Holocaust survivor testimony: a brief overview of characteristics and approaches
Holocaust survivor testimony: a brief overview of characteristics and approaches

Summary/Abstract: This paper reviews characteristics of audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi crimes. It provides general reflections about the genre of survivor’s testimony, and underscores some challenges associated with this resource. Characteristics of eye witness accounts and their application to educational use are discussed in the second part of the paper. The research used data from the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute, a collection of 52 000 videotaped and digitized testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution. The Archive is now housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It is the largest collection of eyewitness accounts of Shoah of this kind in the world, and a resource that “shifted the collection of testimonies to a new scale”.

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