Introduction
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Most people today encounter the holocaust through some kind of mediation: a book, film, class, travel, museum exhibition, or other work activity. Within these many forms engaging holocaust, recollections survivors—offered in written memoirs, live presentations, filmed interviews—are widely regarded as providing firsthand accounts wartime experiences unrivaled directness, memories at their immediate. NOTE: This Scalar project includes a text-only essay, “Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List: Or, Reading a Digital Archive Against the Grain,” which is available as a downloadable PDF here. The essay begins with a discussion of archives of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors generally and then addresses the value of reading one such collection, the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), “against the grain.” This introduction precedes a case study, which analyzes how survivors discuss the 1993 film Schindler’s List in the course of their interviews for the VHA. This Scalar project complements the essay by foregrounding the interviews with Holocaust survivors discussing Schindler’s List and by providing supplementary information, images, videos, and website links on the history of recording Holocaust survivors’ narratives and on the epiphenomena surrounding Schindler’s List. Readers can start with either the Scalar project or the essay.
However, all of these presentations of survivors' accounts of their past are shaped both by the individual act of memory and by the medium, protocols, forum, and context in which these accounts are created and encountered. Mediation is inherent in remembering the Holocaust—even for survivors—and understanding how it informs works of Holocaust remembrance is vital to appreciating their value. Indeed, some Holocaust survivors attest to relying on other mediations for an understanding of their own past.
Dorit Whitman, who had fled her native Austria before the start of the war, recalls that she first became aware of the “real, full extent” of the Holocaust in a movie theater in the United States: Dorit Whiteman
Harriet Solz, who had worked in a factory owned by Oskar Schindler during the war, remembers her response to Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's List, when it was published in 1982: Harriet Solz
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