A writer confronts her great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival in a Yale archive.
It was in class at Yale that I first watched my great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival. I expected some kind of great emotional release, but it never came. My great-grandfather felt somewhat masked, still withdrawn, just out of my grasp—his demeanor remained stoic while he attempted to describe the indescribable. Watching my great-grandmother felt like a homecoming.
Thirty six years ago, the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies project made its way to the survivor hotspot of Queens, New York where Hana and Anschel Kantor recorded their memories. These files were then deposited in Sterling Memorial Library, permanently absorbed into Fortunoff’s collection of stories.
When I arrived at Yale last fall, I was nervous in the normal ways, eager to find friends and extracurriculars. I also knew that I would have to confront my great-grandparents’ testimonies. I was too physically proximate to the archive—hidden behind a nondescript, brown door on the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library—to ignore them. It didn’t help that an exhibit by the Fortunoff, titled “In the First Person” had just gone up in the Beinecke. Each time I passed the gargantuan white cube, I thought of my great-grandmother and her strange connection to the place where I now study.
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies was the first of its kind. It pioneered audiovisual testimony as a medium to record not just the stories of the Holocaust, but the lives of survivors before and after the war. It is not static, a room tucked away full of tapes. The Fortunoff has developed curricula for a variety of courses at multiple levels of education, with a Teacher Advisory Council of educators across the country. The archive consults for Holocaust museums and has advised archival work surrounding other global genocides.
Today, there are over 4,400 recordings, recorded in twelve countries and in over twenty languages. The very first testimonies were recorded by survivors in New Haven, by a burgeoning organization titled the Holocaust Survivors Film Project.
“There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself,” Dori Laub, a child Holocaust survivor and Yale professor of psychiatry and a founding member of HSFP, wrote in his book “Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.” “One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.” If we take Laub’s words to be true, Fortunoff has granted thousands of survivors a kind of second life.
The total digitalization of the testimonies allows deeper engagement with the recordings, which can now be accessed from any corner of the world, with permission from the archive. “The archive has transitioned from the active collecting, processing, and digital preservation stage to a new stage in which we build on the foundation built by our predecessor to enhance access to the collection and encourage use of the collection in teaching and research worldwide,” Stephen Naron, the director of the archive, explained. The extraordinary act of faith the survivors initiated by entrusting Fortunoff with their stories has higher stakes now. These testimonies can reach more people, more rapidly. And as the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, the preservation of memory becomes even more urgent. As the Fortunoff Archive steps into the moment for which it was created, who is there to meet it?
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Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock began videotaping four Holocaust survivors in an office in New Haven on a May evening in 1979. They began at 6:30 p.m., and remained long after midnight.
Vlock, a television reporter, and Laub turned their interviews into an archive. The Holocaust Survivors Film Project officially launched in June of 1979, in the home of William Rosenberg, who led a local labor zionist organization that HSFP had used to contact survivors. A month later, survivors poured into his home for what would be the second recording session of their stories. HSFP board members and volunteers turned kitchens and living rooms into makeshift meeting rooms, discussing their plan to tape more testimonials and map the future of their newfound organization.
HSFP grew quickly. Geoffrey Hartman, a Kindertransport survivor and English professor at Yale, joined the ranks and requested a grant from the New Haven Foundation to support the burgeoning organization; it was approved in 1980. They published newsletters, amassed volunteers, and held lengthy recording sessions, sometimes recording up to six testimonies in a day. At the time, Hartman was building Yale’s Judaic Studies program from scratch and beginning to see the university as a home for these testimonies.
HSFP had recorded a grand total of 183 testimonies when they officially deposited them in the Manuscripts and Archives division of Sterling Memorial Library in 1981, establishing what would become the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
In 1987, the status of the testimonies changed from a deposit to a permanent donation. The Fortunoff family, a prominent Jewish jewelry retailer, endowed the project, giving it the financial freedom to live in perpetuity. Esther Fortunoff-Greene, who now sits on the advisory board of the Archive, remembers that her parents’ donation was driven by their own interactions with survivors in the New York City jewelry market.
HSFP, and then Fortunoff, demanded extreme sensitivity from its interviewers and required an extensive training process. The interviewer training packet from 1984-1997 contains a syllabus for volunteers and lists training sessions, required readings, and a fifteen minute in-depth interview with an individual of the volunteer’s choice, to practice before encountering the survivors. They developed a specific methodology, designed to give narrative agency to the survivor. The packet included something called the “bad questions list,” compiled by JR, presumably Joanne Rudof, Fortunoff’s original archivist. Off the table were questions with simple, factual answers (were the prisoners old or young?), and questions that implied judgement or assumptions.
Thirty six years ago, my great-grandfather’s interviewer broke the rules. When discussing his experience in concentration camps, she asked the unanswerable: What was the worst part? I found it nonsensical. How does one dare to ask a survivor of multiple camps what “the worst” part of their experience was? How could she ask him to measure the weight of the many massacres he witnessed? But his answer was simple: “Anyone could kill you.”
