Bibliography

The lives of Holocaust survivors during and after persecution have attracted attention for many years. As information was accumulated, views and interpretations concerning survivors' behavior in the camps and their psychological state thereafter have changed, and old theories and beliefs have been replaced by new, more adequate ones. The greatest change however, was brought about by the survivors' own words, both in written or oral form.
There have been many projects that involve interviewing survivors, and one of the earliest was the Fortunoff Archives for Holocaust Survivors' Audio-visual Testimonies, at Yale University. This project gathered testimonies in different countries, including Israel, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Copies of most of them have been placed in our Archives. The testimonies are being indexed and serve students interested in the subject.
At the same time we started to interview and audiotape survivors who were children during persecution. This group came only recently to our attention. They had been living somewhat unnoticed among us. As they enter senescence, suffer from losses and tend to look back at their lives, many feel the need to tell their story. It is society's obligation to listen to them. At the same time it opens the opportunity, probably the last one, to learn about their extraordinary experiences during early childhood, and about the no less extraordinary strengths and coping capabilities needed to reintegrate into post-war society. This is an ongoing project, yet even now, in its early stage we have learned a lot from these survivors.
Search for Testimony