The Oral History Review

ISSN: 0094-0798 (Print) 1533-8592 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uohr20

“Those Who Were There: Voices from the

Holocaust—A Podcast from the Yale University
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies” https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/
podcasts/

Jonathan C. Friedman

To cite this article: Jonathan C. Friedman (2020): “Those�Who�Were�There: Voices from

the Holocaust—A Podcast from the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies” https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/podcasts/, The Oral History Review, DOI:
10.1080/00940798.2020.1718940

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2020.1718940

Published online: 06 Feb 2020.

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THE ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

REVIEW

“Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust—A Podcast from the Yale University
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies” https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/
podcasts/

Approaching the topic of the Holocaust with questions about why and how it occurred has led many
researchers to focus on the perpetrators and the system of persecution. This was the framework of
one of the deans of Holocaust history, Raul Hilberg, who sought in the 1960s and 1970s to uncover
the functioning of the Third Reich’s machinery of death through a meticulous analysis of German
documents. Seeking an understanding of how the victims of the Holocaust experienced suffering,
trauma, and death was another area of inquiry but one that encountered skepticism both in terms of
its explanatory power and its reliance on survivor testimonies, which scholars like Hilberg found
problematic. Both pathways to deepening our understanding of the Holocaust are valid, and they
have coexisted in many ways from the beginning. The difference is, as historian Michael Berenbaum
has aptly stated: “History is often written by an elite few [but Holocaust] testimonies are written by
a shoemaker, a baker, a tailor” (“Never Again: Holocaust News,” San Diego Jewish World,
20 November 2015).
From the USC Shoah Foundation to Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the desire to preserve testimonies of survivors has been one of the
major endeavors of Holocaust historians of the past generation, and an early effort incorpor-
ating video technology in this regard began at Yale University in the late 1970s. The project,
funded by Alan A. Fortunoff and which bears his name, is now comprised of over 4,000
testimonies from Holocaust survivors, resisters, and liberators. The most recent endeavor of
Fortunoff archivists is a podcast – the only such platform for Holocaust oral histories – that
applies a twenty-first century social media strategy to reach out to a generation of students
weaned on Instagram and Snapchat. And for the most part, the podcast succeeds in bringing
its analog collection into the digital age.
While the plan is for ten episodes, at the time of this writing the podcast features nine, plus an
introduction, with each episode consisting of twenty to twenty-seven minute-long segments from
survivor testimonies, with additional narration by dramatist Eleanor Reissa for background and
context. The episodes showcase the following survivors, in order of their appearance: Martin
Schiller, a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Skarzysko-Kamienna forced labor camp; Leon Bass, an
African-American soldier who liberated Buchenwald; Heda Kovaly, a Czech Jew who survived
both the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz; Sally Horwitz, another Polish-Jewish survivor of multiple
labor camps; Arnie Lie, a Norwegian resistor; and Renee Hartmann, a Slovakian Jew who, along
with her sister, survived starvation and typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp; Leonard Linton,
another U.S. soldier who liberated a Nazi concentration camp; and finally, a two-part testimony
from Celia Kassow, a Jewish partisan and survivor of a mass shooting in the town of
Sharkowshchyna, which is currently in Belarus.
The geographical and gender diversity of the testimonies is noteworthy, as is the breadth of
the experiences captured in ghettos and camps as part of resistance and liberation. The stories
of life and death are harrowing, and transcripts of each episode are a useful research aid for
students and scholars alike. The organizers of the podcast have experience in both oral history
and Jewish studies, and Trinity College Professor Samuel Kassow, one of the leading experts in
modern Jewish history, provides historical oversight of the project overall.
My preference would have been for a different organizational scheme, with testimonies
arranged in a way that enabled students to see the evolution of the Third Reich and its policies.
2 REVIEW

There is one remaining podcast, but it might have helped students understand historical
change over time by featuring early on the experience of a German Jew who could have
spoken to the creation of the Nazi dictatorship and the many antisemitic laws prior to 1939.
Then we could move into the war years and hear testimonies about Polish ghettos. More
testimonies about the killing centers are in order as well so that students understand the core
of the Holocaust experience. The Fortunoff collection contains some of the most indispensable
testimonies in this regard, including that of Simon Srebnik, who was one of the only survivors
of the Chelmno killing center. The testimony is in Hebrew, so it is not possible to use it for the
podcast. However, the collection also contains the English-language testimony of Thomas
Blatt, who was at the Sobibor death camp and was able to escape during the October 1943
uprising. The collection also contains testimony from Telford Taylor, who led the American
prosecution effort at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the war. I hope
that these testimonies will be included in future podcasts because they convey key aspects of
Holocaust history.
It is also unclear why the organizers opted for the podcast format over video clips, as is the
case with the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness platform that enables users to browse through
segments of testimonies and create mini-documentaries with WeVideo (https://iwitness.usc.
edu/SFI/). These do require more technological capacity, which might entail higher costs, but
being able to see survivors and then interact with the material in ways that serve both
educational and creative purposes would help to maximize effectiveness. Attaching classroom
activities to the site so that the podcast could be integrated into school curricula could help
facilitate usage and ensure that its content is linked to specific student learning outcomes that
could then enable educators to track and assess the project’s overall efficacy. Despite these
criticisms, the podcast is a necessary and important undertaking, especially given recent
surveys that suggest knowledge about the Holocaust among United States citizens is poor.

Jonathan C. Friedman
West Chester University
JFriedman@wcupa.edu
© 2020 The Oral History Association
https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2020.1718940