The Database "Greek Jewish Shoah Testimonies"

Paris Papamichos Chronakis & Themis Dallas The Database ‘Greek Jewish Shoah Testimonies’ (http://gjst.ha.uth.gr/el/) Paper presented at the Workshop “Archives of Memory: The Experience of Greek Jews in Audiovisual Testimonies” 24-25 February 2012, University of Thessaly, Volos We will start by presenting the database -its structure and its functions; we will then continue by giving you a brief tour of the website that sustains it; and, finally, we will conclude by presenting to you some of the ways we think the database can be further developed in the hopefully not so distant future. The database: collecting and ordering data Our database collects data from 1,022 testimonies given by 853 Greek Jews survivors of the Holocaust. We define as ‘Greek Jews’ all those living in Greece immediately before the war irrespective of their nationality. Hence, the database does not include information on all those Jews of Greek citizenship that were at the time residing elsewhere in Europe, primarily in France and Italy. On the other side, our database does include testimonies by the Jews of the Dodecanese. We are totally aware how historically arbitrary this inclusion is. The Jews of Rhodes and Kos were not part of the Greek state either before or during the war. Τhe only ‘Greek’ experience of the Dodecanese Jews was their detention in the camp of Haidari on their way to Auschwitz in 1944. However, we felt that omitting them from the database would incur an even greater historical injustice. In a world still defined by national borders and their anachronistic projections in the past, an omission of the now by default ‘Greek’ Dodecanese Jews would inevitably silence their voices once more and write their historical experiences out of any historical narrative. For this reason, we eventually decided to include them. The testimonies included are in their vast majority audiovisual. They were primarily culled from five collections: the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive, the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, the Jewish Museum of Greece collection of oral testimonies 1 of Holocaust survivors, the archive of oral testimonies of the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, and the Centropa ‘Witness to a Jewish Century’ database of life stories. We have also included the four testimonies of Greek Jews taken by David Boder immediately after the war, as well as a number of testimonies we have traced either in the online catalogues of a number of lesser known archives, or as short videos in the internet. All these interviews were conducted in very different spatio-temporal settings and according to diverse protocols. Some of them focus solely on the Holocaust, while others are essentially life stories. Some are heavily structured, whereas others are loose narratives. Additionally, they were also catalogued in very different ways. The first challenge we therefore faced was to work through such a diverse body of material. Moreover, the fact that it was impossible to listen to the vast majority of the testimonies themselves, due to obvious linguistic and logistical limitations, created additional problems. Essentially, we had to rely on the information the catalogue of each archive provided. And yet, the reliability of these catalogues was not unquestionable. Basic information, such as dates or place names, were sometimes mistaken or incorrectly transcribed. On the other side, different testimonies of the same witness gave conflicting data, like for example slightly different dates of birth or names of camps. In the end, the way we processed the data and designed our database reflected both our methodological premises as well as the limitations of our material. Let me therefore show you why this was through a description of the search and results pages of the database. The search page The aim of the database is to provide a basic set of information for every available testimony of a Greek Jewish Holocaust survivor. This information will allow the user to get a brief but compelling account of the survivor’s individual experience, as well as all the necessary data regarding the ‘source’, the interview itself. Consequently, the search page is constructed along these two axes and is composed of three interconnecting areas and their corresponding fields. The first area collects all ‘biographical’ so to speak information. It allows the user to search a specific name and/or surname, or, more broadly, a group of survivors defined by gender, age, locality, or by any sort of combination of the above. So, for example, I can look for a witness named Alvo; for all male witnesses; for those born 2 in Volos; for witnesses born in 1924, or between 1921 and 1925. We are aware that a surname often changes as the witness or his/her testimony moves from one linguistic environment to another. Thus, our search engine allows the user to look for an exact name, for all names beginning with a given set of letters, or, finally, for all names that ‘sound’ similar but are written differently (such as for example Cohen, or Koen, or Kohen). This feature is based on the Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching Algorithm that was specifically designed for Hebrew names and has been used and proven on the Ellis Island website. The search is performed on Greek and Latin versions of the surnames and maiden names. The second area of the search page focuses on the witness’s experiences during the war and the immediate post-war years. As it will be further evident in the results page, our codification of the experiences follows to a great extent that of the Visual History Archive, since the majority of the processed interviews comes from there. We have thus grouped all individual experiences into seven categories: 1. imprisonment (in a concentration camp); 2. internment (in a displaced persons or a refugee camp); 3. participation in a death march; 4. involvement in a resistance