Nearly 20 years ago, talent manager and producer Steve Sauer was having a business lunch with Tony Thomopoulos, then-president of Amblin Television. Thomopoulos knew that Sauer’s parents were Holocaust survivors, so he asked Sauer if they had recorded their testimonies for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation yet.
Photos courtesy U.S. Department of State
In December 1995, USC Shoah Foundation, then called, Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, held a training session for interviewers in Buenos Aires; bringing together people from different countries of Latin America. The Foundation had just started to collect the survivors’ testimonies throughout the world and was about to start recording testimonies in Brazil.
Kátia Lerner worked as interviewer and Regional Assistant Coordinator for USC Shoah Foundation in Rio de Janeiro from 1996 to 1999. After that period, she continued her work as liaison until 2012. Katia received an MA in Social Communication and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology, both at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her thesis analyzes the process of shaping the memory of the Holocaust taking as object of study the then called Survivors of the Holocaust Visual History Foundation (from 1994 to 2001).