Video project helps keep Holocaust memories alive

Net Results: One summer a couple of years ago, I found myself sipping California wine and nibbling hors d'oeuvres in the wisteria-draped courtyard of Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks Studios, a California ranchero-style haven of adobe brick and Native American rugs tucked in a lush corner of Universal Studios.

In among the tanned and attractive crowd a tiny, elderly man chatted with guests. This is Harry, and indirectly, he is the reason this gathering of six international film directors and various guests is taking place.

His voice is low and gentle, and his creased face carries an old but still prominent scar. As a youth, Harry passed through six concentration camps, including those whose names are most synonymous with horror. His scar is the legacy of one of them. Against impossible odds, six times stacked against him, Harry is a survivor of the Holocaust.

He is also one of the original volunteers with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (shoah is the Hebrew word for holocaust), an organisation founded and chaired by Mr Spielberg and dedicated to making sure that, with the aid of digital technologies, the memories of Harry and tens of thousands of other survivors are preserved.

Mr Spielberg founded Shoah in 1994, as he was completing Schindler's List. "When Steven was making the film, he was approached by many, many survivors of the Holocaust," Mr Doug Greenberg, Shoah's president and chief executive, says. The director committed $10 million to enable the group to record testimonials from the ageing survivors.

It was a race against time. By 1994, half a century after the camps were liberated, only 300,000 survivors were thought to be alive. "We believed half wouldn't want to be interviewed because the memories were too painful, and of the remaining 150,000, perhaps half would die" before they could be reached, says Mr Greenberg.

But their collection is now the largest public archive in the world. By word of mouth, spread globally through synagogues, Jewish groups, history centres and other organisations, over 50,000 individuals from 57 countries agreed to be interviewed. The videotapes poured in, for a long time at the rate of 300 to 400 per week, swamping volunteers who worked in 24-hour shifts to create duplicate tapes, then send the originals to a secret, high-security storage facility.

By the time I visited, trained interviewers had recorded more than 116,277 hours of testimony, in 32 languages, which took 13 years, three months and two days to watch from end to end.

"Most of us really have not had a chance to talk about our experiences," says Ms Daisy Miller, a Shoah volunteer originally from Yugoslavia, who spent her wartime childhood hidden on an Italian farm. She has worked with Shoah for seven years, "because this project is so compelling, so powerful, so important".

Watching the testimonials is riveting and most often, heart-wrenching, as elderly people, their faces etched in sorrow, relate tales of ghetto clearances, book-burnings, evictions, transport to the camps, the deaths of parents, spouses, children, sisters and brothers.

One man describes how his father told SS guards that he was 16, old enough to work, rather than be herded towards the gas chambers like his mother and sister. Father and son watched the two walk away to be gassed. Another man acknowledges that his parents had heard talk of the camps. "But they didn't believe, they could not imagine the horror that was waiting for us."

One eastern European Jew, speaking with great emotion, says: "Even when I'm not hiding, I'm still, somehow, hiding. When someone asks me if I'm Jewish, even today I am quite capable of saying 'no'." He whispers the last word and starts weeping.

Testimonials have come from everywhere - including six from Ireland - and still trickle in, a few every week. The archive also contains interviews with other groups who experienced the Holocaust: the Roma (gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, liberators, and people who were involved with the Nuremberg Trials, for example. "But the focus of the archive is still on the Jewish experience," Ms Millar says.

Shoah's recent efforts have focused on "how to shift from collecting to disseminating testimonials", said Mr Greenberg. One way is through vehicles like the documentaries produced by the six directors, and another is through CD-Roms for schools. The real challenge, though, is cataloguing those 50,000-plus testimonials and making them available to researchers, scholars, students and the public.

The huge collection is managed through the latest computer cataloguing and storage techniques - storage technology company EMC is one of Shoah's largest corporate donors, and since Shoah's foundation, has helped to create software to manage the collection, stored the archive in EMC servers, and helped to develop technologies to make it available on computers and over the internet. Donations have come from many stalwarts of the technology industry, including multimillion-dollar support from Unisys, Sybase, Sony and Silicon Graphics.

The infrastructure needed for a project of this scope is massive. Just the initial shipping and handling of the testimonials requires an enormous studio for making four simultaneous copies - one for the interviewee, one for back-up, one for the underground vault, and one for Shoah's vault. The tapes are all barcoded and then shipped to their destinations.

The digitised tapes - 180 terabytes of information, or the equivalent of 180,000 books - are held on powerful EMC storage servers at Shoah headquarters in Los Angeles. A robotic arm can pluck out requested cartridges from a storage rack, plug it into a computer, and then the contents are played back as a video stream to whoever has requested it, across the world. Shoah is part of an Internet 2 project to create high-speed links to the testimonials for scholars at several US universities, as well as specialised viewing centres.

But the initial work is completely low-tech, involving dozens of volunteers who listen to the testimonials and catalogue them according to 18,000 keywords. At Shoah volunteers of all ages sat with headphones and watched videos on their computer screens. They constantly stopped the videos to enter notes into a specially-designed cataloguing program. It takes a full day to catalogue a single hour of testimony, and 35 hours in total to complete a single testimonial. Nothing is edited out.

The cataloguing process is, in its intensity, unlike any other scholarly task. "It's a very difficult job, because [ cataloguers] listen to these interviews every day," Ms Miller says. One woman, who had catalogued 200 videos, said: "Sometimes cataloguers just have to walk out while they're listening."

The foundation is committed to making some of the material publicly available, and several testimonials can be viewed on Shoah's website, where people can also read about the technology behind the whole project. However, about 450 people asked that their tapes not be offered for viewing until after they have died. Some tapes are also too harrowing for schoolchildren.

In the time leading to this week's official commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, I've been thinking about that trip to the Foundation and the survivors I met. The sheer scale of the Shoah project, thanks to those companies involved and the work of thousands of volunteers, means these memories are alive and can be brought to others.

The Shoah Visual History Foundation website: www.vhf.org

klillington@irish-times.ie

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