Digitizing Holocaust memories
Dr. Josef Mengele calmly greets a trainload of prisoners to Auschwitz as human ashes fall from the sky. This scene, from the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List, is unforgettable, but a dramatic rendering is nowhere near as powerful as hearing from someone who once stood before the real-life Todesengel, or "Angel of Death," as the brutal Nazi came to be known.
Itka Zygmuntowicz, a Holocaust survivor, recounts in a 1996 interview seeing Mengele dressed in his SS uniform and white gloves as he calmly sent people to a concentration camp or to die in a gas chamber. Zygmuntowicz is one of nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors whose interviews were recorded initially on videotape but will soon be preserved in a massive digital archive.
The University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Institute has begun digitizing 100,000 hours of interviews at a cost of more than $8 million, including a $2 million hardware donation from Sun Microsystems. The five-year project requires a state-of-the-art system, which includes the use of robots and an 8-petabyte archive. The goal is to save and disseminate testimonies of genocide survivors, including those from Rwanda.
"We'll be helping to preserve interviews so people can refer to them as they build educational programs," said Sam Gustman, chief technology officer of the foundation. "Obviously, whatever people need to learn from the past hasn't been learned yet, since we continue to have genocides like (in) the Sudan. Maybe first-person experiences can help in a way that textbooks haven't been able to, to date."
A digital library is needed because videotape rots, Gustman said. According to some experts, digital magnetic tape may last only 20 years.
When Spielberg launched the project, formerly called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, in 1994, digital technology was still in its infancy. An added benefit of a digital library, besides helping preserve the interviews, is that it's easier to disseminate than videotape. To share it with schools, governments, and the public, all you need is the Internet.
Before the testimonies can be moved to the Web, a truck must begin transporting the more than 230,000 videotapes across the country, to the USC campus--15,000 at a time. The interviews, which are now on Betacam SP tape, will be fed into a high-volume digitization station, where robots do most of the work.
To make the interviews available on a wide range of digital formats, separate copies will be preserved in MPEG-2, QuickTime, Windows Media, Motion JPEG 2000, and Flash formats. A master copy and sub-master copy of all this material will be loaded into separate 4-petabyte digital-storage units. Gustman said that each day, six employees are needed to help load the tapes and maintain the system, which was modeled after one being built by the U.S. Library of Congress.
Now full Internet access to the archive is available at USC and 16 other institutions, including the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Eventually, the foundation wants to make 1,000 interviews available on its Web site. Another goal is to store archives on hard drives at multiple research institutions, Gustman said.
All this technology is welcome by those involved in the project, including some of the interviewees. Throughout many of the videos I watched, people expressed gratitude that their story would be preserved. According to one survivor, despite all the horrors he had seen, "humanity is making progress."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
Many countries and not just one has suffered their own Holocaust.
even now many are being created today.
Why isn't there a mouth peice to speak to all about Holocausts and how this must stop
Read all '"USC"' posts in News - Digital Media
October 20, 2008 10:19 AM PDT
Digitizing Holocaust memories
Posted by Greg Sandoval
In the continued recounting of this great tragedy sorely missing, or grudgingly mentioned, are the accounts of efforts by thousands of people who helped the oppressed. Perhaps this attempt will rectify the omission. www.blizne.com
Zdzicho Augustynak
These people are permanently honored in Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem
Indeed the "Righteous among the Nations" is commendable, even if does not nearly encompasses the magnitude of efforts to aid in distress. I agree that, as "Inahu" seems to suggest, it should be expanded to cover all people of all persuasions, everywhere. You may find some efforts toward it in the http://www.blizne.com, as listed previously, excerpt quoted below. Zdzicho Augustyniak
?O MANKIND! We created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know and honor each other (not that you should despise one another)."
Qur'an Chapter 49 Ver. 13
?Repel (evil) with what is better. Then will he, between whom and thee was hatred, become as it were thy friend and intimate. And no one will be granted such goodness except those who exercise patience and self-restraint.?
Qur'an Chapter 41 vers 34, 35
AN APRIL ANNIVERSARY
I witnessed how the persecuted, famished, crowded in unsanitary conditions, removed to the concentration camps, shot and killed, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943 rose in an armed defiance against the oppressors.
As a Prisoner of War:
"Mindful of my personal experience, I instructed them to look alongside the road ditches, bushes and fields for the discarded, abandoned by somedisenchanted German soldiers their personal weapons, like rifles, sub-machineguns, pistols and hand grenades.
This was the way, in the later part of September 1939 that I found a rifle in a ditch. The rifle, with a broken off wooden stock, was thrown into a ditch by a Polish soldier when he could not stop the invaders. With my friends, brothers Zbyszek and Jurek Kopacz on each side, with the German troops bivouac some three hundred meters away, I put the rifle into the trousers' left side and pretended to have an injured, stiff leg. We passed only Mrs. Skowronska, my mother's friend. She gave me a quizzical look, most likely with the thought that Flora's boy does silly things. Though, she caught on right away, looked straight ahead and did not see us. At my age she experienced the occupants, one war before. We came at the dusk to my house.
I thought I will use it myself. Then the word was spread: "Ghetto wants weapons". It was needed there sooner. Now, at the dusk also, I handed the rifle to my underground contact and in several days he reported its delivery. In a tradition of the Country, the Warsaw Ghetto rose."
Zdzicho Augustyniak
They used Real player for the files...soon there may be no way to play them back!
- by hqconvert October 20, 2008 8:37 PM PDT
- www.google.com
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