It’s pure gold for Holocaust historians, but it has nothing to do with Swiss banks.
Sealed in celluloid and soon to be on the Internet are 50,220 personal testimonies of life in Europe during the Holocaust, compiled by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
But most people are not historians. What will they do with the epic archive?
They may find it as significant a Jewish text as the Talmud, foundation president Michael Berenbaum asserts.
In recent months, the Los Angeles-based Shoah Foundation has put into high gear a cataloguing effort. Using high-tech equipment that in some cases it has had to invent, the foundation will spend the next few years indexing the tapes to make them searchable via a wide range of inquiries.
Berenbaum, in San Francisco last week for a benefit premiere of the foundation’s film “The Last Days,” proffered a handful of ways the archive’s stories might grip even the most lackadaisical Web surfer.
Within the thousands of hours of testimony, viewers can use a computer to locate anecdotes about daily life from the videotapes.
After dropping their kids off at Hebrew school, for example, a parent can go home and find out what life was like in a yeshiva during the darkest years. Young people can hear accounts of how kids scraped by; older people can hear of adult life.
Current events also can pique people’s curiosity. For example, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discovered her Jewish roots in recent years, there was a groundswell of interest in tracing family history. As a result, Berenbaum said, one question commonly asked was why people chose to hang on to their Judaism. Today’s generation could use the archives to find out “why a person decided to be a Jew, even when it was basically a sentence of death,” he said.
Berenbaum said he personally would like to use the archives to find out what romance was like for people who didn’t know if they would live another day. “There are questions only my generation has begun to ask, just as there are questions future generations will ask that we never thought of,” he said.
It’s the ability to get face-to-face answers from the very people caught up in history that excites Berenbaum. “What if, when studying slavery in America, we could hear the voices of black people, listen to them laugh and see their faces. How much better would we understand history then?” he said.
Berenbaum has earned a reputation as a scholar. Prior to heading the Shoah Foundation, he served as director of the Research Institute of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
In a dark suit and sporting a well-trimmed beard, Berenbaum seems part corporate executive, part scholar and part humanist. At the gathering at Embarcadero Cinemas, he answered interview questions at lightning speed, rattling off statistics and lessons from the Shoah Foundation.
While Berenbaum seemed almost detached at times from the Holocaust, he spoke with concern about the gap between generations concerning response to the genocide. While his generation grew up underexposed to the atrocity, he said, younger generations have had it drummed into them so much, it’s becoming a dull and distant thud.
“We’ve overcompensated and have been too loud” in inculcating younger generations about the Holocaust, Berenbaum said. “We have to find the [right] balance.”
That balance must be found soon, he added. Holocaust survivors won’t be around for much longer. And technology changes so fast that projects from 10 years ago look like ancient history.
The danger is that the passage of time itself will make the Holocaust old-fashioned, and Berenbaum is betting that the best way to fight against this is to make people live again by letting them speak through their stories.
“We are worried,” he said. “But because we are worried, we did this. The scope of what we’ve done is unprecedented.”