United States

Report on Archives with Significant Holocaust Holdings

The National Archives and Records Administration
NARA in College Park, Maryland has two groups of Holocaust materials. The first is the Holocaust-Era Assets records, which consist of claims files and records and similar documents. The second is the Captured German and Related Records on micorform. These are predominantly Nazi materials, and the collection contains photographs.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC has an archives collection. Their holdings include a film and video branch, a photo archives, an oral history collection, and music, in addition to their archival documents. They collect personal papers, memoirs, testimonies, and literary manuscripts. The USHMM library also has a rare book collection of Memorial Books (Yizkor), which were published in limited runs by survivors in order to document the Jewish communities destroyed by the Shoah. They are printed mostly in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German.

Fortunoff Video Archives
The Fortunoff Video Archives at Yale University Special Collections has over 4,000 video interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. The interviews range in length from one hour to twenty-six hours. Yale has housed this collection for the Holocaust Survivors Film Project since 1981. The archives is cataloged in the campus library catalog (Orbis), and the FVA has a webpage with a guide to researching in the catalog. To test out Orbis, I typed in "holocaust testimony and auschwitz" as a keyword search, and the response was 779 entries, all from the FVA.

Voice Vision at University of Michigan-Dearborn
Voice Vision: Holocaust Survivor Oral Histories at University of Michigan at Dearborn is the archive of interviews with 150 survivors. The interviews were conducted by history professor Sid Bolkosky during the course of 14 years. There are 330 hours of audio recordings and 60 hours of video. A small number of these interviews and transcripts can be accessed online. Voice Vision has their materials cataloged with OCLC, and they can be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan.

Voices of the Holocaust at Illinois Institute of Technology
Voices of the Holocaust is a project still in progress at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1998 librarians rediscovered 16 volumes of typescripts of interviews with Holocaust Survivors in the IIT Galvin Library. The volumes were 70 interviews transcribed into English by Dr. David Boder, a journalist and former English professor at IIT. Boder conducted 109 interviews in Europe in 1946. Eight of these edited interviews were published as I Did Not Interview the Dead, and the audio recordings are available at the Library of Congress. The Voices of the Holocaust project aims to republish these interviews on the website, in transcript form and via streamed audio. They have a strong interest in indexing, especially trauma indexing.

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This page was created by Jill Reilly, December 2001.