Contributed photo
Fortunoff archive co-curator Stephen Naron.
In 1979, a New Haven-based television producer named Laurel Vlock and psychiatrist Dori Laub began filming the testimonials of Holocaust survivors and survivors of antisemitic violence. Over many years, thousands of interviews were recorded in more than a dozen languages. More than 10,000 hours of the resulting videos have been digitized, preserving material of great historical importance.
Stephen Naron and Konstanze Kunst, co-curators, have distilled the interviews and produced an exhibition titled “In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,” which opened at Yale’s Beinecke Library in July and will remain on view until Jan. 28, 2025.
The exhibition shares the stories of a generation, narrated in distinct, unique voices. The videos are presented alongside a display of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, documents, and other items that tell the history of Jewish documentation efforts that stretch back to the Kishinev pogrom from the collection of Yale Library.
I had the opportunity to interview Stephen Naron about the archive; our conversation is below.
Clara Holahan: The collection is very well curated. How did you decide what videos to show?
Stephen Naron: It was difficult to choose the testimony excerpts. We decided early on that it would be simply impossible to represent the polyphony of voices and the diversity of experiences in the archive.
Did you want even representation in geography or gender, or was presenting a unique story each time most important?
We aimed for gender balance, but we realized geography, language, and experiences would be impossible to represent in more than fragmentary form. We wanted to cover a few major thematic areas, like life in ghettos, hunger in the camps, life in hiding, liberation and its discontent, memory and living with memory. Each story is unique, by default, every testimony is unique like the individual who recounts their life. That is one of the most important things one can learn from testimonies. Yes, there are commonalities, but beware attempts to generalize.
The project began with newspaper ads and spread significantly by word of mouth. How do you think this affected data collection and the groups represented?
It was always a skewed group, and it’s important to keep that in mind. We only recorded testimonies with those who were willing to speak. Many survivors, for various reasons, do not want to talk about their experiences, so you already have a skewed collection in that sense. And we never wanted to place any pressure on survivors to speak, so it was important that it came from them. And of course, we cannot interview those who didn’t survive. One must remember that survivors themselves are the anomalies. 6 million died.
To begin with Jan Karski, why did you decide to include his interview, as his story has already been well documented?
It’s interesting that you think of Karski as well known, but that’s because you seem well informed! The average visitor, and the Beinecke gets thousands of visitors, will likely never have heard of Karski. We wanted a Polish witness that could speak to the complicity of some Poles in the destruction of Polish Jewry, to complicate the binary of Germans and Jews, since collaboration and dynamics with local populations played an enormously important role in whether Jews had a chance to survive.
In his interview, Jan Karski mentioned that many people do not understand how Jews could be easily recognized, even if they escaped. Imre Kertesz, on the other hand, said he saw Jews as an assimilated part of European culture. Based on your research, do you think this was a widespread perspective in Europe?
It really depends on the place and time and class and religiosity. I’d be careful not to make generalizations even at the national level. Jews were both, and nothing, and all things in between.
Martin Schiller said he wanted to fight the narrative that all survivors were silent even though he was shamed for speaking out as a child. Do you think that after the Holocaust, the social stigma around speaking out created this silent stereotype?
If you listen to survivors, or follow more recent research on exactly this topic, such as Hasia Diner’s, we remember with reverence and love, you’ll find that survivors were never silent, but rather the surrounding population was not open to listening or understanding. Many survivors, like Martin, tell us of their desire to speak, but were often met with cruelty and disbelief and therefore were silenced by the unwilling listeners.
Some stories were so unbelievable, Martin Schiller said he feared he may lose credibility if he shared them. Do you agree that many of the interviewees modulated their stories or were more likely to share the palatable parts?
Again, it varies from person to person. The video archive made a concerted effort to create a space in which survivors felt safe and comfortable to discuss all manner of difficult subjects. A space where the interviewers, as empathic listeners, would allow a judgment-free opportunity for survivors to speak. This was often quite successful, for instance, listen to Celia Kassow’s testimony, where she does not seem to hold back at all about the most difficult moments of life during the war and the brutality of war in a partisan unit.
When testifying at Nuremberg, Leon Weliczker Wells felt the questioning was uninformed and aggressive. Do you think this differs from how Nuremberg is represented in pop culture, like in movies such as Judgment at Nuremberg?
There is definitely a kind of dialectic between popular culture and testimony like the ones at the Fortunoff video archive. For one, the archive began shortly after the release of a TV series Holocaust, which many survivors found to be quite offensive and unrealistic. Thus, in some cases pop culture spurred survivors to set the record straight through projects like Fortunoff. At the same time, it’s undeniable that at the same time, the TV series raised an enormous amount of public awareness about the Holocaust. Wells is a fascinating figure, who wrote and testified again and again, in various forms, which is why he is featured so prominently upstairs and downstairs. His sense that juridical testimony in a court of law was aggressive and unsatisfying even traumatizing experience is a common response, and in part a motivation for work like the Fortunoff archive which provides a kind of counterbalance to the unfriendly interrogation of the witness.
Why did you decide to include one Romani testimony in a most Jewish exhibition?
We also felt it was important to emphasize that while the majority of testimonies in the collection are of Jewish victims, there are many testimonies of non-Jews, and in that sense it is a remarkably ecumenical collection and more representative of the experience of mass murder by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Fortunoff has some of the earliest video testimonies with Roma and Sinti survivors, which again points to the inclusive thinking of the founders and staff from the start. Moreover, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma is still an underexamined, understudied, lesser-known tragedy within the great catastrophe of the Holocaust, especially in the United States, so for us this was an opportunity to lift up this important story to a broader public.
Which piece of media, aside from the videos, do you find the most important or interesting?
Well, the materials downstairs, the books, pamphlets, manuscripts, documents, and other items from across Yale Library’s collections that trace the history of first person documentation following anti-Jewish violence back to the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, are quite remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a collection of these types of texts and documentation in an exhibit like this before. But honestly, it was hard enough to pick the excerpts for display. It’s so hard to choose one thing to highlight. Every omission Konstanze Kunst, my co-curator, and I were forced to make, because of space, felt like a betrayal. They are all essential and insufficient fragments of a story that is so enormous and monstrous it cannot be expressed in a hundred Beineckes.
What do you want the lasting impact of this exhibit to be?
Sadly, an exhibit like this is fleeting and temporary, so I’m not sure if it will have a lasting impact. But at its core it’s a summons to listen and watch and learn from survivors, many of which in the case of the video archive were, or could have been your neighbors in New Haven. Individuals with rich and unique lives who experienced terrible suffering, but devoted themselves to documenting their experiences so that we hopefully could learn from them. It’s summons and an obligation that each generation has to approach anew.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Dori Laub as a television producer. He was actually a psychiatrist.