These survivors told me stories that were unimaginable, stories of great pain and suffering. The interviews began with stories of the survivor’s childhood and then proceeded onto deportation, separation from their families, life in the concentration camps, liberation and now, their time following the Holocaust.

They told their stories as if they’d been born to tell their stories. All told me they felt better after they spoke. After the conference, upon returning home to San Francisco, I used my skills in journalism to write stories of my experience, drawing conclusions about my time with the Holocaust survivors and witnesses. At this point in time however, magazines and academic journals were not interested in the Holocaust. Most institutions viewed the Holocaust as a thing of the past, something that had ended decades ago. The forming of the United Nations after the murder of 6 million Jews, and 5 million political dissidents, homosexuals and gypsies was seen as enough.

Despite countless efforts to submit my articles and create awareness of the Holocaust survivors, the articles were not selected by publishers. This led to the creation of the Holocaust Oral History Project, now called the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to record the stories of Holocaust survivors to raise public awareness of the Holocaust. With a staff of three people and approximately 100 volunteers, the Project was able to secure and record the oral histories of 1400 survivors in 1700 taped sessions. The interviews were recorded on video, as well as audio sessions. The collection of the oral histories have been donated to the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and are now accessible to the public. I worked for the project from l98l to l996.

In 1983, I participated in the next conference of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. I brought twenty-five public radio reporters with me and we interviewed 150 survivors. And so it began, tape by tape, until we built one of the largest collections in the country. Thanks to many volunteers and interviewers, our project flourished. I’m proud that we were of assistance to projects in Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Paris, London and Johannesburg.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List and discovered that the stories of most Holocaust survivors were not being saved. As a result, Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation for Visual History. Through his research, he came across my work and invited me to be his first consultant. Spielberg started projects around the world and collected 53,000 testimonies worldwide.

In l992 & l993 my collaboration with military historian Eric Saul resulted in the discovery of two lost stories of the Holocaust. We did extensive research on the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a small unit of Japanese American soldiers who played a role in the liberation of the Dachau complex, specifically the subcamps and Landsberg-Kaufering Death March. We are also proud to have discovered the story of Chiune Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler”. Sugihara and his wife Yukiko saved Jews in l940 when Mr. Sugihara issued visas to thousands of Polish Jews fleeing Europe, against the orders of Japan. Sugihara issued transit visas to the refugee’s and the Dutch Consulate, Jan Zwartendijk issued destination visas. Eric and I partnered in this work with Noby Yoshimura and Harry Fukahara.

Speaking transforms survivors. Through testimony, many survivors report that they began their journey to personal healing. Many survived in order to testify.  Many of our interviews had a transformative quality. Positive changes occur for both the respondent and the interviewer. For many of the survivors I personally interviewed, I found that they seemed revived and emerged from the process looking years younger.

Over the years, there has been an opening in the public consciousness in accepting the Holocaust. Dialogue is opening and people are discussing oral histories, and they are inviting oral historians into academic studies. Oral histories create a fuller picture and tell the stories that make us complete, those important stories that are not found in history books. The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project still continues to interview survivors in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Thank you to all who work to remember our history.