About

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action.

With a current collection of over 56,669 eyewitness testimonies, the Institute’s Visual History Archive preserves history as told by the people who lived it. These testimonies were conducted in 65 countries and in 45 languages. Each testimony is a unique source of insight and knowledge offering powerful stories from history that demand to be explored and shared. In this way we will be able to see their faces and hear their voices, allowing them to teach, and inspire action against intolerance.

The Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world. Currently encompassing 119,565 hours of video testimony, the archive is an invaluable resource for humanity, with nearly every testimony containing a complete personal history of life before, during and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully searchable, and hyperlinked to the minute. This indexing allows students, professors, researchers, and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of more than 68,204 keywords and key phrases, 2 million names, and 774,095 images.

In the spring of 2013, the Visual History Archive was expanded to include testimonies from eyewitnesses of genocide from Rwanda. Learn more about our archival collections.

Approaching its 20th Anniversary in 2014, the Institute is committed to teaching with testimony, endeavoring to make the power of each story accessible to students, educators, scholars, and the general public on every continent.

China in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive

The Visual History Archive has 440 testimonies with content related to China. Each testimony was indexed using a controlled vocabulary, the USC Shoah Foundation’s Thesaurus, which, in its entirety, consists of approximately 68,204 terms. These index terms include geographical locations and time periods (e.g. “Beijing (Beijing, China),” “China 1941”), as well as location names (e.g. “Hongkew (Shanghai, China: Ghetto)”) and experiences (e.g. “separation of loved ones,” “decisions regarding flight”). Appropriate index terms are matched with one-minute segments of each testimony, thereby permitting users to perform detailed searches for relevant testimonies or segments of testimonies.

The testimonies are searchable using a web-based software tool, the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) which is available at a number of universities and institutions in the United States and abroad via a separate, high-capacity network called Internet2—or its variants in other countries.

Out of 440 testimonies, 433 were collected from Jewish survivors, five from liberators, and one from political prisoner.

One interview was recorded from a man who was born in Harbin, China, in 1920 and emigrated from China to USSR in 1937, where, wrongly accused of espionage, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of incarceration in Soviet GULAG. Interviews of Jewish survivors include accounts about flight from Germany and German-occupied areas of Europe to China in 1937-1942, living conditions in China under Japanese administration, life in the Hongkew Ghetto (312 testimonies) or in the refugee camps set up for Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and liberation at the arrival of the American goodwill mission on September 3, 1945.

Testimonies featuring China-related content were recorded in 14 languages.  In addition to 389 interviews recorded in the English language (88.4% of the content), the following languages are also represented in the collection: Bulgarian (1 interview), Czech (1), French (1), German (11), Hebrew (8), Hungarian (1), Polish (1), Portuguese (3), Russian (16), Sign language (1), Spanish (5), Swedish (1), and Yiddish (1).