Beinecke exhibition ‘lifts up’ the voices of Holocaust survivors

In videotaped testimony recorded in 1984, Holocaust survivor Baruch G. describes the crushing loneliness that followed his liberation from the Nazis.

“I remember after liberation, I suffered probably more from the loneliness and the isolation, more than during the Holocaust period,” he says. “And I suppose it has to do with the fact that after life around you seems to be normal… you are abnormal.”

Baruch G., who had survived the Mława ghetto in Poland and several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, explains that he solely focused on survival as the Holocaust unfolded, but in the absence of that daily struggle to live, and in the wake of horrific loss, he felt alienated and utterly alone.

“I remember during the years ’45, ’46, ’47, even up to ’48, I would find myself crying and, quite frequently, feeling that there is no one,” he says. “There’s no one around me that cares what I do or what I don’t do.”

Baruch G.’s recollection is one of 19 excerpts from testimonies of survivors and witnesses of terror perpetuated by Nazi Germany featured in “In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.” The exhibition, opening July 25 at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, contextualizes the archive’s work within the modern Jewish tradition of documenting anti-Jewish violence through eyewitness accounts.

“The Fortunoff Archive transformed how people think and write about the Holocaust by lifting up the voices of survivors,” said Stephen Naron, the archive’s director. “We’re approaching 80 years from the end of the war and the witnesses, who gave testimony to this archive, are disappearing. We owe it to them to ensure that their voices are heard. Moreover, with the global rise in antisemitism, xenophobia, and increasingly authoritarian parties and regimes worldwide, the need to listen and learn from survivors’ testimonies is, sadly, more relevant than ever.”

Free and open to the public and on view through Jan. 28, 2025, the exhibition marks the 45^th anniversary of the first videotaping by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a grassroots New Haven community initiative that evolved into the Fortunoff Archive — the world’s first institution dedicated to recording video testimony of Holocaust survivors and to promoting scholarly engagement with those testimonies. Today, the archive houses a collection of more than 4,400 testimonies, in more than a dozen languages, recorded at Yale and by affiliated projects in Europe, North and South America, and Israel. “In the First Person” is the first large-scale public exhibition of footage from this groundbreaking collection. 

“Today we take for granted that the survivor should have a voice. But this was not always so,” said Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the archive’s faculty advisor. “For decades a common opinion was that all historians needed was the German official sources. This could only change because people worked together to give survivors a voice. There was nothing easy about that. It took vision and it took labor. Projects like Fortunoff, which was a pioneer, changed Holocaust studies and Holocaust memory, and created a model for ethical human engagement with the (continuing) history of atrocity.”

The 19 video excerpts are displayed along with books, pamphlets, manuscripts, posters, and other materials from Yale Library collections that illuminate modern Jewish efforts to document anti-Jewish persecution through eyewitness accounts. The exhibition, planned since the spring of 2022, tracks this tradition of documentation from the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 — an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in present-day Moldova — through the Holocaust and its aftermath. It includes no materials created by perpetrators and no photographs of atrocities.

“One of our goals with this exhibition is to demonstrate the continuity of these traditions of documentation in the wake of destruction throughout the 20^th century,” said Naron, who co-curated the exhibition with Konstanze Kunst, the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Librarian for Judaic Studies at the Yale Library. “We see the Fortunoff Video Archive as, in part, a modern continuation of that tradition of using video instead of written text.”

A diversity of experiences

On May 2, 1979, Dr. Dori Laub, a survivor, and New Haven television producer Laurel Vlock, founders of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, taped their first interviews with survivors. The project’s methodology instructs interviewers to allow the survivors to lead the story. Interviewers ask few questions and intervene as little as possible.

The project’s taped testimonies were deposited at Yale Library in 1981, forming the foundation of the Fortunoff Video Archive. In 2015, the archive completed the digitization of the collection, which helped to preserve more than 10,000 hours of recorded testimonies and make them more accessible to scholars worldwide.

Portraying the magnitude and depth of this collection with just 19 brief excerpts was hugely challenging, Naron and Kunst explained.

“The collection includes an enormous geographic and linguistic range. Survivors describe the experience of exile, of hiding, of living in ghettos and camps,” Naron said. “There is such an immense diversity of experience in these survivor testimonies that it’s impossible to represent everything.”

People often mistakenly view Holocaust survivors as a uniform group, Kunst said.

“They are idealized and expected to follow a certain script,” she said. “But there is no script and there are no monoliths. These testimonies and materials document an incredible range of people, experiences, emotions, and ideas. We tried to give visitors a sense of that diversity.”

