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Survivors' Voices

Freie Universität Berlin First Institution in Germany to Provide Access to Digital Oral History Collection "Refugee Voices" of Association of Jewish Refugees

№ 336/2011 from Nov 04, 2011

Freie Universität Berlin is the first institution in Germany that provides access to Refugee Voices, an oral history collection of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR). AJR is a welfare organization founded by Jewish refugees who emigrated to Great Britain. The collection contains 150 selected English-language video interviews with Jewish survivors of National Socialism currently living in Great Britain. Refugee Voices is a further addition to Freie Universität’s multimedia archives devoted to eyewitnesses of the Nazi period.

The collection contains 150 selected English-language video interviews with Jewish survivors of National Socialism currently living in Great Britain. Altogether it contains around 450 hours worth of video material. Most of the interviews were conducted with eyewitnesses originally from German-speaking countries who described life in Nazi Germany and the countries occupied by Germany. The interviews focus on the eyewitnesses' experiences with emigration and exile. The video interviews were fully transcribed and provided with a time code that makes it easy to locate specific points in the videos. In addition to a summary of each interview, the archive offers a structured database, including among other things, biographical information about the interviewees and pictures of their family members, acquaintances, and friends. The archive can be accessed via Freie Universität's campus network, and will soon be available via the Digital Library of Freie Universität.

In addition to the Refugee Voices archive, Freie Universität offers researchers, lecturers, students, and other interested parties access to two other important multimedia archives that bear witness to this period in history: the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California (USC) and the digital archive Forced Labor 1939–1945: Memory and History.

Further Information

Katrin Plank-Sabha, Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS), Tel: +49 (0)30 / 838-53705, Email: presse@cedis.fu-berlin.de

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