Survivor Testimonial Project

Realizing that the weight of teaching the Holocaust poses challenges for educators and students helped us to focus the rationale and develop the following goal for the project: to document and preserve the testimonies of Ottawa Holocaust survivors as primary sources of oral history mediated through film and with broad online access.

Our hope is that the testimonies will allow future generations of students, researchers, teachers, and others to hear and see the people who experienced and witnessed the genocidal policies and crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators.

Following a lengthy process of interviews and recordings, the testimonials were edited into ten 25 – 30 minute films designed for use in a classroom setting. Each testimony is also available in a 2-3 minute abridged version.

Since they were produced, the films have been used widely, especially by teachers, researchers, and in university settings in Ottawa and beyond.

Antisemitism – prejudice and hatred of Jews — existed in Europe for generations before Hitler came to power. The Holocaust has its roots in a long history of hatred of Jews. With the rise of Nazism antisemitism became an instrument of the deliberate policy to murder all of Europe’s Jews.

In Germany restrictions and discrimination against the Jews grew with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933. After that the situation of the Jews deteriorated rapidly and following Kristallnacht in 1938 the atrocities increased.

The experience of Jews elsewhere in Europe varied during the Holocaust, depending on whether and when the country in which they lived was occupied by the Nazis, whether their country was an ally of Nazi Germany, as well as various other circumstances.

The half hour short films presented here detail the survivors’ experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. The testimonials include different survival experiences in different parts of Europe: surviving ghettos in Hungary, Nazi slave labor camps in Germany, Nazi death camps in Poland, hiding in non-Jewish homes in Holland and France, hiding in a dugout in the Ukraine, and surviving as refugees in Romania and Shanghai.

Each story is unique and offers a glimpse into what it must have been like to live through the traumatic events of the Holocaust. The films are testimonies based on the survivors’ personal experience. They have been reviewed to ensure historical accuracy and are intended to be used as pedagogical tools”.