"Voices of the Holocaust"

[Eva Libre]

Blog planned on interviews with concentration camp survivors from 1946

“Voices of the Holocaust”: The unique interviews with concentration camp survivors directly after the liberation are to be brought closer to a wider audience. The German historian Jürgen Bassfreund is planning a blog.

The unique sound archive “Voices of the Holocaust” has been accessible to the public for over ten years, but is almost unknown to the general public. It contains over 100 interviews with Holocaust survivors. They were led by the American social psychologist David P. Boder, who traveled across Europe shortly after the concentration camps were liberated in 1946.

Unique sound archive

With very few exceptions, the interviews are the only sound documents of survivors from this period. It is also the world's first collection of acoustically recorded interviews of Nazi persecution, explains the German historian Axel Dossmann from the University of Jena. He now wants to bring the sound archive closer to more people with a blog.

Dossmann also emphasizes the great multilingualism as a special feature. A European and especially Eastern European language world becomes audible here. At the same time, many young people can be heard, i.e. survivors who still have their lives ahead of them. Accordingly, it creates a completely different perspective than, for example, the large video interview projects in the USA since the 1990s with survivors in their twilight years.

Shocking testimonies

It is also noticeable in the interviews how the survivors in the summer of 1946 sometimes reported extremely factually and soberly about their experiences. Dossmann explains this, among other things, with the traumatization, which is also linguistically and in the whole habitus of the storytelling even more clearly than in the 1990s.

Dossmann states at the same time: "On the other hand, it may also be due to the fact that what you have just experienced was an immediate part of everyday life for you and that it may also come into its own in this apparently neutral, accepting manner."

Click here for the sound archive

Voices of the Holocaust, Link will open in a new window

The interviews by David P. Boder

Just as special is the sometimes almost “interrogation-like” interview practice of the social psychologist David P. Boder. «We wouldn't do an interview like this today. Bider was a language psychologist and was still untrained in such interview techniques, ”explains Dossmann. Boder also went into the interviews with very little prior knowledge and looked for a chronological order. Sometimes he proceeded stubbornly and with little audible empathy in an irritating manner.

Original by SRF translated with Google

[Eva Libre]

here also a video from 'MuseumJewishHeritage LivingMemorialToTheHolocaust'

18 Voices: A Liberation Day Reading of Young Writers’ Diaries from the Holocaust

More than one million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. Countless others survived. Some, like Anne Frank, kept diaries in which they confided their hopes, fears, and experiences. Join us on International Holocaust Remembrance Day for a special virtual reading of excerpts from some of these diaries.

By giving voice to the written words of some of the Nazis’ youngest victims, we commemorate their suffering and learn from their courageous and resilient spirits.