Speaking Even When All Words Fail

In 2008 the Federal Cultural Foundation funded the project “Living with the Memory” at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It presented thousands of video interviews with Holocaust survivors who recalled their suffering caused by the National Socialists before, during and after the Holocaust. The archive has been expanded to include forty new interviews with the last living eyewitnesses who suffered persecution in the large former Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. In terms of content and technical details, the project has applied the established methods used by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. As soon as they were recorded, the interviews have been archived and categorized in terms of historiography, educational content and textual analysis. The goal of the archive was not so much to completely document history, but rather convey personal experiences and memories. The interviews are accessible to the public at the Information Centre.

Scientific director: Daniel Baranowski
Curators: Ruth Oelze, Gaby Zürn, Barbara Kurowska (PL)
The interviewees were members of Jewish communities in Breslau, Czernowitz, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Kowno (Kaunas), Cracow, Lemberg, Lodz, Prague, Pressburg (Bratislava) and Riga.

Venue and schedule:
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2011 – 2014