In 1994, after finishing filming on
Schindler's List,
Steven Spielberg established
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to gather firsthand accounts from
Holocaust survivors, liberators and witnesses...before it was too late. It was urgent to proceed quickly with this undertaking, since many of the Holocaust Survivors are quite advanced in age. Their stories must be told now rather than later.
We must never forget. As a visiting
Rabbi addressed my college campus earlier this semester, "
The Holocaust never ended. Not really. And
It could happen again."
The Project participants collected over 50,000 unedited testimonies, placing them in an archive of over 200,000 videotapes. All together, over 100,000 hours are recorded...to watch the entire collection of personal stories would take an individual 13 and a half years.
The Shoah Foundation organizes its archive into a technological databasethat will allow researchers, educators and students to access to specific information from the digitalized testimony collection. Library Science has allowed the programmers to organize information based on keywords, subjects, specific people and places and events.
Factual information was found at http://www.vhf.org, and those interested in this project are urged to visit that resource and discover more about this necessary and laudable effort.