The USF Libraries are now one of sixteen institutions in the world to provide access to the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
In 1994, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to videotape and preserve testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. Today, the Shoah Foundation Institute, now part of the University of Southern California, is engaged in the urgent mission to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies embodied in the Visual History Archive. The Institute’s Archive contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies collected in 32 languages and 56 countries. One-hundred-twenty thousand hours of video occupy 200 terabytes of storage on servers at USC.
The Institute interviewed Jewish survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti survivors (Gypsy), survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. Segments are organized according to topics: pre-war, camps, hiding, ghettos, liberation, and post-war. Biographical information about each interviewee is included with each testimony clip. Users may identify both whole testimonies of relevance, as well as specific segments within testimonies that relate to their area of interest. Each user is required to create a username and a password in order to log on. ff-campus access to the testimonies is possible through VPN.
Testaments of the Holocaust is a companion resource to the Visual History Archive.
The Wiener Library is the oldest institution in the world established for the task of documenting the Nazi regime and its crimes against the Jewish people. Testaments of the Holocaust makes accessible online for the first time primary source material within this library. Content includes eyewitness accounts gathered after the pogrom of 1938 and accounts assembled after 1955; photographic material; propaganda materials; school text books; limited circulation publications and rare serials. It provides the basis for studying Nazi Germany and its crimes from many perspectives, offering the raw materials that allow researchers to study the history of this period. It builds this history through people’s testimonies, family narratives and the documents of the activities of the Nazi regime. Appropriate secondary literature complements this collection. Includes thematic essays by scholars in the field. Testaments of the Holocaust, from Cengage Learning (Gale), supports both an English and German interface with 75% of the materials in German and 20% in English.
To access these resources and more, visit http://www.poly.usf.edu/Library and click on “Search the databases”.