Since 1981, Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has interviewed Holocaust survivors. The University's Mardigian Library has been the repository of these interviews. It has been our privilege to provide a forum for those voices, "listening ears," as one survivor notes, and the facilities to record the testimonies. As a University of distinction, the campus has demonstrated its dignity and character because of the respect it has accorded the tapes and the people who made them.
This archive represents a gurantee of honest presentation--unembroidered, without dramatization, a scholarly yet austerely moving collection of information and insight. We have been and are engaged in rescuing fragments of fragments of memory. We have done that quietly, without fanfare, but with integrity and quality. Because of that, the project is what it is, does not need any hype or dramatization. It speaks for itself--literally.
Those who have had access to the tapes--including scholars, psychologists, historians, and more than 1,000 students--have found themselves riveted to their tape recorders or VCRs. Now the collection, as it grows, has obtained a potentially larger audience: copies of all the interviews rest in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; copies of the videotapes are in the Yale Video Archives and the Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield, MI. Through the work of many individuals, that audience is now international and unbounded, crossing continents and oceans, disciplines, and professions. There have already been inquiries to the campus from Australia and Munich as well as Ann Arbor and Flint, Michigan. ....
Individual donors, the Fisher Foundation, and the University of Michigan-Dearborn have generously provided support for the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive.