group; 5. detention in a prison; 6. escape (from a prison, a ghetto, or a concentration camp); and, finally, 7. rescue (by hiding or by fleeing Greece). These categories are of course not exclusive. On the contrary, our database allows for all sorts of combined searches. It is for this reason that we also provide a complete list of the camps mentioned in the testimonies for the user to choose from. This list includes the concentration as well as the displaced persons camps, since many served both functions. The third area of the search page focuses not on the witness itself, but on the testimony, its genre and its location. The user can therefore search for testimonies held in one or more audiovisual archives. We have singled out the most important of them in terms of the quantity of the material held, its easy accessibility, or its historical importance. The oral history archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece and of our department have been grouped together under the overarching label ‘Greek Archives’. Finally, there are two additional generic categories: ‘Internet’, for those interviews to be found floating in the web; and ‘Books’, for any kind of published 3 testimony, be that an anthology of transcribed oral testimonies or an individual’s memoir. The results screen Once a search has been requested, the results appear in two formats. Initially, the user is automatically directed to the results page. There, she can immediately see the number of testimonies that meet her criteria as well as a full, comprehensive list of them. This list contains the most important biographical information of every relevant witness: their name, gender, place and year of birth. At a second stage, by clicking on the appropriate icon, the user can access a more extended datasheet. This includes: firstly, some further biographical information (i.e. the maiden name of the witness); and secondly, a full list of their experiences. In particular, this list includes (whenever applicable and in order of appearance): 1. the place of deportation; 2. all concentration camps the witness was deported to; 3. the death march; 4. all displaced persons’ camps the witness has passed through; 5. any escapes; 6. all hiding places and their type (house, countryside, monastery, flight to Palestine, etc.); 7. any participation in the resistance movement (with additional information on the specific resistance group he/she joined and the territory of action); 8. the place where they were liberated (and in the case of concentration camps by which of the Allied armies). Experiences are displayed by category and then by the order of entry in the database. We believed that the testimonies would be more or less in linear time, but this did not prove to be the case. So the results in the datasheet do not aspire to reconstruct the particular sequel of events each witness went through. Several other data have been included as ‘notes’. The ‘notes’ section contains information which is either highly anecdotal and non-quantifiable (such as for example rescue techniques, or pre-war experiences), or information which has not yet been checked for every testimony. As our work continues, we plan to transfer data from the notes into separate fields (i.e. the place of post-war settlement), making them searchable, too. 4 Finally, this detailed datasheet includes information on all the testimonies the witness has given. We provide the name of the archive where the testimony is held or the name of the publication where it is included, plus the place, date and language it was conducted (or transcribed), as well as its duration. Whenever the audiovisual testimony has been catalogued, we also provide the specific catalogue number. For example, we give the catalogue number of Haim Alvo’s testimony in the SFI Visual History archive (12990), and in the Fortunoff Video Archive (HVT 2771). Moreover, whenever the testimony is readily available on the web, we provide a link to it. Hence, by clicking on ‘Centropa’ or ‘Internet’, the user is immediately directed to the testimony of Haim Alvo at the Centropa archive or to the one found in the web. Research, as we all know, seldom requires one session or the use of just one set of criteria. The database thus also gives the user the possibility to group, save and export his/her searches. By ticking on the box next to each witness’ name and by then clicking on the basket icon, the user can either export the selected testimonies in a csv format or save them temporarily and then proceed to conduct a new search. Searches are stored both in the database and as cookies. A visitor can have access to a list of all his recent searches, and also send the results to another party by simply emailing them the relevant url. The website The database is supported by a website that aims at presenting the logic behind it, indicate some of the research possibilities it can sustain, and finally offer to the user some additional information to help him with his searches. Thus, the main menu of the website is composed of four sub-menus: 1. The first sub-menu focuses on the historians’ approaches to testimony. It includes a short presentation of the many possible uses of the Holocaust testimonies for historical research as well as a ‘demo’: three short essays written by Giorgos Antoniou, Pothiti Hantzaroula and Paris Papamichos Chronakis. Each of these essays uses the audiovisual testimonies to explore a particular historical question, be that the interplay between public and private memory, the transformations of the notion of the witness, or the uses of national appellations in the concentration camps. 