The USC Shoah Foundation is the world’s largest archive of recorded survivor and witness testimony of the Holocaust. It was founded in 1994 by the film director Steven Spielberg, in the aftermath of Schindler’s List, with the explicit aim of recording the testimony of as many living Holocaust survivors as possible before that generation passed away. The Foundation has been based at the University of Southern California since 2006.
The core of the archive is the Visual History Archive, which holds more than 56,000 video testimonies recorded in 43 languages and across 65 countries. Each testimony is on average just over two hours long, fully transcribed, and indexed at one-minute intervals against a structured thesaurus of historical and geographical terms. This makes the archive searchable in a way that ordinary video material is not. A researcher can ask, for example, for every testimony that includes a recollection of a specific camp, a specific transport, or a specific town, and be taken to the exact moment in each interview where that recollection appears.
The Foundation’s collection has expanded over the years to include testimonies from other genocides and mass atrocities, but its Holocaust collection remains the largest single body of survivor testimony ever assembled. For any aspect of the Holocaust that is best understood through the words of those who lived through it, the Visual History Archive is the standard reference. It is also the source for ongoing work on the preservation of testimony as the survivor generation comes to an end, including projects to allow students to interact with recorded survivors through speech recognition and natural language systems.
Website: sfi.usc.edu