Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age

Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices

Jeffrey Shandler

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602960
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historia judía

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory.

The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive—over 100, 000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50, 000 individuals—and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.

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AN ARCHIVE IN CONTEXTS

The Visual History Archive: An Overview

The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust—began, we are told, serendipitously, in the wake of creating another work of Holocaust media. While making the 1993 feature film Schindler’s 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 Płaszów concentration camp when they were conscripted by the film’s protagonist, Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman and Nazi Party member, to work in his factories in Cracow and, later, Brünnlitz. Schindler’s efforts saved these Jews from harsher treatment—and the possibility of death—during the war. In addition to some of the Schindlerjuden whose stories figure in the book by Thomas Keneally on which Schindler’s 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 Schindler’s List reported that speaking with survivors helped the film’s storytelling to “be more authentic.” Over a hundred Schindlerjuden also appeared in the film’s epilogue, a tribute to Schindler filmed at his gravesite in Jerusalem.

Spielberg’s encounters with survivors while directing Schindler’s 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 “as many Holocaust survivors as possible.”² 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 Schindler’s List—unanticipated by either the director or the film’s producers, who did not expect it to be a commercial success—provided 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 survivors’ 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, “a race against the clock” 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 VHA’s scope is manifestly monumental, similar to other memorial impulses that strive to demonstrate the Holocaust’s enormity and to recall as many names of the genocide’s victims as possible.

Despite the project’s 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 communities’ 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: “God-fearing,” 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 Nazis—Sinti and Roma, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, survivors of eugenics policies and of forced labor—were 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 Archive’s creators have argued that the interviewers’ “diversity of backgrounds and experience . . . made the archive richer.” At the same time, the Foundation ran training programs for its interviewers in order to establish a “consistent methodology” for their work by providing background information on Holocaust history and guidance on interviewing practices.⁸ Even though interviewers sought to conform to the Foundation’s standards, the interviews vary considerably in approach, reflecting the diversity of both interviewers and interviewees.

The Shoah Foundation also established protocols to standardize the project’s 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 survivor’s family background and wartime experiences, as well as the particulars of prewar and postwar life. Gathering this information was primarily intended “to serve as a guide for the interviewer.” 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 survivor’s life story, devoting proportionally more attention to the Holocaust period than to the prewar or postwar era. While advising interviewers that “preparation and research are vital” to the task, the Foundation also instructed them to avoid turning the interview into “a ‘question and answer’ session” and counseled that an “ideal interview consists of open-ended questions that allow the interviewee’s testimony to flow.”¹¹ 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 survivor’s photographs and other memorabilia and to record a group interview with members of the survivor’s family. For each of these sequences the Shoah Foundation’s guidelines specify the composition of shots, lighting, and camera movement.

Standardization of the VHA is perhaps most readily evident—and most consequential—not in the interviews themselves but in their inventorying and indexing, as these are the rubrics through which users access the Archive’s holdings. The act of searching the Archive’s online databases precedes the users’ 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 VHA’s vast size can make the prospect of searching among its many thousands of hours of video seem daunting. The Archive’s 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. “Each of the nearly 52,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, preserved for all time, is invaluable,” the Shoah Foundation explained on its website in 2007. “However, the full social and educational potential of the Foundation’s archive cannot be realized without creating an effective means for future viewers to search through the tens of thousands of hours of testimony.”¹³

Like the VHA itself, the index is vast, consisting of over fifty thousand “experiential” and “geographic” search terms. It is structured as a taxonomy, with search terms nested within a graduated series of broader topics. For example, one of the index’s twenty-two main headings is “daily life,” within which are seven subheadings, including “family life.” This term is divided into more than a dozen categories, among them “childbearing,” which is, in turn, subdivided into “camp childbearing,” “forced march childbearing,” “ghetto childbearing,” 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 “filtered”—that is, the list of interviews tagged with a given term can be narrowed by the criteria of interview language, gender of interviewee, and “experience group” (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 “early personal aspirations” and “school antisemitism” 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 archive’s “technical structure . . . determines the archivable content . . . and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records.”¹⁶ 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 Archive’s use: As a memorial project, it endeavors to list the name of every person mentioned during the interviews, including survivors’ family members and other acquaintances, many of whom died during the war. As a documentation of Holocaust history, the VHA’s index references locations, events, and core experiences of the genocide; the indexing of interviewees’ 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., “future message,” “Holocaust education,” “Holocaust testimony sharing willingness”).

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 recording’s 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 VHA’s index, which isolates segments of interviews according to its taxonomy; second, through the VHA’s search function, which culls segments from multiple interviews, according to a user’s 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 Foundation’s 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 VHA’s 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 VHA’s digitized interviews are connected online with their cataloging and indexing as part of an integrated database and retrieval system. When summoned through the Archive’s 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 Archive’s digital framework.

Even as digitization transforms how these recordings are stored and searched, the original thirty-minute videotapes on which the interviews were recorded...