Past Forward: Oral History Interviews with Holocaust Survivors and Storytelling

Abstract

This article highlights new research opportunities on oral history interviews and storytelling. From 2003 to 2013, Goucher College students interviewed Holocaust survivors in Baltimore, Maryland, and publicly retold their stories on campuses, in schools, and in synagogues. These oral history interviews and storytelling presentations are stored in digital form in the Special Collections at the Goucher Library and are currently in the process of being made available online. The students used their chronologically structured interviews to develop their own narration of the survivors’ accounts. The interviews and presentations include a wide variety of survival experiences all over war-torn Europe as well as the survivors’ recollections of their arrival in the United States. The Goucher Testimony Collection adds another aspect to existing archived oral history interviews: the survivors entrust their stories to interviewers the ages of their own grandchildren. The interviews as well as the digitized storytelling presentations are a rich source for comparative analyses with interviews from other collections and/or other forms of testimonies. The techniques and approaches are also applicable to other oral history/storytelling projects, such as with war veterans or immigrants.