Holocaust Memorial Day: the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive

For Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, we would like to tell you about the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. This resource came about due to the film Schindler’s List, and its importance cannot be overstated.

The Shoah Archive contains 50,000 interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. Interviews are approximately two and a half hours long and some are supplemented with photographs, documents, and artefacts pertaining to the interviewee’s family and wartime experiences. Interviews are in a wide range of languages.
Interviewees speak on the following topics:

  • Jewish Survivors
  • Rescuers and Aid Providers
  • Sinti and Roma Survivors
  • Liberators and Liberation Witnesses
  • Political Prisoners
  • Jehovah’s Witness Survivors
  • War Crimes Trials Participants
  • Survivors of Eugenics Policies
  • Homosexual Survivors

As well as Holocaust testimonies, the Archive also includes testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1996 and the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979.

It’s a unique resource and researchers often come from far and wide to view the videos.

How do I use it?
This resource is only available on campus. There is a link on the Databases A-Z, under V, and once you’re on the site, you will need to create an account in order to log in, search, and view videos. Once on the website, you must register to create a personal username and password.

Searching the archive
Searching is easy, you can search on a topic, for a name, and use links in the videos to skip to particular sections relevant to your interests. The USC Shoah Foundation has a YouTube Channel with lots of information, but we’ve collected searching tips in this playlist.

Have you used the archive? Do you think it would be useful in your research? Contact library@rhul.ac.uk for more information, or leave a comment below.

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