Steven B. Sample and Steven Spielberg
Holocaust survivor Erna Anolik's video testimony
is just one of nearly 52,000 collected and
digitized by the Shoah Foundation and now
archived at USC.
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Moving History
By Pamela J. Johnson
If you read Erna Anolik’s story, you might recognize her
heart-wrenching description of Nazi soldiers dragging sick passengers
from a deportation train to Auschwitz and dumping them, alive, into
ditches.
You wouldn’t, however, hear the gravitas in the Holocaust survivor’s
voice as she emphasizes, “They were put into these ditches with the
dead. The living with the dead.” You wouldn’t see the 82-year-old
blond-haired woman with high cheekbones and a smooth complexion
swallowing hard and biting her bottom lip trying to suppress emotion.
You wouldn’t take in the sight of her brown eyes welling with tears.
As the world’s largest digital video history archive, the USC Shoah
Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education allows survivors
such as Anolik to tell their stories directly to viewers. Hearing their
voices, seeing their facial expressions and their body language,
listening to their unedited accounts can give viewers a richer
understanding of the past. This audiovisual form of chronicling history
is also a budding new field.
The institute was launched when the Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation became part of USC College Jan. 1. It is dedicated
to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias said, “As scholars, we see this
arrangement as an exceptional opportunity to simultaneously enhance
both the resources of the Shoah Foundation and of USC. We look forward
to leveraging our common expertise in digital library management to
provide global access for scholars to these important archives.”
“I see USC making its mark with visual history,” said Joseph Aoun, dean
of USC College. “We’re becoming a leader in this emerging field. The
opportunities are staggering.”
Aoun and others predicted the collaboration surrounding the testimonies would spark the creation of new areas of study.
“This is only the beginning and we don’t know where it’s going to take
us,” Aoun said. “We’re facing the possibility of new fields coming out
of this. Some will intersect. Some we can not yet foresee.”
The majority of the 51,689 audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust
survivors — including Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s
Witnesses and political prisoners — collected by the Shoah Foundation
are available throughout the campus on any computer connected to
USCnet. The URL is http://vha.usc.edu/v500. Also included in
testimonies are accounts by witnesses such as rescuers and war crimes
prosecutors.
Interviewers traveled to 56 countries — from Argentina to Zimbabwe —
gathering testimonies in 32 languages. They went to great lengths
videotaping most survivors inside their homes. In the hinterlands of
Eastern Europe and other places, electricity was scarce.
“Some did not have electricity because it was so expensive,” recounted
Karen Jungblut, former Shoah Foundation cataloging director and now a
special projects manager in the College. “If that was the case, we
[covered the cost]. In other cases, there was electricity at only
certain times during the day.”
In all, 120,000 hours of video were collected; the average interview
was 2.5 hours. The archive, requiring nearly 200 terabytes of storage
space, would take a person 13.5 years to view in its entirety. One
terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes. The archive is digitized and
electronically searchable by nearly 50,000 keywords, mostly geographic
locations, or nonjudgmental phrases such as “living conditions in the
camps.”
Experts say the massive audiovisual archive will help revolutionize the way society defines and chronicles history.
“Most of us learned what we know about the past from pieces of paper
and ink on those pieces of paper. Occasionally, from photographs or
paintings,” said historian Douglas Greenberg, former president of the
Foundation and now the institute’s executive director.
“A hundred years from now, when people come to write about our
contemporary world, they’re going to find sources that are not ink on
paper,” Greenberg continued. “A hundred years from now, when people do
scholarship about our time, they will do their research from video.
That’s why we called it visual history and education. In the future,
the past will be something that is visual.”
College faculty, Aoun said, are already playing a critical role in
defining and shaping the budding field of visual history, the
multimedia form of historical narrative.
Hoping to emulate Columbia University’s early leadership in oral
history, USC — already a pioneer in digital technology — will gain
further prominence as an authority in visual history, Aoun said. But
collaborating with institutions throughout the world remains a main
objective.
USC has been a leader in the development of digital libraries, and
boasts state-of-the-art technological resources for preserving archival
materials. The Shoah Foundation and USC have partnered in the past to
catalogue Holocaust testimonies collected in California. USC also
connected the Foundation to Internet2, an advanced high-speed network
for research and higher education.
The Foundation has made the archive available to museums, schools and
other institutions around the globe. Such educational outreach efforts
on the international level have increased.
“Let’s be clear about this,” Aoun said. “This archive doesn’t only
belong to the College. Or belong to any school. This belongs to the
whole world.”
In addition to ensuring that the message of tolerance and respect will
be distributed globally, placing the archive at USC guarantees its
preservation.
