Dienststellen

English

The Museum of Tolerance (MOT) is a multimedia museum in Los Angeles, California, with an associated museum in New York City, designed to examine racism and prejudice in the United States and the world with a strong focus on the history of the Holocaust. The MOT has expanded to Jerusalem, where a „Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity“ is currently under construction. It is sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

English

Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. While most of those who gave testimony were Jewish survivors, the Foundation also interviewed homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages, representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world. In January 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became part of the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the testimonies in the Visual History Archive will be preserved in perpetuity. The change of name to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education reflects the broadened mission of the Institute: to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies. Today the Institute reaches educators, students, researchers, and scholars on every continent, and supports efforts to collect testimony from the survivors and witnesses of other genocides.

Tasks

Indexing German Testimonies

This is the major part of the intern’s assignment. The Foundation has recorded interviews in many different languages. Although the video-testimonies themselves are kept in their original language, information has to be translated into English when the data is entered into the central database. In the first step, profile information from the Pre-Interview Questionnaires, such as the names of the ghettos or camps, is entered. Sometimes this involves little research issues when a term used by a Survivor is not yet part of the database’s keyword-authority. In addition to that, the intern also works on indexing or cataloguing English questionnaires.

Other Translation Issues

No matter what the main language of an interview was, quite frequently Survivors mentioned German terms or place names. Thus other cataloguers are thankful for assistance of a native speaker in case an unusual German term comes up.

Jehovah’s Witnesses Testimonies

Being a Jehovah’s Witness himself, the first Gedenkdienst intern at the Foundation Reinhard Hannesschläger has been concerned with the history of his fellow-believers under the NS-regime since he was in high-school. He also was involved in setting up the database that contains the information of the over 70 Jehovah’s Witnesses – testimonies.