The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is the largest single archive of Holocaust survivor testimony in the world. It holds over 55,000 video interviews recorded since 1994 in 65 countries and 43 languages, totalling around 115,000 hours of testimony. It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 with the proceeds of Schindler’s List and is now part of the University of Southern California, where it operates as a substantial academic and educational institution. The archive is the principal institutional response to the loss of the survivor generation: by 2050, when no living survivor will be available to speak in person, the recorded interviews will be the primary remaining direct testimony.
The founding
The Shoah Foundation was established by Spielberg in November 1994, six months after the release of Schindler’s List. Spielberg had taken no personal earnings from the film and had committed the proceeds, together with substantial fundraising contributions from the entertainment industry and from individual donors, to the establishment of an archive that would record systematic video testimony from as many surviving Holocaust survivors as possible. The original target was 50,000 interviews; the final figure of around 55,000 was reached around 2000.
The collection effort ran from late 1994 to 2000 and involved the recruitment, training and deployment of interviewers in 65 countries. The interviewers used a standard methodology developed in consultation with academic Holocaust historians, oral-history specialists and trauma psychologists. Each interview followed a protocol structured to elicit pre-war life, the persecution years, the camp or hiding experience, the liberation, and the post-war life; the protocol was designed to allow the interviewees to speak at their own pace and to revisit difficult material under their own direction. The interviews vary in length from around 90 minutes to over 20 hours; the median is around two hours.
The transfer to USC and the institutional development
The Foundation operated independently from 1994 to 2006 and then transferred its collections and operations to the University of Southern California in January 2006 as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (later simplified to the USC Shoah Foundation). The transfer reflected the recognition that the long-term preservation, cataloguing and academic use of the collection required institutional infrastructure of the kind a major research university could provide. The Foundation has been a unit of USC since then, with substantial dedicated facilities including the digital preservation operation, the cataloguing project that has indexed the testimony at the keyword level (allowing searches across the collection by subject), and the educational programmes.
The collection has been substantially expanded since 2006 to include testimonies from survivors of subsequent genocides and mass atrocities: Cambodia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Armenia, the Nanjing massacre, the Anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar, the Central African Republic violence, and others. The expanded collection, now called the Visual History Archive, holds over 60,000 testimonies in total, of which the Holocaust collection remains the largest single component.
The cataloguing and indexing
The cataloguing of the collection was a substantial intellectual undertaking. Each interview was indexed to a standardised vocabulary of around 65,000 keywords covering people, places, events, experiences and themes; the indexing was carried out by trained cataloguers over a decade and is searchable through the Visual History Archive online interface. A user searching for, for example, “selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp” can retrieve every testimony segment in the collection that addresses that specific experience. The indexing is one of the principal scholarly contributions of the project and has made the collection usable for academic research at a scale that less-indexed oral history collections cannot match.
The Dimensions in Testimony project
The Dimensions in Testimony project, begun in 2014, is the institute’s most-discussed recent initiative. It is the production of three-dimensional interactive recordings of small numbers of survivors who have agreed to participate in extended interview sessions designed to support natural-language interactive use. A user in 2026 can stand in front of a Dimensions in Testimony installation, ask a spoken question, and receive a recorded video response from the survivor that addresses the question. The system uses voice-recognition and natural-language matching to identify the most-relevant recorded response from a library of around 1,500 to 2,000 questions and answers per participating survivor.
The technology is not artificial intelligence in the strict sense; it does not generate new content but selects from pre-recorded material. The survivors who have participated in the project (around 25 by 2026, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Schloss, Aaron Elster, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and others) have been recorded over several days of structured interviewing in studios with multiple cameras to capture the responses from various angles. The Dimensions in Testimony installations are now in around twenty Holocaust museums worldwide, including USHMM, the Illinois Holocaust Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, Beth Shalom in Britain, the Sydney Jewish Museum and several others.
The educational and academic work
The Foundation’s educational arm produces curriculum materials for school use, teacher training programmes and classroom resources keyed to the testimony collection. The IWitness platform, an online educational environment that allows students to construct video projects from segments of the testimony collection, is used in schools in over 90 countries. The Foundation’s academic centre at USC supports doctoral and postdoctoral research using the collection, hosts visiting fellows, and produces a substantial publication programme on the methodology of testimony, on Holocaust education and on the history of the genocides the collection now documents.
The standing of the institution
The USC Shoah Foundation is the principal institutional response to the foreseeable loss of the survivor generation. Its scale (the collection is roughly twenty times the size of the Yad Vashem oral history collection and around fifty times the size of the USHMM oral history collection), its systematic indexing, its educational reach and its continued expansion since 1994 make it the central archive of Holocaust survivor testimony for the period after the survivor generation is gone.
See also
- The USC Shoah Foundation
- Oskar Schindler
- Schindler’s List
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Eichmann Trial as a Turning Point in Holocaust Consciousness
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
Sources
- Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006 (chapters on the Foundation)
- Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Indiana University Press, 2015 (the principal scholarly study of the institutional methodologies)
- Andrea Pető and Helga Thorson (eds), The Future of Holocaust Memorialisation, Tom Lantos Institute, 2015
- Stephen D. Smith, “Building a Living Memorial: The Shoah Foundation’s Mission”, in USC Shoah Foundation Annual Report, multiple years
- USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu
- USC Shoah Foundation Dimensions in Testimony, https://sfi.usc.edu/dit
- USC Shoah Foundation IWitness, https://iwitness.usc.edu