IWitness Provides Testimony Clips for French Contest on Resistance and Deportation

For the fifth consecutive year, testimony clips from the Visual history Archive are part of the annual “Concours national de la Résistance et de la Déportation (CNRD)” (National Contest on Resistance and Deportation) offered to French secondary and university students. But for the first time, the clips and other resources are offered on the IWitness website.

The contest aims to perpetuate in students the memory of the resistance and the deportation in France during the Holocaust so that they can draw inspiration from it and draw civic lessons from it in their lives today.

CNRD is open to all French or French territory students in high school or college. Students have the option of working individually or in small groups to create written, artistic or audiovisual responses related to the year’s theme, which is focused on a specific aspect of French resistance and deportation. A panel of judges selects the regional finalists and national winners.

The theme of the 2016-2017 edition of the National Competition of the Resistance and the Deportation is "The negation of the Man in the Nazi concentration camp.”

Each year USC Shoah Foundation offers a series of French-language testimony clips from the Visual History Archive relating to the contest theme that students may use in their projects or simply draw on for research and inspiration. This year’s clips provide insights into the functioning and realities of the concentration system, the processes of dehumanization and the personal interpretations of the camp residents about them.

For the past four years, the CNRD clips have been hosted on the USC Shoah Foundation website. This year, the clips can be found on a dedicated page on IWitness.

These clips may be freely used in the context of audiovisual projects. Each of them is accompanied by a short description and a biography enabling the narrative to be placed in the survivor’s overall story.

To find out more about the 2017 edition of the CNRD, go to the Ministry of National Education: http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid53745/le-concours-national-de-la- Resistance-and-of-the-deportation.html