Peter Berczi began working as a librarian at Budapest's Central European University in 2009 –the same year that CEU became a Visual History Archive Access site. But more and more, he says, he thinks this coincidence was meant to be.

Berczi helps professors at CEU find testimonies to use in their courses and conducts sessions to teach their students how to use the archive. He also conducts Visual History Archive trainings for local secondary educators as part of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21^st Century professional development program.

He also works with scholars and visitors to CEU who want to do research in the archive. Often, he said, people will come to the library wanting to watch a family member’s testimony.

He said the Visual History Archive is an immense source of firsthand information about the Holocaust at CEU, important especially because it allows the stories of survivors who are no longer alive to still be learned from.

“When students and professors watch clips from interviews we can see that they feel very close to these survivors and have a different understanding of history than they do reading history books,” Berczi said.

Berczi himself is a second generation Holocaust survivor and an amateur genealogist. He often brings a personal touch to his VHA trainings by using clips from his own family’s history to demonstrate various searches, he said.

He said that working with the Visual History Archive and doing his own family research has helped him deal with the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust.