The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Painful video testimonies bring Holocaust to life
NEW HAVEN — To Lawrence Langer, the purpose of interviewing survivors of the Holocaust is not to prevent such a monumentally horrific event from happening again.
History has shown that, to some degree, genocide has continued unabated since Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was destroyed in World War II.
Langer, 88, who lives in Wellesley, Mass., has conducted 84 interviews for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and said, “I do not believe knowing about the Holocaust will prevent future holocausts. That’s been proved already.
“I don’t look for moral lessons, but a human being who is determined to know what history is about, what being alive is about, has an obligation to know about history.”
Learning about history through the video testimonies of those who survived, resisted or witnessed the Holocaust has been the mission of the Fortunoff archive since 1979, when it was created as a community effort called the Holocaust Survivors Film Project. According to its director, Stephen Naron, the archive was one of the first efforts to record the raw, unedited memories of those who lived through the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945.
Starting with 183 testimonies given to Yale in 1981, the collection — which is open to anyone who registers and requests to see a specific video — is close to 4,500 testimonies strong, totaling “over 10,000 hours … in over a dozen different languages,” Naron said.
Langer said “the results have been spectacular,” partly because the archive began in 1979, when memories were still relatively fresh, partly because the interviewers are wellversed in the history, so the person being filmed doesn’t feel a need to explain basic facts, and partly because the testimony does not rely on questions that might limit the survivor’s story.
“Our premise is that the survivors know what they want to say … and they need a supportive atmosphere and a sympathetic atmosphere to allow them to say it,” said Langer, who will present a screening at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Criterion Cinemas, 86 Temple St., of a work-in-progress documentary called “Soul Witness: the Brookline Holocaust Witness Project,” with a question-and-answer session afterward.
“When I interview someone, a certain rapport develops and so they feel more comfortable telling their stories,” Langer said.
“I’ve heard stories that are so terrible that I don’t write about them and I don’t talk about them to anybody,” he said. Langer taught English at Simmons College and has written 15 books on the Holocaust and other subjects.
“I want to hear them and I think audiences need to hear them because otherwise we sentimentalize the Holocaust into the triumph of the human spirit,” he said. While there were such stories, “at the same time there are stories of deprival. They are as interested in talking about the people they lost as much as the people who survived.”
Many suffered unfathomable losses, as the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, as well as LGBT persons, people with disabilities, Roma and Sinti people (once called Gypsies) and others until the Allies defeated Hitler in 1945.
Among those furthering the mission of making Holocaust testimonies accessible is Sarah Garibova, the Fortunoff’s first Geoffrey H. Hartman fellow, named for a Yale professor whose wife, Renee Hartman, was one of the first survivors taped. Geoffrey Hartman, who escaped Germany as a child on a Kindertransport to England, helped launch the original film project.
Garibova is working on an annotated edition of the testimony of Liubov’ K., a woman from the central Ukrainian town of Zvenigorodka, who was born in 1921 and died in 2013 in Haifa, Israel. (The Fortunoff archive uses only first names and last initials in identifying those whom it records.)
The interview was in Russian, with some Ukrainian and Yiddish. “I translated it into English and I also wrote annotations for it, giving it some context and scholarly insight into the big picture, said Garibova, a post-doctoral researcher who specializes in Russian and Jewish history.
In her testimony, Liubov’ K. “talks quite thoroughly about her pre-war life, the war period and then the post-war so you really get 80 years of a person’s life,” Garibova said. The transcript is more than 50 pages long.
Liubov’ “grew up in a very, very poor family. They didn’t own their own home,” Garibova said. “At a certain point her family had to give her and her brother over to an orphanage.” That was during the “Great Famine of 1932-33,” which was a genocide aimed at Ukraine by Joseph Stalin, according to britannica.com.
Liubov’ K.’s education was mostly in Yiddish, Garibova said, but she was then imprisoned in a number of labor camps run by the Nazis and Ukrainian guards. “In the early months of the German occupation, both her parents were shot” at separate times while being confined in a ghetto, she said.
Somehow, Liubov’ survived the war and “was responsible for initiating the construction of three monuments at various graves” in her hometown, Garibova said. She had one daughter and a grandson.
Garibova said it isn’t easy listening to the tragic stories of Holocaust survivors. “I’m not going to lie,” she said. “It’s difficult and it’s very depressing to work with these materials. I can’t say it makes me a more optimistic person, but, as a scholar, it’s really enriched my perspective on Soviet-Jewish history,” which included “economic crises, social crises and famine after famine.”
However, Garibova said, “I think working with testimonies gives you access to both the very dark side of human nature and the positive side. Everybody who survived owes their life to at least one person … almost always a non-Jew. And they owe their survival to their own creativity. I’ve been blown away by the spur-of-the-moment things that have saved someone’s life. ... You can think of 10 ways where it could have failed.”