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| Name: | USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education |
| Translated Name: | |
| Affiliation: | University of Southern California |
| ADDRESS: | Leavey Library, 650 W. 35th Street, Suite 114
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2571 |
| COUNTRY: | United States |
| TELEPHONE NUMBER: | +(1-213) 740-6001 |
| FAX: | +(1-213) 740-6044 |
| EMAIL: | vhi-acc@usc.edu |
| WEBSITE: | http://www.usc.edu/vhi |
| OPERATING HOURS: | By appointment. |
| CONTACT PERSON(S): | , Director of Archival Access
Phone: +(1-213) 740-6001
Email: vhi-acc@usc.edu
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| GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION: | In April 1994, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization, with the mission to collect and preserve on videotape the firsthand accounts of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg and the founding staff settled on the concrete goal to collect at least 50,000 testimonies from survivors and other Holocaust witnesses. This number was based on a variety of estimates, including the extent of the remaining survivor population, the percentage of survivors and other witnesses who might come forward to give testimony, the financial resources available to undertake the project, and the idea that a collection of this size would offer both depth and breadth in documenting Holocaust survivor and witness experience.
Because the Shoah Foundation’s offices were physically located in the Los Angeles area, the first interviews were conducted locally. The first interview took place on April 18, 1994, and regular, full-scale interviewing began in July 1994. To locate Holocaust survivors and other witnesses for prospective interviews, the Foundation devoted significant resources to outreach campaigns. After the first interviews were conducted, the Foundation quickly expanded its interviewing operations first in the United States and then in other countries. To facilitate the interviewing expansion, the Foundation opened regional offices in many cities around the world and recruited more than 2,300 interviewers and 1,000 videographers to organize and conduct the interviews. Interviewers and videographers received training in the Shoah Foundation’s standardized interviewer and videographer guidelines. In January 1999, the Foundation collected the 50,000th testimony, and the interviewing operation began winding down. In all, the Foundation collected nearly 52,000 testimonies in 56 countries and in 32 languages.
To provide access to the testimonies, in 1995, a team of historians, technology professionals, and experts in information management began to develop the Shoah Foundation’s cataloguing and indexing system. To make the testimonies digitally searchable, staff began digitizing the testimonies, entering biographical information about each interviewee from pre-interview questionnaires into a database, and indexing the interviews by assigning a controlled vocabulary of index terms to specific time-codes of each video testimony. By the end of 2005, more than 51,100 testimonies had been digitized and had had biographical information entered, while nearly 49,000 testimonies had been fully indexed.
In January 2006, the Shoah Foundation became part of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Under the arrangement, the Shoah Foundation’s repository of nearly 52,000 testimonies was transferred to USC in perpetuity. In addition, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was formed, dedicated to tolerance education and research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
The mission of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry–and the suffering they cause–through the educational use of the Institute's visual history testimonies. The Institute relies upon partnerships in the United States and around the world to provide public access to the archive and advance scholarship in many fields of inquiry. The Institute and its partners also utilize the archive to develop educational products and programs for use in many countries and languages. |
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| OVERVIEW OF ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION: | The USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 videotaped interviews conducted in 56 countries and in 32 languages during the period 1994-2005. In addition to about 49,000 testimonies given by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the archive also includes smaller numbers of testimonies conducted with rescuers and aid providers, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, war crimes trials participants, survivors of eugenics policies, and homosexual survivors.
Among the main subjects discussed in the interviews are geographical locations; prominent figures, names of family members and other people; prewar Jewish life; religious practice; cultural life; acts of persecution and prejudice; camps and ghettos; deportations; massacres; means of adaptation or survival; resistance; rescue and aid efforts; and postwar emigration and immigration.
Thousands of geographic locations are referred to, primarily relating to the European countries that were part of the Axis powers or under Nazi occupation during World War II—Germany; Poland; USSR (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan); Latvia; Lithuania; Czechoslovakia; Austria; Hungary; Romania; Bulgaria; France; the Netherlands; Belgium; Italy; Greece; and Yugoslavia—as well as unoccupied Allied and neutral nations including British Mandate Palestine and Israel, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and countries of South America, Asia, and Africa.
In most interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts pertaining to the interviewee’s family and wartime experiences were displayed. Literary and musical works performed and often composed by the interviewees themselves are included in some interviews; original works of art are also displayed on camera. Walking tours, in which a portion of the interview would be conducted in the open air at sites such as former concentration camps, ghettos, mass graves, or prewar family homes, were a feature of some interviews.
