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AN ARCHIVE IN CONTEXTS
The Visual History Archive: An Overview
The USC Shoah Foundationâs Visual History Archiveâthe largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaustâbegan, we are told, serendipitously, in the wake of creating another work of Holocaust media. While making the 1993 feature film Schindlerâs List, director Steven Spielberg talked with a number of Jewish Holocaust survivors who are referred to in German as Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews). During World War II they had been imprisoned in the Cracow ghetto and the PĆaszĂłw concentration camp when they were conscripted by the filmâs protagonist, Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman and Nazi Party member, to work in his factories in Cracow and, later, BrĂŒnnlitz. Schindlerâs efforts saved these Jews from harsher treatmentâand the possibility of deathâduring the war. In addition to some of the Schindlerjuden whose stories figure in the book by Thomas Keneally on which Schindlerâs List is based, Spielberg met other survivors who sought him out at their own initiative in Poland, where most of the film was shot.1 Unlike most people who might show up uninvited at the set of a Hollywood feature, these men and women were not turned away. Rather, the makers of Schindlerâs List reported that speaking with survivors helped the filmâs storytelling to âbe more authentic.â Over a hundred Schindlerjuden also appeared in the filmâs epilogue, a tribute to Schindler filmed at his gravesite in Jerusalem.
Spielbergâs encounters with survivors while directing Schindlerâs List prompted him to envision a follow-up project to the film. After considering the possibility of a documentary on the Schindlerjuden he had met, Spielberg eventually proposed interviewing âas many Holocaust survivors as possible.â2 By April 1994, a plan to establish what was first known as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (referred to hereafter as the Shoah Foundation) was under way, with the initial goal of interviewing fifty thousand survivors within three years. Eventually, the Foundation recorded over fifty-one thousand interviews with survivors and other eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, conducted in fifty-six countries and in thirty-two languages, between 1994 and 2000.3 Profits from Schindlerâs Listâunanticipated by either the director or the filmâs producers, who did not expect it to be a commercial successâprovided initial financial support for creating what is now known as the Visual History Archive (VHA).
The VHA is far from the first effort to record and collect videos of Holocaust survivorsâ personal narratives. Yet from the start, the Archive was conceived on a grander scale than all previous projects, most of which had been undertaken by preexisting institutions dedicated either to research on the Holocaust or to some related topic, such as local Jewish history or World War II remembrance. By contrast, the Shoah Foundation was established for the specific purpose of creating the VHA. The Archive was envisioned as a stand-alone resource, international in its reach, surpassing other similar projects in range, quantity, and prominence. Inaugurated in the mid-1990s, when most Holocaust survivors were senior citizens, the VHA was also driven by a sense of urgency, âa race against the clockâ of an aging cohort of interviewees.4 In contrast to other oral history collections, assembled for research purposes with more constrained and selective inventories of interviews, the VHAâs scope is manifestly monumental, similar to other memorial impulses that strive to demonstrate the Holocaustâs enormity and to recall as many names of the genocideâs victims as possible.
Despite the projectâs envisioned vast scale, and energized by the acute time pressure, the VHA came together swiftly, involving many hundreds of people as coordinators, advisers, videographers, interviewers, technicians, indexers, and educators. To recruit interviewees, the Shoah Foundation publicized its mission in mainstream media as well as through survivor communitiesâ social networks. Seeking a diversity of interviewees, the Foundation made special efforts to include Jewish survivors living in eastern Europe and those who are haredim (Hebrew: âGod-fearing,â referring to those Jews who are most stringently observant of traditional religious practices and, at the same time, most resistant to integration into a cultural mainstream), populations largely absent from older videotaping collections.5 Though the project centered on Jewish survivors, members of other groups persecuted by the NazisâSinti and Roma, political prisoners, Jehovahâs Witnesses, homosexuals, survivors of eugenics policies and of forced laborâwere also interviewed, as were various eyewitnesses to the Holocaust: rescuers, aid providers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials.6 The Shoah Foundation recruited a wide variety of people to conduct the interviews.7 Rather than employing only scholars of the Holocaust, psychotherapists, or experts in documenting oral histories, as some other videotaping projects have done, the Archiveâs creators have argued that the interviewersâ âdiversity of backgrounds and experience . . . made the archive richer.â At the same time, the Foundation ran training programs for its interviewers in order to establish a âconsistent methodologyâ for their work by providing background information on Holocaust history and guidance on interviewing practices.8 Even though interviewers sought to conform to the Foundationâs standards, the interviews vary considerably in approach, reflecting the diversity of both interviewers and interviewees.
The Shoah Foundation also established protocols to standardize the projectâs recruiting, record keeping, videotaping, and inventorying. After contacting the Foundation and providing basic information about his or her wartime experience, each survivor was assigned to an interviewer. Several days before the taping session, the interviewer spoke with the survivor to collect answers to an extensive preinterview questionnaire, which asked for detailed information about the survivorâs family background and wartime experiences, as well as the particulars of prewar and postwar life. Gathering this information was primarily intended âto serve as a guide for the interviewer.â In addition, this task provided the survivor and interviewer with an opportunity to establish a rapport with each other, and, perhaps most importantly, it enabled survivors to reflect on the impending task of relating their life histories.9
Both interviewers and videographers were given detailed guidelines regarding the form of the interview and its documentation.10 Interviewers were instructed to begin and end with specified questions and to progress chronologically though the survivorâs life story, devoting proportionally more attention to the Holocaust period than to the prewar or postwar era. While advising interviewers that âpreparation and research are vitalâ to the task, the Foundation also instructed them to avoid turning the interview into âa âquestion and answerâ sessionâ and counseled that an âideal interview consists of open-ended questions that allow the intervieweeâs testimony to flow.â11 The tension between these divergent goals is resolved differently in each recording, reflecting how each interviewer and survivor approached the task at hand as well as the nature of their relationship with each other. Following the interview proper, videographers were to film a separate sequence documenting the survivorâs photographs and other memorabilia and to record a group interview with members of the survivorâs family. For each of these sequences the Shoah Foundationâs guidelines specify the composition of shots, lighting, and camera movement.
