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USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive

Now Available at the CEU Library, Budapest

The Library of Central European University (CEU) is the first institution in

the region to gain electronic access to the Archive of the USC Shoah

Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Established by

Steven Spielberg in 1994, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute maintains

an archive of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and

other witnesses, collected from 56 countries, and in 32 languages. Today,

the archive of testimonies is one of the largest video digital libraries in the

world. The mission of the Institute is to overcome prejudice, intolerance,

and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of

the Institute’s visual history testimonies. The testimonies are made

available to the CEU community and outside users (non-affiliated

researchers may obtain on-campus access) through an interface which

allows the searching and viewing of the fully indexed video testimonies

and any additional corresponding data.

“The CEU Library is proud to be the first in Central and Eastern Europe to

present the Visual History Archive for researchers, educators and

students. Until today, only the Freie Universität Berlin provided digital

access to this Archive in Europe” – said Maria Szlatky, Director, CEU

Library.

“Providing the broadest possible access to the Visual History Archive is a

vital component of the Institute’s mission, and we are so pleased that the

Archive will be available to scholars, students, and educators at Central

European University.  In addition to supporting scholarship and research

in many disciplines, the depth and breadth of the archive—which contains

personal accounts of life in numerous countries throughout the 20th

century—can support CEU’s commitment to nurture respect for human

rights and diverse cultures and opinions.” – said Kim Simon, Interim

Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

The Visual History Archive (VHA) contains interviews with Jewish

survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators

and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers,

Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and war

crimes trials participants. The languages of the interviews are Bulgarian,

Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Greek,

Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Ladino, Latvian, Lithuanian,

Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romani, Romanian, Russian,

Serbian, Sign, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and

Yiddish. VHA testimonies include 1349 interviews in Hungarian,

including more than 800 interviews conducted in Hungary.

The generous support by the George W. Schaeffer Foundation to the

Institute has enabled it to begin to conduct educational programming and

to provide access to the testimonies in Hungary. The archive's availability

at CEU presents important educational opportunities to teachers in

Hungary.  The Institute will launch its International Visual History

Program in Hungary, through which it works with government agencies,

non-governmental organizations, educators, and historians to develop

testimony-based educational resources in Hungarian. These resources are

designed to help students understand the history of World War II,

including the Holocaust, as well as other historical events that took

placein Hungary and the greater region during the 20th century, and to

encourage them to resist stereotyping and other acts of prejudice they

may encounter in their daily lives. In Hungary, the Institute plans to work

together with the Ferenc Merei Pedagogical Institute, the Holocaust

Documentation Center, and the Ministry of Education to support the

development of testimony-based educational resources in Hungarian and

to encourage their nationwide use.

For more information about the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, visit

www.college.usc.edu/vhi, further information about the VHA at CEU is

available at http://www.library.ceu.hu/vha.html