How Laurel Vlock Documented The Unthinkable

The life and work of Laurel Fox Vlock (pictured), a TV journalist who founded New Haven’s Holocaust video archives, will take center stage at an event Sunday. Hosted by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven, the event — the second annual Judith Ann Schiff Women’s History Program — begins at the New Haven Museum (114 Whitney Ave.) at 2 p.m. Click here for more details. Read on to learn how Vlock’s work broke new ground and resonates more than ever today.

Laurel Fox Vlock came from a family of doers. Even so, her accomplishments stood out.

Laurel’s father, John Fox, was a Hungarian immigrant who founded a successful steel company. Her mother, Rose Greenberg Fox, taught school, served in numerous civic organizations, and was reportedly the first New Haven woman to get a driver’s license. Both parents worked tirelessly on behalf of Jewish communities in New Haven and elsewhere. Laurel’s sister, Marian Fox Wexler, is the kind of person who, moving to a town that lacks a nursery school, simply starts one. 

And Laurel — well, Laurel was both the visionary and the indefatigable worker behind the world’s first video archive of Holocaust testimonies.

She won an Emmy Award for a documentary drawn from some of those early survivors’ testimonies. She hosted a long-running public affairs television program — and before that, an innovative radio interview show. She co-wrote a book on an entirely unrelated subject. She convened a group of women to start a TV station in Bridgeport, telling the New York Times: ​“I felt it was about time that women achieved parity in communications and were put in positions where they could mold and shape public opinion.”

But it was her pioneering work in videotaping the memories of Holocaust survivors, and collecting those tapes into what became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, for which Laurel Vlock is best known. For good reason. 

Others were recording survivors’ memories on paper and on audiocassette. Vlock, as host and producer of ​“Dialogue with Laurel Vlock” on WTNH-TV in New Haven, understood ​“the impact of the visual,” as she put it. She understood that what she termed demeanor evidence — the pained smile, the dabbing of a tear, the moments when speech fails — conveys information and emotion that mere words cannot.

Vlock’s work inspired many others, including Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation and video testimony projects documenting genocide and ethnic cleansing in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia.

All that began with just four interviews, recorded in 1979 on the then-new videotape technology in the New Haven office of Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and child survivor. 

Together, Vlock and Laub founded the Holocaust Survivors’ Film Project. Working without institutional support, their all-volunteer team quickly expanded, raising money and interviewing survivors in other states and in Israel. The Fortunoff archive now contains roughly 4,400 video interviews. 

“I was sure of the impact of the visual,” Vlock said at a 1982 ceremony inaugurating the archive’s move to Yale. ​“I was sure of the ability to do this kind of interviewing. I was sure that the technology was there to make it possible. And I was also sure, very frankly, that this was the time. That it was important to do it now. That it was 40 years after the event and that time was indeed running out.

“What I was very uncertain about was opening old wounds, disturbing personal equilibrium.”

That’s where Laub came in. ​“He felt that the survivors — and he is a survivor — were sensing their own mortality and would be ready to come forward,” Vlock said at the Yale inaugural ceremony.

Added Elie Wiesel, perhaps the world’s best-known Holocaust survivor: ​“Listen to them and listen well. Because ultimately when you listen to a witness, you yourself become a witness.”

Antisemitism at Home and Abroad

Growing up in New Haven in the 1930s, sisters Laurel and Marian Fox came to an early awareness of antisemitism, both at home and in Europe.

Neighborhood bullies declared a nearby Catholic church to be off-limits. Schoolmates at the Roger Sherman School called both girls ​“Christ-killers.” Nuns at a convent near the Fox home refused to say hello to Marian and Laurel.

Meanwhile, the Fox parents kept a close eye on the rise of the Nazis and their assault — rhetorical, legal, and physical — on German Jews. They made sure their young daughters understood as well. 

In 1937, at the urging of a brother who had recently traveled in Europe, Rose Fox took her girls on an extraordinary trip.

In London, they visited Rose’s older sister and witnessed vicious antisemitic graffiti as well as fascist leader Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi ranting, according to a 1990s interview with Laurel. In Brussels, Marian saw a sweet shop displaying a portrait of Hitler in the window. In Luxembourg, Rose’s sister persuaded the family to walk across a bridge into Germany, saying they should see the beautiful countryside. 

The Nazis had been in power for four years. The Nuremberg laws had stripped German Jews of their citizenship and civil rights. Ferocious Nazi border guards held snarling German shepherds. As the family walked along a country road, German children stopped playing and gave the Heil Hitler salute. It was terrifying for Laurel, age eleven, and Marian, just seven years old. 

