Hundreds of thousands of names in archives around the world. Behind each one is a life story—perhaps the one you’re looking for. Set out on the trail of forgotten destinies across archives around the world. One of the most fascinating research centers is located in Prague, where thousands of video recordings from the Steven Spielberg Foundation are available. You can watch the recollections of survivors describing daily life in the Terezín ghetto or unique testimonies from Lidice.
The Spielberg Archive
In the early 1990s, director Steven Spielberg hired researchers throughout Central Europe to help him prepare for the film *Schindler’s List*. At the same time, he enlisted professional documentary filmmakers and amateur researchers in Europe and overseas. Gradually, they built an extensive video archive of survivors’ memories, which is now available through the Spielberg Foundation. “The filmmakers asked not only about pre-war life and wartime experiences, but also about what the survivors went through after 1945. The interviews were not meant to be “just” about traumatic wartime experiences, but were intended to cover a much longer period in the life of a specific individual. The main motivation for founding the “Spielberg” USC Shoah Foundation was to preserve these unique testimonies and pass them on to future generations in a world where eyewitnesses to the Holocaust will no longer be alive. Within a few years, they managed to record tens of thousands of interviews. It helped greatly that the documentary filmmakers no longer needed heavy film equipment. They filmed with handheld cameras. The recordings were initially on VHS, but everything was gradually digitized—and thanks to that, most of the interviews are available online. “We have recordings from 56 countries in 32 languages, including Czech,” explains Karin Roginer Hofmeisterová of the Malach Center for Visual History in Prague, which has been operating in the building of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics on Malostranské náměstí in Prague since 2010.
Personal Data
It is the only place in the Czech Republic where you can view the complete recordings of survivors’ testimonies. Here you’ll find accounts from survivors of the Jewish and Romani communities, as well as memories of political prisoners and queer people. Many of the video recordings are available on the Spielberg Foundation’s website, but the complete testimonies can only be viewed at the Malach Center. According to Jakub Mlynář, who has worked at this institution since its inception, the survivors provided their testimonies on the understanding that the VHS tapes containing the recordings would be housed in the Spielberg Foundation’s archive in California. Anyone interested was supposed to travel there in person. Times have changed, so while many of the testimonies are now online, access had to be restricted for ethical and security reasons. This is because the testimonies contain not only names but also images of family photographs, birth certificates, and other documents containing personal information.
Thousands of Records
The Malach Center is open to the public and not only assists in tracing individual life stories but, thanks to modern technology, also allows users to search for specific topics. It is no coincidence that this institution is based at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. Thanks to its connections with developers, Malach can provide access to large digital archives and also grants access to smaller video collections that do not have their own “home” archives. Experts from Malach, together with colleagues from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, have created a full-text search function in several languages. Thanks to this, you can search not only by the names of survivors but also by topics that interest you, such as “manifestations of discrimination” or “postwar returns home.”
Terezín Testimonies
Among the most frequently searched-for testimonies in Malach is the account of Viktor Laš, who, at the age of 18 as a Terezín prisoner, was sent to remove the remnants of the Nazi rampage in Lidice. He never spoke about what he had experienced, and when he returned to Terezín, he said, “Don’t ask me where I was or what I did there.” He didn’t even tell his family. It wasn’t until he was being filmed for the Spielberg Foundation that he described what he had witnessed in Lidice. The archive also contains dozens of recollections of the famous athlete and popular youth activities leader in Terezín and Auschwitz—Fredy Hirsch—about whom a new book by American author Wendy Holden, *The Teacher from Auschwitz*, was recently published. The database also contains recollections of the beloved artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who taught art in Terezín. Many of her students recount how this exceptional teacher inspired them. She showed them how art could help them escape, at least for a moment, from the daily reality of life in the ghetto. In the Malach database, for example, I was able to find the recollections of Ann Steiner, who spent most of her life in Canada but originally came from a Jewish family in Prague. In a video recording, she recalls that she enjoyed attending Zionist youth meetings led by Egon (Gonda) Redlich. He also ran the so-called Aliyah School, where Ann and other young people prepared to travel to Palestine. In 1942, Redlich was deported to Terezín, where he continued his work with young people. Ann eventually left for Denmark in the fall of 1939, where she lived for four years with a foster family. Her parents were deported by the Nazis to Terezín, and from there to Estonia, where they perished.
Postwar Searches
Another archive where you can uncover a wealth of interesting information is located in Bad Arolsen, Hesse. This institution was established after the war, when the Allies initiated the creation of the International Tracing Service. They assisted survivors who were trying to find out where their relatives or friends were. The archive has been open to the public since 2007. Like the Malach Center, the Arolsen Archive has an online database where you can find personal files of people who were imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos throughout Europe; there are also records from repatriation centers, registers of forced laborers, and information about people who perished during death marches. There are also thousands of personal items, such as watches, jewelry, letters, and photographs from concentration camps or repatriation centers. The collection contains 50 million documents on approximately 17.5 million people and is part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. One of the key missions of the Bad Arolsen archive is to assist in the search for lost relatives or friends whose paths were separated by the war.
An Important Clue
One of the stories I was able to piece together thanks to this archive was the fate of five men. In January 1945, they escaped from a train from Auschwitz that was passing through Velim. The men made their way to a forest near the nearby village of Sokoleč. Thanks to the help of locals, they hid in a forest shelter until the end of the war. In May 1945, they had their picture taken together with the people who had helped them. For decades, it was unknown what these survivors’ names were or what had happened to their relatives. In 2015, I published an article about this group in Lidové noviny. Several eyewitnesses responded to my article. Thanks to them, I discovered that one of the survivors was a Polish man named Mendel Janiak. After the war, he sent a thank-you note to Sokolče. It bore a return address in Munich. What happened to Mendel? Thanks to the Bad Arolsen archives, I discovered that he was listed in the records of a Munich camp where survivors from various concentration camps lived. This important lead took me to the Munich City Archives. There, they discovered that he was supposed to leave for America, but a few days before his departure, someone ambushed Mendel at the Munich train station and killed him—a man who had survived the horrors of the Auschwitz camp and months in a forest hideout… His relatives live in America; it was only thanks to the research I undertook that they learned what had happened to Mendel. In 2017, they came to the Czech Republic and participated in a memorial event in Sokolče. None of this would have been possible without the help of researchers at various archives, who not only know how to advise you on where to look but can also guide you on where to continue your search.
