Between 1994 and 1999, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation conducted 51,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and rescuers from around the world. This archive is one of the most comprehensive collections of witness testimony ever created.1 The Foundation's mission now reaches far beyond Holocaust education and aims to "overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of its visual history testimonies." Testimonies have been collected in 63 countries and 41 languages.
Before providing an interview, survivors complete a 50-page-long questionnaire that asks for names, dates, and experiences from before, after, and during the Holocaust and World War II.2 Interviewers are expected to familiarize themselves with the survivor's history so that questions can be tailored accordingly. The Foundation Interviewer Guidelines include "helpful hints" for interview questions, and suggest an attention to chronology over stream-of-consciousness narration. Moreover, this document also proposes ways in which the interviewer might deal with certain types of subjects. For more "eloquent, forthcoming, focused" respondents, the interviewer can take a more removed approach and ask few questions. For those who "jump around" or "display difficulty expressing [themselves]," the interviewer is instructed to help guide the conversation, even "interject and ask more specific questions" and "maintain chronology of events." More detailed instructions even lay out the ways in which the subject is to be filmed.3
The Shoah Foundation has been both praised and criticized for their work. While some scholars point towards a type of "Hollywoodization" of memory, others see the benefits in an expansive collection of oral histories of the Holocaust.4 The quality and breadth of these interviews (and the experience of the interviewers) also vary widely.
Peter Feigl gave his testimony to the Shoah Foundation on April 19, 1997, two years after he had already been interviewed for the USHMM oral history collection. Peter Ernst Feigl was born on March 1, 1929 in Berlin. In 1936, his family moved to Prague, where they remained for a year until moving to Vienna. In the following years the family remained on the move, trying to keep away from Nazi rule, fleeing to Brussels after the so-called Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Feigl's father went to Antwerp, Belgium for work. However, he was stopped and arrested by Belgian authorities because of his German passport. Feigl's father was later interned in the Caen prison camp in France, at which point Peter moved with his mother and sister to Paris. Peter, his mother, and his sister later endured a short internment in the Gurs concentration camp due to their German nationality, after which they moved to Auch, France. Peter waited out the war hidden in the Christian community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France, which hid and saved roughly 5,000 Jews during the war. Both of his parents were killed at Auschwitz.
Feigl talks in this interview about his experiences and how the diary that he wrote as a child during the war impacts his memory of events today. In this short selection from the larger interview, Feigl speaks about the significance and meaning of the diary that he kept while in hiding and about the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who protected him.