25. Survivors Narrative Project
I am a grandchild of four Holocaust survivors. That should tell you a lot about me.
You may also find telling the fact that stacked atop that burdened blessing, my parents are professional Holocaust educators and survivors’ rights activists. My mother, Jeanette, was a cofounder of the 2nd Generation Network and the recent author of “Why Should I Care: Lessons from the Holocaust,” and my father, Philip, is the current Executive Director of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants. The Holocaust has thus, as you might imagine, always been a big part of my family’s identity and vocabulary. So much so, in fact, during high school my friends referred to my mom as Mrs. Holocaust.
No joke, I spent the first 20 years of my life living in a Holocaust library. My parents are, among other things, writers and editors and today they earn much of their living from editing and co-authoring Holocaust survivors’ memoirs. Their bookshelves, in practically every room of their house, are overstuffed with histories, theses, memoirs, novels — all about the Shoah. At some point, they had accumulated so many that they filled a wing at a local university just getting rid of the runoff.
For all these reasons and more, I am intimately familiar with not only the legacy of the Shoah, but all the unholygodawfulness of Shoah biz — the institutionalization of the Holocaust. And even though the thought of using a dime of Holocaust-related funding for anything but the survivors’ care makes me ill, and only because — due to life circumstances — I couldn’t possibly avoid having one good Holocaust education idea, here, inevitably, is my application for Shoah dollars.
As I was saying, my parents help survivors write and publish their memoirs — their testimonies to the horrors and miracles they witnessed during WWII. It is a noble and thankless task. Survivors’ stories need to be told. But, with rare exception, survivor memoirs are not bestsellers. Most survivors foolishly expect to find publishing contracts for their books, balking when faced with the reality and expense of self-publishing. So their manuscripts linger on shelves, unseen to anyone but a few academics and disinterested publishers. Yet there is such a wealth of information, offering such a expansive picture of events, that to leave these manuscripts languishing is a crime to our historical memory and the survivors’ legacy.
The Survivors Narrative Project (SNP) would offer a means to give our survivors’ stories their due, by creating a complete history of the Holocaust told from the perspective of its witnesses.
This mockup is a visual reference and not at all a final vision.
An interactive, multimedia Web site, SNP would let users specify a date and location and then browse through retellings of the days’ events pulled from the pages of survivors’ testimonies.
In addition to offering a robust boolean search interface, SNP’s primary navigational tool would be one which let users quickly jut about dates, locations and personalities.
Similar to MIT Labs’ Exhibit, but not nearly as ugly nor hard for the am haaretz to grasp, SNP’s navigator would be divided into three collapsable panels:
- Date: Users would select a date or date-range on an interactive timeline covering the entire period from before to after the war, with major events highlighted for quick access.
- Location: Users would set the location by clicking an area on an interactive map. Users can select a region of any size, from a single town to the entire globe. Historically significant locations would be marked for quick access.
- Individual: Users would select from a gallery of survivors’ photographs to display testimonies specific to the selected date and location.
Content would shift on the fly as users made their selections, enabling effortless browsing through time and space.
Beneath the navigation, the selected testimony would show. Narratives would be pulled directly from survivors’ memoirs and harvested from various collections like those of Yad Vashem, YIVO and the USHMM. Using a custom XML encoding, authors can be tagged with biographical data, and books’ chapters, paragraphs and sentences could be marked for their date of occurrence, location and other data. (Users could even help tag incoming content, as new manuscripts are added to the database.)
So too, this could be done with the Shoah Visual History Foundation’s archives, which would make a fantastic addition to this platform. Video testimonies can be tagged for date and location info, connecting film segments to the timeline and map for quick reference. And with the help of technologies like those employed by Metavid, closed captioning and other metadata can be used to make spoken text searchable.
Users could choose to read or view only a segment at a time, or to delve further into an entire testimony, by viewing online, or by downloading ebooks, ordering print-on-demand copies or purchasing DVDs of video testimonies (thus providing additional incentive to archival partners). Users could also annotate and cross-reference testimonies, connecting dots between individuals’ stories and providing helpful insight and references. Social media tools will also enable users to tweet and share on Facebook segments of testimony they find compelling.
SNP would thereby provide a means for survivors to finally share their stories effectively, an ideal tool for students, educators and researchers to investigate the Shoah, and a business model of sorts for organizations sitting on the rights to manuscripts no one seemingly wants to buy.
