Overview
In the midst of the pandemic Professor Deidre Butler and her team of researchers filmed seven powerful oral history interviews for the Hear Our Voices: Holocaust Survivors Share their Stories of Trauma and Hate project. The goal was to create a free bilingual online resource to teach about the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism.
HOV has been an astounding success, training new student researchers, creating new free educational resources, reaching thousands of students, teachers and researchers around the world.
At this moment when Holocaust denial and antisemitism are both surging around the world, the work of the Hear Our Voices project is urgently needed. Help us to expand and deepen this work to transform these individual oral histories into powerful teaching documentaries.
The Background
We’ve already reached thousands, help us do more.
In this second stage of Hear Our Voices, Professor Butler and her team are developing short documentaries that centre these human stories, to educate about the history of the Holocaust but also to understand our current moment so that students can see for themselves how antisemitism persists and changes over time and understand the antisemitism that is rising around the world today.
Our first documentary follows the story of Professor Jan Grabowski’s family during the Shoah in Poland and beyond. The second half of the film focuses on how Professor Grabowski was persecuted and prosecuted by the Polish Government which sought to silence his historical research and rewrite the history of Polish complicity during the Shoah. We are in the final stages of research, locating archival sources, and storyboarding. With new contemporary footage from Treblinka and Warsaw as well as local historians that were filmed after October 7, this is the story of antisemitism across generations, historical and contemporary.
The Rollout
Funds raised will be used to professionally edit and produce the existing raw footage into seven 30-minute oral history documentary films; train and hire undergraduate and graduate research assistants to provide historical context for these stories; enrich the interviews with archival documents, photographs, and maps; translate and caption each film in English and French.
Funds raised now will allow us to complete the first documentary and continue to advance the next films. We have made significant progress on our documentary film which will tell the story of Tom Deri, who as a boy survived the Shoah in Budapest in hiding with his family. New footage filmed after October 7 with local Jewish community leaders and local scholars supplements the original oral history interviews to place Tom’s family’s story in the distinct history of the Hungarian Holocaust to understand how it is remembered in Hungary today and how antisemitism continues to reverberate in Hungary in the 21st century.
The Impact
Before their stories are lost, help survivors, members of the second generation, and the families of righteous gentiles share their family’s history of the Shoah with students, educators, and the public.
Help us preserve history.
Help us empower students and scholars to meaningfully engage the trauma of the Holocaust and develop the tools to recognize and resist the persistent threat of antisemitism.
Help us teach.