The Henonville Wire Spool: A Document Found

Abstract

In Summer 2016, my work in the Media Laboratory at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology led to the discovery of a reel presumed missing of 1946 recordings of Holocaust survivors singling folk songs. At DOCAM’17, I presented this work, with Dr. Jodi Kearns. We explained that Dr. David Boder, a psychologist whose papers and related media are housed at the Cummings Center, studied trauma. His research included interviewing displaced people who had suffered trauma. The media at the Cummings Center includes wire spool interviews that Boder recorded using a Pierce Wire Recorder. Though we knew the general content of these spools, no one at the archives had ever heard the actual recordings. The challenge in the archives was to make the original, analog playback technology functional and for it to communicate seamlessly with a modern computer. Once this was accomplished, and the wire spools were playable and digitized, it was clear that one particular spool was revealed to be the missing spool.