
Eighty-seven years since the ‘Anschluss’ —the incorporation of Austria into the Nazi-German Reich in March 1938 —preserving the memory of these catastrophic events and their impact on Austria and Europe’s Jewish population remains more important than ever.
Central European University is proud to announce that its library is now an access point to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. This archive is one of the world’s biggest collections of oral and video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust, as well as from witnesses and those who resisted the Nazi regime.
Students and researchers will have the opportunity to learn about the stories of people like Alice S. Born, who was raised in Vienna. She recalls how the ‘Anschluss’ turned many of her neighbours into fervent Nazis yet also tells of individuals who refused to participate in the persecution of the Jewish population—like the superintendent of her family’s building, who protected them during a roundup.
Another testimony, from Frank K., describes the repression and violence following the ‘Anschluss’, including how he and his father were publicly humiliated and forced to clean the streets. His story traces his flight from Europe to Cyprus, Palestine, Egypt, Tanzania, and eventually to the United States, while his parents were deported to Terezín and later to Auschwitz.
Michael Miller, academic director of the CEU Jewish Studies Program, emphasized the significance of this resource: "The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is an enormously important resource for scholars and students of the Holocaust alike. Here, at CEU, we are educating a new generation of scholars of Jewish history in Central and Eastern Europe. Having access to the Video Archive will create new opportunities for our students to engage with the history of the Holocaust and the experiences of survivors.”
The archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, totalling over 12,000 hours of recorded history. These testimonies were collected in cooperation with 36 affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel, with each project maintaining a duplicate collection of locally recorded videotapes. Click here to explore the Fortunoff Archive: Home - Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies