Testimony

Survivors often took solace in retelling their experiences to others, and several agencies solicited oral histories in the immediate years after liberation. Individual researchers like David P. Boder and G. M. Gilbert entered the DP camps and conducted numerous interviews with survivors. The Jewish Agency and the JDC jointly directed a project that gathered 3,500 testimonies in 1945 and 1946, and by 1947, the Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin and Warsaw had collected 4,000 more. These frank and lucid testimonies often were solicited as material for war crimes cases.