This essay urges the importance of collecting the oral history of survivors in order to create a richer and more accurate social history of Jews during the Holocaust. The special circumstances of the Holocaust have resulted in a documentary history which has been told from the perspective of the Nazi perpetrators. Only oral testimony can enable us to understand the actions and reactions of Jews faced with harassment, expropriation, exile, and murder. The practice of oral history was not originally designed for eliciting memories of traumatic events. Holocaust oral history requires the historian to reject the positivist conception of the objective and distanced interviewer, in favor of a position as compassionate listener to painful personal experiences. Interviews can produce less mediated, more spontaneous versions of memory, which require sensitive interpretation. The oral histories of Jewish refugees to Shanghai are examined to demonstrate how careful reading and listening can elucidate the social memories, and thus the social history, of Jews in the Holocaust. The process of interviewing also helps the historian bridge the experiential gap with survivors, enabling a better understanding of their experiences. What do you want me to do? I haven't prepared for this, I haven't thought about it, I must say, because we've been very swamped in recent days. I'm the department chairman now and I've been swamped with administrative problems, financial among others. So I haven't thought about it, let me try to focus. Maybe you can say a few words to help me to focus.1 * Address all communications to Steve Hochstadt, Bates College, Lewiston, ME 04240 USA, shochsta@bates.edu. Written for presentation at the Social Science History Association annual meeting, panel on Using Oral Histories to Study the Holocaust, New Orleans, October 10, 1996, and subsequently revised. A somewhat different version is being published in Sino-Judaica, v. 3 (Sino-Judaic Institute: 1997).