The video excerpts on view represent various themes expressed across the collection. The pain that accompanied liberation, as told by Baruch G., is a common one, Naron said.

“People often perceive liberation as some joyous moment in the survivors’ life stories,” he said. “But if you listen to the survivors, they’ll often tell you that it’s the exact opposite. They’ll say that liberation is the end of one type of suffering, but the beginning of a new type of suffering. Once the risk of immediate death ends, and they have time to reflect on what they’ve lost, a new form of pain begins.”

The excerpts, which last from one to seven minutes, are presented in the 18 vitrines that line the east and west sides of the Beinecke’s mezzanine. Testimonies from a liberator, bystander, and a non-Jewish survivor, a Roma woman, are presented along with excerpts from Jewish survivors. But for the video screens, the cases are shrouded in black.

“We imagine it as a memorial space,” Kunst said.

Donning headphones, visitors will hear a range of stories, some poignant and others appalling. Fred O., a physician who treated patients in the Warsaw and Hrubieszów ghettos, in Poland, discusses examining a man whose upper body was blanketed with lice. Hannah F. recounts a sleepless night at an extermination camp when, tormented by gnawing hunger, she stole a piece of bread and some margarine from a bunkmate. Celia K. recalls destroying a German ammunition dump while serving as a partisan fighter. Edith P. describes the horror of Auschwitz:

“At 4:30 when the sun came up, it was not like the sun. I swear to you, it was not bright. It was always red to me. It was always black to me. It never was life to me. It was destruction.”

Documenting destruction

The exhibition’s opening section, consisting mostly of printed materials displayed in flat cases on the Beinecke’s ground floor, confronts the myth that survivors of Nazi terror remained mostly silent about their experiences until the 1961 trial of former Nazi official Adolph Eichmann, a chief organizer of the Holocaust.

“Most of the materials on view are not striking in the way a 15^th-century manuscript is striking,” Kunst said. “But their story is striking. The efforts to document what happened after destruction is very striking.”

The exhibition explores efforts to document anti-Jewish violence in the early 20^th century, starting with the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, during which mobs murdered 49 Jews, raped women and girls, and destroyed 1,350 homes.

Weeks after the riot, Jewish intellectuals in Odesa dispatched the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik to Kishinev, today Chișinău, Moldova, to investigate. Bialik and two associates used questionnaires while interviewing survivors about their experiences. Instead of writing a formal report of his findings, Bialek composed “In the City of Slaughter,” a 272-line Hebrew poem about the pogrom. A rare first edition of the work is displayed with two later editions.

Visitors will learn about efforts to document anti-Jewish pogroms after World War One as well as early efforts to record the experiences of Holocaust survivors.

Among the objects on view are the three volumes of “From the Last Extermination,” a 10-issue periodical published in Munich between 1946 and 1948 by the Jewish Historical Commission, which was founded by survivors. The journal, printed in Yiddish, contained eyewitness accounts, photographs, ghetto and camp songs, and historical analysis. The volumes bear the Yale University Library acquisition stamp from the year they were published, indicating that Yiddish-reading scholars in the United States had access to them.

Curved cases on the Beinecke’s mezzanine display objects relevant to the Fortunoff Archive’s history, including the master tapes of the first four testimonies by survivors Eva Benda, Renee Hartman, Sally Horowitz, and Leon Weinberg.

Also on display is a 1980 newspaper advertisement soliciting interviewees, placed by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project in the Jewish and local press.

A photograph depicts the founders of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project — Geoffrey H. Hartman, Dori Laub, William Rosenberg, and Laurel Vlock — signing the deed of gift that made the first 183 testimonies a permanent part of Yale Library in 1987. The tapes had been on deposit since 1981, as the exhibit label explains, but the official deed of gift marks the birth of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale.

Also in 1987, Alan Fortunoff provided a gift to support the archive’s endowment, and the collection was later renamed in recognition of him.

“Coming to Yale helped legitimize the project’s efforts to record testimonies as worthy of the academy,” Naron said. “That’s very important because for a long time, mainstream academia ignored survivor documentation. Some early scholarship on the Holocaust almost exclusively focused on perpetrator documentation, which seems inconceivable today. The Fortunoff Video Archive, through Yale, helped to shift that thinking in a small way.”

The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street in New Haven. The library’s exhibition hall is open to the public. Regular hours are:

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday,  9 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Wednesday, 10 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, noon – 5 p.m.