Alice Herz Sommer recalls life after the Holocaust. She discusses how she reached out to her sisters. In order to prove she was still alive, she wrote asking that they listen to her play the piano on the radio. Her sister would talk about the experience for the rest of her life.

Paula Lebovics remembers arriving to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival she was asked to sing for everyone in her block. She was nervous, but felt obliged to do so. Luckily for Paula, everyone loved her voice and afterwards she was given special privileges. She remembers getting extra rations of food that she would take back to her mother.

Roman Kent talks about the songs he would sing for resistance in camps and how these songs create a sense of community.

Kurt Messerschmidt passionatley sings a song from his childhood.

Mihran Andonian is describing an experience that was common during the Armenian Genocide.  Some Armenian mothers, certain that they would not survive the death marches into the desert, let their children be taken by Muslims (Turks, Arabs, Kurds), hoping to guarantee survival. Other Armenian mothers on the caravans died while still with their children leaving these orphans to fend for themselves. Indeed, thousands of Armenian children were left homeless by the end of World War I and were either taken in by locals or rounded up by missionaries and brought to orphanages.

Celé interview, ze kterého tento úryvek pochází, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

Celá interview, ze kterých tyto úryvky pocházejí, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

Celá interview, ze kterých tyto úryvky pocházejí, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

“Get angry about it”, the conclusion of this clip, presents one of Israel Charny’s most important messages.

In the spring of 1915, the Young Turk regime of the Ottoman began a genocide against its Armenian population under the cover of World War I. This minute-long excerpt features survivor Haroutune Aivazian.  He describes the horror his mother faced when a town crier in Marash, a city in Cilcia in South West Anatolia, called for the Armenians of the community to gather in a square just outside of the town for deportation. As his mother prepared for the journey, a local Turkish man warned the family that deportation meant death.

In 1968, filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian received a phone call as he describes in this clip, from a German, who had apparently been stationed in a medical corps in the Ottoman Empire in 1915/1916 and witnessed what happened to Armenians. Michael had not heard of this person before, but knew right away that this could be an important interview. Why?

Dr. Ugur Ümit Üngör, Professor of History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, lectured on the involvement of Kurdish people in the Armenian Genocide as both perpetrators and resistors of the mass violence.

In this brief clip Father Krikor Guerguerian is faced with a theological question that has challenged many survivors of the Armenian Genocide. The perpetrator confesses to him that he killed his father, three brothers and confiscated their house and garden and asks Guerguerian for forgiveness.

In this short clip Harry Kurkjian recalls Armenians who were about to be killed crying out in despair, “Where are you God?”  “Why are you punishing us?”  As the first nation to convert to Christianity in 301 AD, the events of 1915 raised a fundamental theological problem for Armenians.  If God is good and all-powerful, why was he not intervening on their behalf?  The problem of theodicy, as theologians refer to it, is an issue that surfaces in nearly every genocide, driving some people to completely abandon faith in God.  Indeed, the “God is Dead” movement arose after the Holocaust as Jewis

In some ways, the one minute we spend with Elsie Hagopian Taft – 56 seconds, to be precise – is a wrenching primer on the Armenian Genocide. It is a poignant and powerful evocation of an innermost ring of Dante’s inferno, and a courageous explanation of why the Armenian Genocide matters today.

Michael Hagopian conducted almost all of the interviews in the Armenian Genocide Testimony collection.  After he died in December 2010, the Armenian Film Foundation received a request to interview Almas Boghosian, in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. Her granddaughter Taline had interviewed her in 2000, but her family wanted Almas to be interviewed again for this collection. I called a cameraman I knew from my previous work with the BBC and we went to Almas’ house, and met Almas’ grandson Bruce Boghosian and his wife, Laura.  

Jona Goldrich’s family evaded roundups deportation by hiding in an attic. Jona describes how he and his young brother escaped Nazi occupied Poland after his father decided it was no longer safe for his sons to remain in the country.

Gertrude Englander describes the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945.

Wolf Deane plays the song composed and sang by Jews in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. This testimony clip and melody is featured in the short film Melodies of Auschwitz.   

Chaim Borenstein remembers the brutality of the SS guards while imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi occupied Poland.

Herman Cohn recalls watching the parade in Nazi Germany for Hitler’s birthday in 1933 and how terrified he felt as a young boy.  

Melanie Wallis recalls how she settled in Detroit, Michigan after immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Stefan recalls the evening of November 4, 1941, when leaving the theater where he worked in Torun, Poland, he encounters a German soldier who turns out to be a man named Willi, his first real romance.Foreign words in this video clip:Ersatzkaffee (German): substitute coffee

After several months together, Willi must break the news to Stefan that he is being transferred to the Eastern front.

On the way to show his friend Zygmund the shed where Stefan and Willi would regularly meet, the two encounter three men who had just escaped the Stutthof concentration camp.Foreign words in this video clip:pedo (Polish): derogatory word for a gay person