Eyewitnesses Share New Testimony in Virtual Interviews

Time is of the essence when it comes to recording the testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust. That is why the Museum’s Film, Oral History, and Recorded Sound division is committed to capturing as many firsthand accounts as they can, while they can. They will augment the 25,000 interviews already in the collection, one-third of which were produced by the Museum.

This spring, when it became unsafe to interview witnesses in person, staff switched to interviewing subjects remotely, via phone or computer. However, the change raised a concern: would it be harder to capture sensitive, nuanced memories?

In April 2020, a Museum contractor interviews Holocaust survivor Magdolna Palmai, who lives in Budapest, Hungary. Since the pandemic began, the Museum has produced 90 interviews abroad. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum

“We had to reorient ourselves nearly 180 degrees in order to conduct oral history interviews,” said Ina Navazelskis, program coordinator in the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation. “The good news is that it worked.”

Now that interviews are not constrained by the logistics and expenses of a video production crew — which typically limited the interview length to a single day — there is increased flexibility to scheduling, something that has benefited the more than 110 new interviews staff have conducted since March.

In late June, Navazelskis recorded 11 hours of testimony over a five-day period from an interviewee in London.

“I was able to get details that I would not have been able to capture in an in-person interview, simply because we were able to postpone to the next day or the next week, to take various aspects of his story and delve into them in depth,” she explained.

Navazelskis added that despite the benefits, virtual interviews lack the visual and audio clarity of in-person recording, so she prefers to interview people in person. While the Museum has been able to conduct some recent interviews with COVID precautions in European countries where the pandemic has abated, remote interviewing will be the “new normal” for the foreseeable future.

Holocaust survivor Ursel Hecht is interviewed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2016. It is part of a collection, “The Last Witnesses of Time,” by German filmmaker André Poser, who recently donated it to the Museum. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of André Poser

In addition to conducting new interviews, the Museum has collected approximately 100 digitized oral history recordings from individuals and institutions, including from Hungary, Germany, and Australia, and a couple hundred more are in the process of being donated. Staff have also helped coordinate and host interviews for people outside our institution who want to interview a survivor, but did not have the proper recording equipment.

Making these interviews accessible online is a top priority, and the collections staff is adding to our comprehensive collection daily. Just recently, a daughter of a survivor was able to view a newly published interview with her mother, who passed away in 2016, and wrote to the Museum to express her gratitude: “I just watched this for the first time and learned a few things I didn’t know. I am grateful for this archive of her life. Thank you so much for taking the time to record her piece of history.”