Oral History and the Holocaust – An Introduction

During the Second World War, the Soviet writers and journalists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman collected and processed eyewitness accounts of crimes against the Jews, thus making one of the first oral history studies of the Holocaust, known as The Black Book.In 2006, the premiere of the documentary "Spell Your Name" took place in Kyiv.It was created in cooperation with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and is dedicated to the events of the Holocaust in Ukraine.In making the film, director Sergey Bukovsky used previously collected testimonies and new interviews recorded during his trips in Ukraine.Thus, viewers had the opportunity to observe the actual field collection of the Holocaust Oral History.Today oral history, and genres of testimonies and life stories, are central to the research field of Holocaust studies, and to how we remember and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.Even while the Holocaust was being carried out, historians and others, in ghettos and all over occupied Eastern Europe, collected testimonies and conduct interviews in order to document what was going on, but also so that someone in the future could write their history.The events of the Holocaust are reflected in the numerous memoirs of rescued victims and witnesses of Nazi crimes.The collection, systematization, and study of personal memories are the main tasks of oral history in this field.Such collections allow us to hear people's voices, to take into account individual experiences of life in the context of genocide, and to complement the general social and historical context of events.Collections of oral history on the Holocaust include thousands of early testimonies and life stories archived in, for example, Yad Vashem, and in the form of audio-visual collections initiated in later years, such as those collected by or for the