Standardization of the VHA is perhaps most readily evidentâand most consequentialânot in the interviews themselves but in their inventorying and indexing, as these are the rubrics through which users access the Archiveâs holdings. The act of searching the Archiveâs online databases precedes the usersâ screening of survivor interview videos, becoming not merely the instrument of access but the primary activity for engaging this repository of memory. While the videotaping of interviews was under way, the Shoah Foundation began the task of developing a computerized system for searching and accessing interviews, creating a customized matrix of search terms specific to the Archive. The decision had been made to index the videos, rather than transcribe them, as both a more expedient undertaking and a more useful aid to researchers.12 The VHAâs vast size can make the prospect of searching among its many thousands of hours of video seem daunting. The Archiveâs creators realized that addressing this challenge was essential to its use, even if doing so would complicate the integrity of individual recordings as discrete narratives. âEach of the nearly 52,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, preserved for all time, is invaluable,â the Shoah Foundation explained on its website in 2007. âHowever, the full social and educational potential of the Foundationâs archive cannot be realized without creating an effective means for future viewers to search through the tens of thousands of hours of testimony.â13
Like the VHA itself, the index is vast, consisting of over fifty thousand âexperientialâ and âgeographicâ search terms. It is structured as a taxonomy, with search terms nested within a graduated series of broader topics. For example, one of the indexâs twenty-two main headings is âdaily life,â within which are seven subheadings, including âfamily life.â This term is divided into more than a dozen categories, among them âchildbearing,â which is, in turn, subdivided into âcamp childbearing,â âforced march childbearing,â âghetto childbearing,â and five other search terms. Search terms are keyed to particular interview segments during which interviewees discuss these topics.14 The experiential search terms are generalized, enabling users to cross-reference interviews tagged with the same term, including interviews in various locations and languages.
In addition, each search of the VHA using an index term can be âfilteredââthat is, the list of interviews tagged with a given term can be narrowed by the criteria of interview language, gender of interviewee, and âexperience groupâ (e.g., Jewish survivor or liberator). Searches can also be conducted for the names of particular people, places, events, or institutions. Searching multiple terms (e.g., finding interviews in which both âearly personal aspirationsâ and âschool antisemitismâ are discussed) can further winnow interview selections.15 Even when one narrows the scope of interviews by a particular search term, language, location, and type of interviewee, the search can yield dozens, even hundreds, of segments.
As is true of archives generally, access to the VHA is not simply facilitated but structured by its index and search functions. As philosopher Jacques Derrida observes, an archiveâs âtechnical structure . . . determines the archivable content . . . and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records.â16 As with other large-scale indexed works, much of what one might find in the VHA, except by chance, is determined by what is itemized in the index. Its terms and structure reflect core goals of the Shoah Foundation for the Archiveâs use: As a memorial project, it endeavors to list the name of every person mentioned during the interviews, including survivorsâ family members and other acquaintances, many of whom died during the war. As a documentation of Holocaust history, the VHAâs index references locations, events, and core experiences of the genocide; the indexing of intervieweesâ prewar and postwar experiences is both less extensive and less specific than the wartime portions of their narratives. As an instrument of moral edification, the Archive indexes terms that tag interview segments in which survivors reflect on ethical issues or on lessons of the Holocaust (e.g., âfuture message,â âHolocaust education,â âHolocaust testimony sharing willingnessâ).
Implementation of the index relies on the properties of video and digital technologies. Video both enables continuous recording for an extended period of time (tapes used for VHA interviews run thirty minutes each) and facilitates the articulation of the interview into discrete segments, measured by the recordingâs time code, to which index terms can be tagged. The Archive atomizes and reconfigures the running flow of video through its digitization: first, by means of the VHAâs index, which isolates segments of interviews according to its taxonomy; second, through the VHAâs search function, which culls segments from multiple interviews, according to a userâs choice of criteria, and aggregates these segments into pools of information. This property of the VHA, in effect, enables survivor interviews to tell different stories, which are engendered neither by the interviewees nor by the Shoah Foundation, but by users of its Archive.
The Foundationâs protocols, the videotaped interviews created according to these guidelines, and the archival structure that inventories and indexes these recordings to facilitate their access are more closely interrelated than is generally the case in archives, including digital collections. The VHAâs holdings were recorded expressly for this collection, which distinguishes them from many, if not most, documents in paper archives as well as media archives, whose holdings were originally created for other purposes and users. Moreover, the VHAâs digitized interviews are connected online with their cataloging and indexing as part of an integrated database and retrieval system. When summoned through the Archiveâs search mechanisms, videos appear on computer screens alongside the display of information that inventories the recordings and identifies particular segments. For users, the videos do not exist as works independent of the Archiveâs digital framework.
Even as digitization transforms how these recordings are stored and searched, the original thirty-minute videotapes on which the interviews were recorded...