Methodological Nationalism in History Writing. Missing Locals of Slovakia

“The testimony you requested from the Fortunoff Video Archive cannot be viewed in Slovakia until 2026,” was the response we received when attempting to access a taped interview with a Jewish Holocaust witness from Sečovce (in Hungarian: Gálszécs), a small town in eastern Slovakia. A social historian of the Holocaust and an ethnographer who has Read More

Talking about Sexualised Violence: The Presentation of Rape and Male Power in an Oral-History Interview

The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is the biggest archive of oral-history interviews of Jews and other survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Trained volunteers have conducted more than 50,000 interviews from 1994 until today. The interviews were filmed and did not only focus on the period of the Holocaust Read More

More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching

The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Uninitiated researchers approaching Fortunoff’s collection, in particular undergraduate students tasked with using Read More

“Mengele picked me and they took me to a hospital”: The Compensation Claims of Hungarian Victims of Pseudo-medical Experiments

“In July 1944, following the order of Mengele, I was taken to the revier of the Gipsy lager. On the third day I was put to sleep and taken to the surgery. Sometime later I woke with terrible belly- and backpain. Three weeks later the anesthesia was repeated. Then I was in hospital for 4–5 Read More

From the Ghetto Revolt to the Warsaw Uprising – Hungarian Jews in KL Warschau

“We were clearing up the ruins of the devastated Warsaw ghetto…While clearing the rubble, we found many dead bodies. Despite the [Germans’] ban, we gave them a burial. Some had knives and weapons in their hands” – remembered 19-year-old Hungarian Jewish survivor, József Davidovics in 1945. Roughly a year after the Warsaw ghetto revolt was Read More

“Historical Meaning Beyond the Personal”: Survivor Agency and Mediation in the Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies Collection

“I am still so completely under the impression of your terrible suffering that every word that I could thank you with for this [report] seems inadequate….You have thus demonstrated that you have faced up to a moral task, which, as I hope, carries a reward in itself: You have helped to ensure that your experiences Read More

Cooperation of Rescue Organisations in Vienna: An Eyewitness Report

Introduction The following document is part of The Wiener Library’s collection entitled ‘Eyewitness reports regarding the November Pogrom’, consisting of 365 eyewitness testimonies collected in the days, weeks, and months following the November Pogrom of 1938, alternatively known as ‘Kristallnacht’ or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. At the time, Alfred Wiener, the German-Jewish founder of Read More