Between 1994 and 1999, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation — now the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education — 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 participants in war crimes trials. The Visual History Archive has since expanded to include Holocaust testimonies collected by other institutions, as well as the testimonies of survivors and witnesses of other genocides across space and time. The VHA now includes material from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Armenian genocide of the World War I era, the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 (China), the Cambodian Genocide, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1996, the South Sudan Civil War, the Central African Republic conflict and the Anti-Rohingya Mass Violence of 2017. The complete archive of these in-person testimonies, which were videotaped in 62 countries and in 41 languages, are available to Brown students, faculty, and staff for use both on and off-campus. Enter » Visual History Archive.
Using the Visual History Archive
The VHA database is a subscription resource that offers streaming testimonies. Use of the VHA requires a one-time registration, allowing users to save searches and projects. Please see the VHA’s Terms of Use.
VHA testimonies are also searchable through the VHA Online website. VHA Online is a limited but freely available version of the VHA, created primarily for use by K-12 teachers. Although VHA Online can be used as a means of identifying testimonies found within the main VHA database, VHA Online provides streaming access only to several hundred of the English-language Holocaust testimonies in the main VHA database. For the rest, VHA Online contains only the metadata. In that respect, VHA Online functions primarily as a searchable index to the main VHA database. Non-Brown users seeking access to non-English language testimonies and other testimonies not streamed through VHA Online would need to come to the Rockefeller Library to access the full version of the Visual History Archive. For information on the availability of research visits to the Rockefeller Library, please email rock@brown.edu.
System Requirements
The Archive is accessible on a PC via standard web browsers, including Windows 7/8+, Google Chrome 12+, Internet Explorer 9+, and Firefox 25+, and on Apple devices using Mac OSX 10.6+, Safari 5.1.1+, Google Chrome 12+, and Firefox 25+.
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 62-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 a new window)
» VHA FAQ (opens in a new window)
» VHA Online (opens in a new window)
» VHA Thesaurus (pdf)
Contacts
Contact eresources@brown.edu or Holly_Snyder@brown.edu for assistance.