5 2. The second sub-menu deals with the testimony and the archive. It opens with a theoretical musing on the relation between testimony and history. This is followed by: - a list of the websites of the most important audiovisual archives containing testimonies of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors in Greece and abroad; - a catalogue of documentaries featuring testimonies of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors; and, finally, - a full list of published testimonies and memoirs written or dictated by Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors. 3. The third sub-menu is dedicated exclusively to the database. It includes: - a description of the database (its scope, possible uses and limitations); - the search page of the database; and, finally, - the basket of searches. 4. Finally, the fourth sub-menu aims at providing some basic historical information that might help the user in his research and assist her in contextualizing her findings. This menu includes: - a short, interpretative account of the history of the Jews in the Greek lands; - a timeline of the period immediately before, during and after the Second World War; - a glossary of terms relating to the war experience of the Jews of Greece; and, ultimately, - some indicative maps of individual trajectories, which demonstrate the variety of experiences the Jews of Greece went through. Future improvements [Paris] At a more practical level, our future steps include first of all some necessary corrections. In particular: 1. We mean to do one more thorough check of all testimonies so as to verify that all camps mentioned have been catalogued. 2. We intend to rearrange the order of appearance of the camps and of the other experiences so as to reflect the chronological unfolding of events. Furthermore, we intend to expand the scope, content and research possibilities of the database in a number of ways: 1. We intend to provide the maiden name of all survivors. 6 2. We intend to incorporate data from the audiovisual testimonies of Greek Jews survivors of the Holocaust conducted in Israel and currently held at Yad Vashem. This is an invaluable source of information to which so far we have been unable to gain access. 3. We also intend to incorporate data from the audiovisual testimonies of Greek Jews survivors conducted in Greece by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These 34 interviews were conducted in the 1990s mostly by the same interviewer, Jasha Almuli, who has previously worked for the Fortunoff Video Archive. Apart from 12 witnesses, all others have also given testimonies elsewhere. Their inclusion would therefore give the researchers the possibility to examine the different temporalities of the witness accounts, as well as whether and how the relation between a given interviewer and interviewee has changed over the years. 4. While so far the place of post-war settlement is mentioned solely in the notes, we aim to make it searchable by including it as an independent category in the search page. 5. To expand the search possibilities of the database we will make possible a search of the testimony by place, language and year it was conducted. 6. Furthermore, all datasheets of testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive will include the url to the extended summary of the testimony the catalogue of the Fortunoff Video Archive provides. Thus, the interested user will have direct access to a wider pool of information without having to leave the database. 7. If a witness has appeared in a documentary film, then we intend to include this information in their datasheet. 8. We intend to rework and expand the glossary to include information about every concentration or displaced persons’ camp. We also intend to make all glossary terms readily available as pop-up windows in the survivor’s datasheet. 9. We intend to rescue every survivor from anonymity by giving him or her not only a voice and a name but also a face. We would very much like to come into an agreement with the Shoah Foundation to use the slide of one of the photographs each survivor shows at the end of the testimony. 10. We also intend to map out the experience of each individual survivor by providing a detailed map of their trajectory during the war and the immediate post-war period. We also hope to use the available technology to construct maps that would situate the individual within the collective by giving for example the possibility to 7 trace the moves of survivors from a given place, say post-war Salonica, to all migratory destinations. 11. We would also like to reconstruct and present in a visually compelling way the networks of friendship or kinship that the survivors established in the concentration camp. We think that this could be done by identifying those interviews that were given by members of the same family or by close friends, say by two brothers or two friends that stayed close to each other during their internment. Survival was most often a collective enterprise and depended to a large extent upon the presence of a close friend or relative. Since testimonies are given by individuals and are catalogued accordingly, the importance of networks is often lost to the researcher, and we would like to find ways to redress this. 12. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we would very much like to construct an English version of the website and the database. Such a version would make all information available to the international scholarly community and to all Greek Jewish survivors and their families outside Greece. It would also perhaps allow us to cooperate with other existing audiovisual archives and especially the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Given the fact that access to the Visual History Archive is currently provided by two Greek universities and that a growing number of institutions worldwide is linked to it, an interface directly linking our database with the Visual History Archive would enhance the research possibilities for everyone interested in researching the Holocaust experiences of the largest non-Ashkenazi community in Europe as well as its subsequent memorializations. As historians and citizens, as Greeks and Europeans, for all of us involved in this project, this is our own duty of memory. Thank you for your patience. 8