Highlights Archives
Holocaust Survivors' Interviews to Go Online
April 15, 2007, is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time (in the words of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.), "set aside for remembering the victims of the Holocaust and for reminding Americans of what can happen to civilized people when bigotry, hatred and indifference reign." In keeping with that spirit, the United States Congress established Days of Remembrance as the nation's annual commemoration of victims of the Holocaust, observed this year from April 15-22.
Hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust came to the United States. Two dozen who settled in Wisconsin were interviewed by Wisconsin Historical Society staff in the 1970s and '80s. Through a generous grant received late last year from the Helen Bader Foundation of Milwaukee, nearly all the documentary materials generated by those interviews are now being digitized for presentation on the Society's Web site ("nearly all" because one contributor requested that access to her interview be restricted to on-site researchers).
When the Wisconsin Holocaust Survivors Digitization Project is completed, about 160 hours of audio interviews and several hundred photographs will be accessible here. Typed transcripts of the interviews will also be available, and each will be indexed by the topics discussed so users can find corresponding segments of text and sound as well as any relevant pictures. Use of all these materials will be free to scholars, teachers, students and anyone else who visits the Society's Web site.
The project is currently in its initial planning stages. Staff are inventorying collections, evaluating other sites that present oral history interviews on the Web, and surveying researchers to discover how they would like the site to function. Barring unanticipated obstacles, the voices of Wisconsin survivors should be online here well before next year's Yom Hashoah observation.
Meanwhile, for more information about the Wisconsin survivors of the Holocaust manuscripts and audio, see the catalog description in our online catalog, ArCat. Excerpts from the interviews were published as Voices of the Wisconsin Past: Remembering the Holocaust in 1997. Other Wisconsin-related Holocaust materials are online at Turning Points in Wisconsin History. Finally, more about Holocaust Remembrance Day, including why it is observed on different dates in different places, is available elsewhere online.
:: Posted April 16, 2007
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