Back home, Rose and John tried to spread the word about what was happening to Jews in Europe, but no one believed them. They worked to promote a Jewish homeland. Meanwhile, the sisters grew up: Hillhouse High School and boys and college. Their father, insisting they get an education so they could support themselves, proudly sent them to Cornell. 

Laurel married businessman Jay ​“Jim” Vlock, earned a master’s degree from Queens College, and worked as a teacher. Three children were born: Daniel, Michael, and Sandra. The family moved to Woodbridge. 

“A Completely New Experience”

Then, in 1964, came an unexpected opportunity. Yale had started an FM radio station, WYBC. Laurel was tapped to create an educational program, ​“Your Community Speaks.” In cooperation with the New Haven Public Schools, Vlock brought speakers — ranging from Yale professors to storytellers to newspaper editors — into classrooms, recording their talks and interactions with the school kids. When former New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner visited Yale, Vlock organized a press conference for 150 high school journalists from around Connecticut. 

The Yale Daily News reported that the pilot show had been called ​“one of the most promising experiments in education in the U.S. today.” The New Haven Register noted that the program was ​“sparked by the tireless efforts of a Woodbridge mother of three” and quoted Vlock saying: ​“It is a completely new experience for me.” 

That completely new experience set her in new directions, many of which involved shining a light on the trials and resilience of other people. 

A couple of years after the radio program debuted, Vlock launched ​“Dialogue with Laurel Vlock,” her long-running and award-winning public affairs show on WTNH Channel 8. Working as an independent producer, she lined up weekly guests on a wide range of topics: many Jewish, but not all; many local, but some ranging as widely as interviews with Hillary Clinton, novelist Jerzy Kozinski, Maus author/illustrator Art Spiegelman, and Abba Eban, the statesman and scholar who was instrumental in the founding of the state of Israel.

An early collaborator at WYBC was Joel Levitch, then a Yale undergraduate. He taught her about radio production. Together they researched and wrote a nonfiction book about William Henry Singleton, who was born into slavery, won freedom by serving in the Union Army, then made his way to New Haven. Here, he worked as a coachman, taught himself to read and write, and became a minister in the A.M.E. Zion Church. The book, Contraband of War, was published in 1970.

Beyond continuing her weekly ​“Dialogue” program, Vlock was instrumental in establishing the first all-women-owned television station in the country. Channel 43, WBCT, began broadcasting in September 1987.

Documenting The Unthinkable

In 1977, the New Haven Jewish community dedicated a Holocaust memorial — the country’s first to be built on public land. Two years later, Vlock was working on a documentary about the monument for Channel 8 when she contacted Dori Laub. Together, they conducted their initial four survivor interviews in a marathon recording session in Laub’s office.

At age 52, Vlock had found her life’s work: the Holocaust Survivors Film Project.

She and Laub enlisted help from a group of New Haven survivors, who donated money as well as agreeing to tell their own agonizing stories. Vlock organized interviews in Bridgeport and Hartford; New York and Los Angeles; Norfolk, Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida. In 1980 she drew upon the initial four interviews to create a documentary for WNEW in New York. Called ​“Forever Yesterday,” it won a New York Emmy.

Family pitched in. John and Rose Fox contributed initial funding. Marian identified potential donors and accompanied Laurel to Boston-area interview sessions, sometimes lining up recording locations. Both Marian and Laurel’s daughter, Sandra, recall going to Israel to help with interviews there. Foundations and wealthy individuals provided funding. Video technology, so much less expensive than film and requiring so much less equipment, made the project technically and financially feasible.

Vlock and Laub recruited and trained additional interviewers, all volunteers. And they continued developing allies. 

One of their first interviewees was Renee Hartman, a New Haven librarian and poet who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a young child. Her husband, Geoffrey Hartman, was a literature professor at Yale and a different kind of child survivor, sent from Germany to England via the Kindertransport just before the war. He helped make a connection to Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti, asking the university to house the growing collection of videotapes.

Giamatti agreed, fast-tracking the acquisition. By the time Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library formally received the collection in 1981, it numbered 183 testimonies on roughly 250 videotapes. 

The Revson Foundation provided a start-up grant, and foundation president Eli Evans spoke movingly at the 1982 inauguration. 

“It is now 37 years since the end of World War II,” Evans said. ​“One only has to sit and watch several hours of this testimony, as I was privileged to do, to imagine what in another 40 years … this project can mean to scholars, to young people, to education, to future generations.”

Forty-plus years after Evans spoke those words, those future generations encompass nearly all of us. Antisemitism has once again flared globally and in the United States. The testimonies that Vlock and her successors worked so hard to gather stand as an essential reminder of the attempted genocide that led to an international agreement to create a ​“Never Again” Jewish homeland in Palestine. 

Laurel Vlock’s visionary efforts to preserve the testimony of those who lived through the Shoah have never mattered more.