Skip to Main Content

University Library

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Survivor Testimonies

Erna & Arthur Salm  Salm
Erna & Arthur Salm

Holocaust Lecture Series Archive
This lecture series at Sonoma State University started in 1984. Many of the lectures, including survivors' stories, are available for viewing online.

British Library Holocaust Recordings
"The testimonies now available are drawn from a major oral history programme - The Living Memory of the Jewish Community - which between 1987 and 2000 gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. It was initiated by National Life Stories based in the BL's oral history section and funded by a number of organisations including the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the John S Cohen Foundation and the Porjes Charitable Trust."

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
"This archive 'is a collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust.' A portion of the segments is available online. The archive is associated with Yale University's sterling Memorial Library."

Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive
"Presents nearly 52,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, representing individuals from 56 countries, speaking in 32 languages. While the majority of the interviews are with Jewish Holocaust survivors (around 49,000), the archive also includes the testimonies of political prisoners, Sinti and Roma (Gypsy) survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and homosexual survivors as well as rescuers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials."

iWitness 
"Over 1,500 video testimonies, multimedia activities, digital resources – the place to participate actively in learning."

Primary Resources

Teaching Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust 
"Provides primary sources and lesson plans for language arts and history teachers to complement Alexandra Zapruder's award winning collection of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. The diaries, documents, and lesson plans in this collection offer a personal window into the history of the Holocaust and raise enduring questions about human behavior." Includes primary source archive.

Andover-Harvard Library: Holocaust Rescue and Relief: Digitized Records of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
"In 1939, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, agreed to travel to Prague to investigate reports of a humanitarian crisis. From these humble but brave beginnings, the Unitarian Service Committee was born. During and after World War II, the Service Committee aided hundreds of displaced persons in Europe. They established food and clothing distribution centers, hospitals, and homes for children. They also aided hundreds of people in their efforts to leave war-torn Europe and establish new lives for themselves in the United States. The Andover-Harvard Theological Library is the official archive for the records of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). In a project jointly funded by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the library completed a massive digitization project of roughly 257 boxes of archival UUSC material dating from 1939 to 1967. In total, about 238,000 documents and 3,100 photographs were scanned. "

Daily Reports of the Gestapo Headquarters Vienna 1938-1945
a research database containing all 741 surviving reports outlining the mood, the political environment and security measures in Vienna and the surrounding region. Published, for the first time, the individual reports are published as first time facsimiles. The photo collection is compiled from the (once confidential) records department of the Gestapo in Vienna."

Felix Posen Bibliographic Project on Antisemitism
"A computerized bibliography on Antisemitism and the Holocaust. A comprehensive database: all periods, ..."

German Concentration Camp and Prison Camp Correspondence
"This collection consists of items originating from prisoners held in German concentration camps, internment and transit camps, Gestapo prisons, and POW camps, during and just prior to World War II. Most of the materials are letters written or received by prisoners, but also included are receipts for parcels, money orders and personal effects; paper currency; and realia, including Star of David badges that Jews were forced to wear."

International Military Tribunal for Germany (Nuremberg Trials)
"The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, in 1945–46, at the Palace of Justice. The first and best known of these trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried 24 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany, though several key architects of the war (such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels) had committed suicide before the trials began.
This website provides much of the transcripts that were taken from these trials."

Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust
"These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000. The project was developed with the specialist advice of leading Jewish historians and complements a number of collections held by the Sound Archive on Jewish life in Britain. - See more at: http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-survivors#sthash.CzD39WRg.dpuf"

 National Socialism, Holocaust, Resistance and Exile, 1933-1945
"...a database containing fundamental primary sources on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, on resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the “Third Reich”. These carefully compiled and digitized documents contain total of approximately 40,000 sources with about 450,000 pages."

Nuremburg Laws and Nazi Annulment of German Jewish Nationality
"This collection consists of index cards listing the name, date and place of birth, occupation and last address of Jews whose German citizenship was revoked in accordance with the "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935, including Jews from Germany, Austria and Czech Bohemia. The cards are generally in alphabetical order. Suffix names "Israel" for men and "Sara" for women were added by law in 1936 to readily identify persons of Jewish descent."

Post War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950
"...provides a unique perspective on the lives of the survivors — Jewish and non-Jewish — of the Holocaust and World War II. The collection contains documents from British government files as well as those of the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad and the Jewish Relief Units — including surveys, leaflets, reports of relief workers, U.S. zone reports, War office memos, Exodus Camp records, Displaced Persons Assembly Centre weekly reports and correspondence of relief organizations. It covers the international politics leading the administration, care, repatriation and emigration of Displaced Persons (DPs) and the daily plight of the refugees themselves."

Testaments to the Holocaust
"This digital resource offers the unique collection of eyewitness accounts from the world's oldest Holocaust museum, founded by Alfred Wiener as the "Jewish Central Information Office" in 1939. 
The collection offers fully searchable personal accounts of life in Nazi Germany, along with photographs, propaganda materials such as school text books, limited circulation publications and rare serials in a uniquely flexible format, enabling detailed research into the domestic policies of Nazi Germany, Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to after the war, propaganda, life in the concentration camps, in hiding, emigration and refugee life."

U.S. Relations with the Vatican and the Holocaust, 1940-1950
"Correspondence, reports and more explore America’s relations with the Vatican during World War II and the Holocaust. This collection consists of the State Department’s records of the personal representative of the President to Pope Pius XII, including the Decimal File, Confidential Correspondence File and the Airgrams File."

World Memory Project
"Millions of documents containing details about victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecutionduring World War II still exist today. Through the World Memory Project, you can help makethese victims' records searchable online and restore the identities of people the Nazis tried to erasefrom history, one person at a time."