That was a major reason the Shoah Foundation, established by Steven
Spielberg, chose USC. The Foundation began collecting the testimonies
in 1994, following the release of “Schindler’s List,” a seven-time
Academy Award-winning film about Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives
of hundreds of Jews during World War II by employing them in his
factory in Poland. Now that the testimony has been collected and nearly
all indexed and catalogued, it belongs at the 125-year-old research
university, Spielberg said.
“When the shifting sands of time reach California’s well, USC will
still be standing,” Spielberg said after an event announcing the
partnership, and the Shoah Foundation’s move from the Universal Studios
lot to the University Park campus.
“Universal [Studios] has changed hands six times since I arrived in the
late ’60s as an interloper,” Spielberg said. “So there’s no guarantee
our trailers will be welcome five years from now, or two years from
now.”
USC President Steven B. Sample added that “universities last longer
than constitutional states, they last longer than corporations.”
At USC, the archives will be used in countless innovative ways.
“The watchword for the next 30 to 40 years is interdisciplinary,”
Sample said. “Here, there is a lot of room for growth. The Shoah
Foundation is going to find those interdisciplinary opportunities. The
opportunities will be much more readily available when they’re an
integral part of an academic community than if they remained as an
independent organization.”
USC College’s Don Miller, a religion and sociology professor, is among
those excited about the possibilities. Miller and his wife, Lorna
Touryan Miller, have collected testimonies related to the Armenia and
Rwanda genocides and have written books on the subjects. Don Miller is
also executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
He said the new institute would attract more collaboration with
organizations such as the Armenian Film Foundation. He hoped the AFF’s
archive of 400 testimonies related to the Armenian genocide of 1915
would be brought to USC, where they could be catalogued and accessible
to scholars and students.
Miller also envisioned an extensive project on the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda, where Hutu extremists killed more than 800,000 Tutsi in 100
days.
“The Rwanda genocide is so fresh there is the potential of doing a
Shoah Foundation-type project, in which the same technology in terms of
videotaped interviews and coding could be done,” said Miller, the
Leonard K. Firestone Professor of Religion.
“The Shoah Foundation’s collection allows us to move beyond the flat
medium of print and include the visual and the audio dimension, which,
of course brings in a range of human emotions,” continued Miller.
“Facial expressions, the tears, the pauses. All of this actually has
the potential to revolutionize research.”
Collaborations would involve diverse disciplines from anthropology to
psychology. At USC, the testimonies have already been used in film and
business courses. At other universities, professors are using testimony
of survivors speaking Slavic to teach the Slavic languages. Or they’re
using it to study the psychology of childhood trauma. Still others are
using it to study interviewing techniques.
Spielberg called the institute “the hub of a wheel with many spokes.
And each spoke is a different visual history about a different cultural
event that changed the world.”
Future visual history archives, he said, might include events in
Rwanda, or address issues such as slavery and civil rights, and the
murder of Native Americans by European invaders.
Yet, Spielberg said, there has been great concern about the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies falling into the wrong hands.
Right now, the archive is accessible to four of the approximately 200
universities nationwide connected to Internet2. In addition to USC,
Yale and Rice universities and the University of Michigan have access
to the archive. The list is expected to grow, but officials have no
plans to make the archive completely accessible online.
“We have to be very, very careful not to release the testimonies on an
open site where it can be used as disinformation about the Holocaust,”
Spielberg said.
Greenberg said alternatives were carefully considered. In the end, the
good outweighed the bad. “If you really wanted to protect the archives,
make sure no one ever used them for bad purposes, it would be a very
easy thing to do,” he said. “Take all of the tapes and lock them up. So
there’s a balance that we try to strive to, between the need for
security on the one hand, and on the other hand, the need to make sure
that people can use them for good.”
Currently, any copying of testimony going beyond “fair use” requires permission of the institute.
Of the Shoah Foundation’s 100 employees, 25 joined the new institute at
the College, some working in development, marketing, fundraising and
local and international educational outreach programs. Most are based
in the Leavey Library, which houses USC's Information Services
technology staff. In all, the Foundation has raised and spent $150
million — including $65 million donated by Spielberg. The new institute
will operate on a yearly budget of about $5 million.
Spielberg was moved by the testimony’s metamorphosis into an
educational tool. “I feel like both a proud and wistful parent watching
my child graduate from high school, and on their way to USC,” said
Spielberg, a USC trustee. “And unlike most parents, I’ll be coming to
USC to follow them from class to class.”
The testimony, Spielberg said, speaks for itself. Take Mollie Stamber,
who survived the Holocaust and gave this advice: “Don’t ignore it by
thinking this is the other guy, I cannot get involved. I would say you
have to get involved. Because if not, God forbid, the same thing can
happen again.”
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