If Anne Frank would have lived 79 years. The autumnal age who have served today pursued many of his generation, which had more strength, more opportunity or more fortunate than her to escape the genocide, and that can still tell the tale. The girl in Amsterdam is the heartbreaking diary of a barbaric and premature death. Of his brothers in horror, their voices and images captured and thousands and thousands of hours of recording time to be preserved as the recent testimony of the nightmare of the concentration camps and gas chambers. Voices that they will survive as a perpetual cry against forgetting, in a world that is prepared for a future without Holocaust survivors. Until the Museum of the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem, arrived in late September, the largest audiovisual archive ever collected on the victims of Nazism: the project of Steven Spielberg. More than 200,000 hours of images, including 52,000 interviews with survivors, the Jewish director began filming in 1994, after the filming of “Schindler List”, through the Institute of the Shoa Foundation, which in Hebrew-name designates “Catastrophe” – created for this purpose at the University of Southern California, with the collaboration of, among others, Time-Warner and NBC.

According to Spielberg explained at the time, during the working sessions for the film in Poland had the opportunity to see how many survivors, entered into their 70s and 80s, faced his nightmarish memories husking unique, then asked them to repeat one to a before cameras. Washington, Israel, Toronto and European capitals such as Paris were just some of the places where offices were opened to locate witnesses and more and more power to immortalize their valuable epilogue, if possible, portraits in their own homes. Personal tragedies
“The survivors are aging and dying … Many are willing to tell their stories. We are the past, then it will not be anybody, “Stern told Mary, a member of the corps of interviewers,-lawyers, psychiatrists, rabbis, students, teachers, also the victims of anti-hunting, which have been used to document this vast memory . It is not the first attempt to capture the experiences that marked the twentieth century before it was extinguished. The Library of Congress and the British Imperial War Museum and marked the passage, picking up the “Voices of the Second World War” in his series’ Veterans Oral History. ”

The review of the personal tragedies mentioned in the first person is heartbreaking. Eliahu of the Rosenberg, deported to Teblinka where 870,000 Jews massacred, narrating phase to phase the process of extermination. “When we opened the door to the gas chamber, in a video-recounts, with emotion-broken, there were 350 or 400 dead, including children, all standing … the first and fell out, I have to say, God almighty, that each of those gassed sighed, exhaling its last breath. Because there was no poison gas, it was just smoke. ” The last of Zanna Farbstein, imprisoned in Auschwitz, waiting for death “every day” between five crematoria “working day and night”. The Hollander of Yaakov, which ten years old when he joined the first concentration camp, where the commander shot from distance to the prisoners like shooting the ducks at the fair.
In the material received in Israel now, the emotional burden is so high that, combined with the diversity of languages, makes the translation of testimony for digitization from the original analog system. Will be more than 204,800 gigabytes of instant access thanks to the magic of new technologies.

‘On line’ must wait Their fate, for now, is the sophisticated film library of the Yad Vashem launched in 2005, where it already contained 10,000 stories of those who were children in the ghetto and slaughter of Hitler, in addition to 5,000 movies on the Holocaust produced around the world. The center ensures not only approaching the biggest crime in history from a collective point of view but also from the perspective that involves moral and human face and voice of each survivor.

Internet, the large window on the global dissemination, for now show only snippets from interviews and other documents through the official website of the museum. Problems technological, legal and financial prevent the display “on line” of all material, although it is possible to view a small portion of the testimony on Youtube, an attractive channel for its great prestige among the younger, but that some authorities Yad Vashem’s found too frivolous. After all, each tape, each survivor has sought-Anne Frank-like “to continue living, even after her death!”.