Testimonies were given in 32 languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Ladino, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romani, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sign, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. |
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| Collect Holocaust Oral Histories: | No. |
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| Interview Guidelines: | Yes. Available on website. |
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| Additional Information: | Videographer guidelines and a sample Pre-Interview Questionnaire are also available on website. |
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| Project Complete: | Yes. |
| Year of First Interview: | 1994 |
| Year of Last Interview: | 2005 |
| Interviews Per Year: | Most interviews were collected during the period 1994-1999. |
| Average Hours Per Interview: | 2.5 |
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| RECORDING METHOD | |
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| Audio: | No. |
| Number of Audio Hours: | N/A |
| Total Number of Audio Interviews: | N/A |
| Number of Audio Reel-To-Reel Interviews: | N/A |
| Number of Audiocassette Interviews: | N/A |
| Number of Interviews in Other Audio Formats: | N/A |
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| Video: | Yes. |
| Number of Video Hours: | 120,000 |
| Total Number of Video Interviews: | 51,682 |
| Number of 1/2-inch Betacam-SP Interviews: | 51,682 |
| Number of 3/4-inch U-matic Interviews: | N/A |
| Number of 1/2-inch VHS interviews: | 51,682 |
| Number of Film interviews: | N/A |
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| RULES: | |
| Access to Collection: | Open. By Appointment. Digital access to the collection is available through the Visual History Archive search and viewing tool at the University of Southern California, Rice University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. Digital access will be provided to other institutions around the world in the future. Check website for further information. |
| Special Requirements for Access or Use: | Yes. Check website for further information. |
| Notice Required to Pull Tapes or Reserve Facility: | Yes. Check website for further information. |
| Access Fee: | Check website for further information. |
| Research Services: | No. |
| Research Fee: | N/A |
| Research Services Requirements: | N/A |
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| Permission Required for Use of Material in | |
| Publications: | Yes. |
| Classrooms: | Yes. |
| Public Lectures: | Yes. |
| Documentaries: | Yes. |
| How To Obtain permission: | Contact Director of Archival Access. |
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| RESOURCES | |
| Format of Collection | |
| Video/Audio: | Video only. |
| Transcripts: | No. |
| Other: | Interviews have been digitized in MPEG1 format. |
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| On-Site Equipment | |
| Audio: | N/A |
| Video: | Yes, MPEG1 video streamed to on-site computers. |
| Users Can Bring Their Own: | No. |
| Other: | N/A |
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| Finding Aids | |
| Guide to Collection Available: | Yes. |
| Published: | No. |
| Guide Cost: | N/A |
| Address to Obtain Guide: | N/A |
| Additional Information: | See http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/libraries/sfa/index.html. For partial guide to the collection. |
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| Transcripts | |
| Audio: | N/A |
| Video: | No. |
| Available for photocopying: | No. |
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| Summaries | |
| Summarized: | No. |
| Available for Photocopying: | No. |
| Available on Disk: | N/A No. |
| Other: | Information Not Available. |
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| Indices | |
| Tapes Indexed: | Yes. |
| Transcripts Indexed: | N/A |
| Summaries Indexed: | N/A |
| Indices Available for Photocopying: | No. |
| Indices Available on Disk: | No. |
| Other: | Indexing metadata is searchable through the Visual History Archive search and viewing tool. |
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| Cataloging Information | |
| Collection Cataloged: | Yes. |
| Available on Computer: | Yes. |
| Other: | N/A |
| MARC Format: | N/A |
| MARC Format Type: | N/A |
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| Internet Resources | |
| Web Address: | http://www.usc.edu/vhi. |
| Transcripts: | No. |
| Summaries: | No. |
| Catalog: | Yes, the biographical profiles attached to each testimony can be searched through the online Testimony Catalogue. |
| Indices: | No. |
| Interview Clips: | Yes - some. |
| Other: | Website includes interactive educational exhibits appropriate for middle and high school students that incorporate clips from interviews. |
| Additional Information: | N/A |
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| Bibliographic Information | |
| Belong to: | Information Not Available. |
| OCLC: | N/A. |
| RLIN: | N/A |
| Other: | N/A |
| Plan to Join: | Information Not Available. |
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| Loan or Purchase | |
| Material Available Through Interlibrary Loan: | No. |
| Loan by other collection: | No. |
| Loan Fee: | N/A |
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| DETAIL ABOUT COLLECTION CONTENT | |
| Demographic Information about Interviewees: | |
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| Total Number: | |
| Total Female: | Information Not Available. |
| Total Male: | Information Not Available. |
| No Data: | N/A |
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Female |
Male |
Total |
Other Information |
| Jews: | 26232 | 23122 | 49354 | Yes. |
| Roma and/or Sinti: | 223 | 185 | 408 | Yes. |
| Political Prisoners: | 84 | 177 | 261 | Yes. |
| Prisoners of War: | | | | Yes. |
| Jehovah’s Witnesses: | 38 | 46 | 84 | Yes. |
| Homosexual Men/Lesbian Women: | 0 | 6 | 6 | Yes. |
| Resisters: | 2240 | 3860 | 7000 | Yes. |
| Partisans: | | | | Yes. |
| Rescuers: | 712 | 419 | 1131 | Rescuers and aid providers. |
| Refugees: | | | | Yes. |
| Liberators: | 10 | 351 | 361 | Liberators and Liberation Witnesses. |
| Prosecutors: | 18 | 46 | 64 | War Crimes Trials participants. |
| Perpetrators/ Collaborators: | 0 | 0 | 0 | No. |
| Refugee Relief Workers: | | | | Yes. |
| Other: | 6 | 7 | 13 | Survivors of Nazi eugenics policies. |
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| Additional Information: | Individuals in some categories may be represented in more than one category. |
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| Focus of Collection: | |
| Ghetto(s) | | |
| Camp(s) | | |
| Geographic Area(s) | | |
| Experience(s) | | |
| Survivor Group(s) | | |
| Other | | |
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| Additional Information: | Information Not Available. |
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Museum