Holocaust Archive Enters New Era

Thousands of survivors have told their stories for perpetuity — so they can be heard, and so the stories of those who didn’t survive can be heard as well.

The stories of 4,300 of those survivors and counting — survivors of the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of six million Jews during World War II— are safely stored in New Haven, in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

For 32 years, a woman named Joanne Rudoff has curated that archive, which is housed in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. She has worked with survivors and volunteer videographers here in New Haven and around the world to build up the archive. She’s in the process of handing over the reins to Stephen Naron, who formally takes over the job Sept. 7.

Naron’s mission is to keep the project growing, and to preserve what’s there. The archive has digitized older videos that were in danger of disintegrating.

From 4,300 narratives has emerged a complex oral history of the Holocaust. Some of the stories you hear from the survivors, says Rudoff, can inspire you in the vein of popular books or movies like Schindler’s List. They attest to the human will to survive, to the kindness of strangers.

But mostly, she adds, the stories document the true picture of the Holocaust, in which most people did not survive, through no fault of their own. It’s not an uplifting tale.

“To put rose-colored glasses on it is to demean the experience,” Rudoff said during an appearance with Naron on WNHH radio’s ​“Chai Haven” program. ​“It’s not a romance story. … The reality is that people were not saved. The bulk of the Jewish population was brutally and systematically murdered with forethought.”

The first imperative behind the project is to allow people who did survive to tell what happened to them and to the family members and friends who perished. ​“We have an obligation to listen to them,” Naron said.

At first, survivors were reluctant to tell their stories to people other than fellow survivors after World War II, Rudoff said. They were told: ​“Nobody wants to hear your story. Just keep quiet. Get on with your life.” That has changed over time.

Contrary to some conventional wisdom, preserving their stories won’t prevent genocide, Rudoff said. ​“It hasn’t stopped,” she noted, citing subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Sudan, and Rwanda, among many others. Holocaust testimony can serve as not just a caution but also a ​“lesson” for those who choose to repeat or not to repeat history.

But in addition to allowing survivors to tell their story, the archive does serve an important historical purpose, Rudoff said: creating a public record for scholars and the general public alike. We do need to know about the Holocaust. The way it really happened. Not just the way Hollywood tells it.

In spending more than 30 years compiling the survivors’ unromanticized stories, Rudoff did still find inspiration, and even a measure of uplift. Over and over again she has been struck, she said, by how ​“most people chose to live again. They had enough hope to marry and to have children.”

She remains inspired enough that, though officially ​“retired,” she will continue working. She’s preparing a documentary on another inspiring story: The story on the archives themselves, New Haven’s gift to history and the future alike.

Click on the above audio file to hear the full interview with Rudoff and Naron on WNHH radio’s ​“Chai Haven” program, including selected clips from the archives of survivors’ stories.

And click here to learn more about the archive, listen to sample stories, and/or arrange a visit to watch full videos.