Let them Speak
Let them Speak is the epigraph of this digital monograph and the name of the collaborative project between three institutions that gave rise to it. Let them Speak is symbolic; it expresses my intention to give voice to millions of murdered Holocaust victims, to the Drowned, as Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, named them. In Search of the Drowned is a hybrid publication with various components bringing together survivors’ testimonies, digital history, computer science, philosophy, and personal memory.
In Search of the Drowned is a data edition of nearly 2700 complete English language Holocaust testimonies preserved in three major US collections: Yale Fortunoff Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To give voice to the Drowned, it renders pieces of collective suffering as testimonial fragments. To unlock survivors’ testimonies, it makes transcripts available as a linguistic corpus.
Testimonies | Fragments | Search |
Essays | Methodology |
Tell the world
Tens of thousands of audiovisual interviews with survivors of the Holocaust have been recorded since the end of the Second World War. While each testimony is the unique story of an individual, one commonly shared sentiment is the desire to tell the world. Thanks to the willingness of survivors to speak, despite the considerable emotional difficulty of doing so, hundreds of scholars, archivists and volunteers have been able to study and learn from their experiences. Nevertheless, the sheer number of available testimonies, as well as lack of transcripts and appropriate search tools, have remained a significant barrier to understanding the Holocaust from the perspective of the survivor and the voiceless victim. The overall goal of Let Them Speak as a collaborative project is to make victims’ perspective investigable and tangible for future generations and for future scholarship on the Holocaust. Again, the epigraph, Let Them Speak, is symbolic. In addition to giving voice to the Drowned, it also expresses this goal.
In 2018, under the initiative of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies of Yale University (FVAHT), three leading institutions responsible for large collections of Holocaust testimonies agreed to make transcripts, and some video material, of a small portion of their large collection available in this book. The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies gave access to 180 transcripts and videos recorded as part of the Holocaust Survivor Film Project in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) contributed 1500 interviews recorded between the 1970s and the late 1990s. The Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California (USC VHA) gave 1000 interview transcripts recorded in the 1990s. (See the complete description of the data sets in the Methodology section). With funding from the Fortunoff Video Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, In Search of the Drowned was written, edited, and built by me in collaboration with the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory, and in consultation with FVAHT, USC VHA, and USHMM. This digital book brings together nearly 2700 testimonies from these three collections for the first time, and allows for unprecedented forms of access, search and analysis of victims’ experiences.
As a data edition, this publication aims not only to release interviews in a digital format, but also to unlock testimonies by drawing on modern technologies such as natural language processing and data mining. The edition is built around BlackLab, a sophisticated search engine that helps readers to explore the collection of testimonies. A filterable and searchable table of contents allows readers to browse and read transcripts or watch some but not all testimonies. All this is in fact an ongoing effort by the Fortunoff Archive; further exploratory tools will soon be developed in the coming years. This book also commemorates those millions of murdered victims, who could never share their experience. Technology has been employed to build an anthology of testimonial fragments that represents the experience of voiceless victims. Readers can get acquainted with the way technology has been applied under the Methodology section.
These exploratory tools complement the work of archivists, librarians, and indexers who work to make these testimonies discoverable by employing rigorous cataloguing standards and controlled vocabularies. In fact, as the reader shall see, this publication builds upon their important work. It also uses transcriptions of testimonies that were prepared by students and volunteers working for the FVAHT, USC, and USHMM. Their work significantly contributed to this publication. Even though this publication is the result of a small and dedicated team, it is based on many years of collaborative work and was designed as a project to encourage further cross-institutional cooperation.
Cover Image: Martyr Monument (designed by Alfred Hajos), Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery, Budapest