SHOAH FOUNDATION CONFERENCE

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You might recognize this as the theme music to Steven Spielbergs 1993 Schindlers List. The Oscar winning film spawned years of Holocaust memorializing, and now, 52,000 archived testimonials of survivors.
Spielberg started the Shoah Foundation a year after his film release. The organization has now spent over 15 years finding Holocaust survivors, videoing their life stories, and using them to teach at universities across the world.
(Talia Cohen, Associate Director of International Programs for the Shoah Foundation Institute)
So Steven Spielberg finished filming Schindlers list and as a result began this organization. It was as he was filming that he realized he wanted to do this.
Talia Cohen is one of directors for the Shoah Foundation. The Foundation teamed up with USC in 2006 and today, Cohen is supervising a 2-day conference for professors, librarians and archivists from 25 universities to see how the tapes are being used in the classroom.
(Talia Cohen, Associate Director of International Programs for the Shoah Foundation Institute)
It’s a huge milestone for us
Our goal is not to have these dusty tapes sitting on a shelf but that it is a real living archive that is used so that their stories continue to be heard and learned from and that they as survivors are also educators who can continue to educate for generations to come.
Roy Shwartzman is one professor who has integrated the archived videos into his curriculum at the University of North Carolina.
(Roy Shwartzman, Professor of Communication Studies at UNC)
The audio visual archives show that the Holocaust is a continuing trend of experiences that transcends time. And it transcends the particularity of the actual survivors experiences.
He uses these videos to make Holocaust stories jump off the page in a way that written documentation could never do.
(Roy Shwartzman, Professor of Communication Studies at UNC)
What we are dealing with are living organic narratives
(Archives)
And then came the 19 March that the Germans occupied the territory and they came in and that was the beginning of the end.
That was Auschwitz survivor, Ester Orwitz, who is just one of the thousands of documented survivors whose stories are now available in 32 languages. The Foundation has collected testimonials from 56 countries too.
(Talia Cohen, Associate Director of International Programs for the Shoah Foundation Institute)
It gives a personal dimension to history and helps students of any age relate to what they are hearing.
The testimonials have captured the stories of Jewish survivors as well as homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, liberators, political prisoners, and others.
Tracy Oppenheimer, Annenberg Radio News