video archive for a pilot project involving Fondren Library. The archives are indexed by subject matter, speakers, and a variety of other data. About 22,000 of the 52,000 entries have been digitized, enabling Rice students and faculty to search for specific segments based on an extensive set of keywords. The videotaped testimonies can be accessed through Rice’s Internet2 connection, a secure fiber-optic network provided by an international consortium of research institutions and universities.

The archive’s videotaped testimonies were given in 32 languages by people living in 56 countries. The foundation interviewed people who lived under the rule of the Nazis or other Axis powers and experienced the persecution and discriminatory policies of the Nazi regime. More than 90 percent of the interviewees are Jewish, but the archive also includes testimony by homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, rescuers and aid providers, liberators and liberation witnesses, and participants in war-crimes trials.

During the 2003–04 academic year, the archive was used in courses on anthropology, religious studies, German, and film studies. One was Introduction to Judaism, taught by Gregory Kaplan, the Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies. Kaplan’s students used the archives to learn what Jewish culture in Europe was like prior to and after World War II. Kaplan divided his class into small groups of three or four students and assigned each group a testimony to view on a computer. Students then gave presentations about Jewish culture and its destruction based on their analysis of the testimony, showing excerpts as an audio/visual aid.

“This approach really moved the students because it wasn’t abstract,” Kaplan says. “Actually hearing people who suffered through and survived the Holocaust deeply affected them in a way that written text cannot because they could see the survivors’ faces and hear their voices. Just reading that 6 million people were murdered doesn’t make as much of an impression as hearing someone describe what it was like to watch their mother get shot or their sister dragged away to a crematorium.”

Such a rich and extensive database lends itself to a variety of research topics, provided that the technology is available to mine the resources efficiently, and the pilot project is serving as a test run for the technology. “Dealing with digital video puts a very big burden on technology,” says Geneva Henry, executive director of Fondren’s Digital Library Initiative. The average testimony in the Visual History Archive is two and a half hours long, so when one student tried to download 100 testimonies for a research project, the computer system overloaded and crashed. “We realized there was a need for something more robust to support this project,” Henry says, “so we applied for the HP grant in hope of getting some extremely fast and reliable processors.”

HP traditionally awards grants to colleges of engineering and computer science, but Rice’s grant proposal for this humanities-related project was “very highly rated,” says Dan Marcek, university relations manager for HP. “We saw a strong connection with the technology that HP wants people to use and the preservation of this transient data from the Holocaust. Rice’s standing in the community as an educational institution and its ability to elevate this project to the world at large made this a socially redeeming endeavor with multiple returns.”

The grant provided three Itanium processors—the highest end of HP’s processing equipment. One of the computers is a workstation and the other two are servers. Database size, speed, and reliability all will be improved. “If you’re studying the role of music in concentration camps, for example, you would want as large a database as possible,” says Charles Henry, principal investigator for the HP grant and Rice’s vice provost and university librarian. “The high-end computers provided by HP can facilitate such sophisticated inquiries with faster and more comprehensive searches than previously available.” He noted that, although the humanities are not usually viewed as technology-intensive, the Shoah Foundation project and HP grant illustrate how interdependent disciplines have become.

Geneva Henry says that once the Shoah Foundation’s digital video archive has been tested and improved at Rice and at the University of Southern California and Yale University, these and other institutions will help make the database available to others in hope of educating the world about the dangers of intolerance.

—B. J. Almond