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Holocaust & Genocide Studies: Primary Sources

Oral Histories & Recorded Testimonies

British Library Holocaust Recordings
"The testimonies now available are drawn from a major oral history programme - The Living Memory of the Jewish Community - which between 1987 and 2000 gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. It was initiated by National Life Stories based in the BL's oral history section and funded by a number of organisations including the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the John S Cohen Foundation and the Porjes Charitable Trust."

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
"This archive 'is a collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust.' A portion of the segments is available online. The archive is associated with Yale University's sterling Memorial Library."

Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive
The Visual History Archive is an online portal from USC Shoah Foundation that allows users to search through and view 55,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides that have been catalogued and indexed at the Institute. These testimonies were conducted in 65 countries and in 43 languages.

Primary Documents

Polish Research Institute Archive: Witnessing Genocide
Towards the end of World War II, approximately 20,000 Nazi concentration camp survivors were evacuated to Sweden. The rescue operations were organized by the Red Cross and United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). A large number of the survivors were Polish citizens. With the intent of documenting the war crimes and the experiences of the victims, a working group called “The Polish Research Institute in Lund” was founded to conduct in-depth interviews with the former prisoners and collect material that the survivors had brought with them from the camps. 
The interviews, transport lists, lists of arrivers to Sweden, photographs, drawings, poetry notebooks, personal notebooks, teaching materials, work journals, and Helena Dziedzicka´s notes from the trials have all been digitized in their entirety. The witness testimonies, all written in Polish, are in the process of being translated into English, and new translations are added continually.