Between 1994 and 1999, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation -- now the
USC Shoah Foundation Institute -- interviewed nearly 52,000 survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The Institute interviewed Jewish survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah's
Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.
The complete archive of these testimonies, which were videotaped in 56 countries and in 32 languages, is now available to Brown students, faculty, and staff for on campus use. Enter » Visual History Archive.
Using the Visual History Archive
Testimonies are streamed from a Brown cache server and are therefore available on campus only. If a testimony you need is not readily viewable on our cache server,
it can be requested and uploaded within 48 hours. Use of the Archive requires a one-time registration, allowing you to save searches and projects. Please see the
Terms of Use.
System Requirements
The Archive is accessed using Internet Explorer (version 6 or later) with the Windows operating system (2000 or later) and Windows Media
Player (9 or higher).
Help
The Shoah Foundation Institute has prepared several guides to aid users in finding what they are looking for in the collection. The VHA User Manual provides basic information on how the archive
is organized, how to search and navigate, how to request download of selected interviews, and similar practical advice. Answers to many typical user questions about the VHA are addressed in
the FAQ, and you may wish to consult this page before opening the User Manual (a 31 page pdf document). The VHA Thesaurus is designed to assist users by providing information on subject
keywords and index terms used in describing the interviews, and is useful both for finding appropriate terms to use in searching and for identifying interviews that address particular research
topics.
» VHA User Manual (pdf - opens in new window)
» VHA FAQ (opens in new window)
» VHA Thesaurus (pdf - opens in new
window)
Contacts
Contact eresources@brown.edu or Holly_Snyder@brown.edu for assistance.