Relatives know that Holocaust survivors can be separated into two groups: those who speak about the war, and those who remain silent.
My great-grandfather Anschel died in 1994, eleven years before I was born, but my most treasured memories are of my dear Gigi Hana, tumbling around a then-crumbling home purchased with German reparations checks.
Hana had dramatic red nails, made shining golden chicken soup, and answered every single question I asked her. Anschel, I’m told, was much more reserved. But this was the beauty of the Fortunoff: survivors who rarely spoke of the horrors they witnessed were granted a vessel.
My beloved great grandmother passed away in 2023. I said goodbye to her as she cried out for her mother in Polish, a language I had never heard her speak.
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The Beinecke exhibit on the Fortunoff Archive is timely. We are losing survivors by the day, intensifying the need for accessible Holocaust testimony. Stephen Naron, the director of the archive, explained that “once the survivors are gone, archives like this will be the only bridge between the living and the dead. Listening to testimony is the closest we can get to being in a room with a survivor and learning from them firsthand.”
Yet, testimony is not a textbook; factual inaccuracies or conflicting narratives are inevitable. An understanding of this nuance informs who can and cannot access the archive—currently, any researcher can gain access to the collection at an access site, and relatives of survivors are provided with remote access. Gil Rubin, the Director of Academic Programs for the Fortunoff, explained that inconsistencies can, in the worst of scenarios, lead to Holocaust denial. “People will pick and choose certain segments and make them appear as something they are not,” he remarked. These deviations expose the human process of storytelling—deeply individual and rooted in our emotional memory.
I am all too familiar with these discrepancies. In her stories—at home and in the archive—my great-grandmother spoke with an air of tenacity, attributing her survival to her own cleverness. Stories seemed to bend and warp around her, twisting according to whatever quick-witted choice she had made. When she passed away, my mother eulogized her. “She was unsparing about the devastation, but nearly every Holocaust story she told had a common theme, which is that she, Chanka Kantor, was the heroine,” she wrote. “She highlighted her daring, her cunning. Her intuition. The time she pulled her sisters out of a line bound for execution. How she warned Grandpa Anshel from returning to his hometown of Kielce where the infamous massacre was taking place.” Neither my mother nor I accept the premise that our shared matriarch was actually more intelligent, or more deserving of life, than those who perished in the camps. This method of narration, as we understand it, was my great-grandmother’s way of making sense of the incomprehensible luck of Holocaust survival.
These fine gradations of my great-grandmother’s testimony are something only I, or another member of my family, can understand. The thought of an academic coming across her story in the archive troubles me. It isn’t that I am worried they won’t understand her or the complexities of her narrative, although they will never grasp my, or my mother’s knowledge of her.
It is that I am not willing to share my great-grandmother.
Now that she is no longer alive, this testimony feels like the most valuable piece of her that I have left. The crumbling house in Queens has been demolished, and the chicken soup doesn’t shine gold the same way. Her story will always belong to me, but since 1989, it has also, in effect, belonged to Yale.
Each survivor that records for Fortunoff signs a legal document. The current version, shared by Naron, says that survivors grant Yale and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies unrestricted rights to use their image and likeness, as well as distribute it on other platforms. However, I understand that my great grandparents did not fully sign their stories away—they remain our own. Every logical part of me trusts Fortunoff’s leaders: “We feel an enormous obligation to the survivors who shared their testimonies with us,” Naron said. “From the start, we created a number of policies to protect survivors from potential harm.” He noted that survivors can add or remove components to the standard release if they desire an embargo on the testimony, or want to restrict its use in a certain way. “Most survivors are happy to sign free of restrictions. After all, they gave testimony because they want it to be used and shared,” he explained. “A small minority are more protective, and that’s their right, and we abide by their restrictions in perpetuity.”
I also understand that these stories do no good sitting in a dark corner of Sterling Memorial Library. Testimony, when treated with the care it merits, is the gold standard of Holocaust representation, and can be an extraordinary method for education.
Nahanni Rous worked with Fortunoff to co-produce the podcast “Those Who Were There: Voices From the Holocaust,” which uses the archive’s testimonies. In the third season, Rous reconstructs the city of Vilna before, during, and after the war. “In that series, there’s a little bit more of a sense of trying to reconstruct events that played out,” she told me, “in that series I actually really was looking for different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the same event.”
The class I took in my first semester, “Representing the Holocaust,” is taught by Millicent Marcus and Maurice Samuels. They assigned the final for the class carefully—students were asked to choose a testimony to engage with in essay form. “We don’t want people to criticize the testimony, but to come at it as a scholar of testimony and to look at it as a form of representation,” Samuels said. Both professors expressed their satisfaction with how students grappled with the testimonies. The goal of the final was to not only listen with care, but to negotiate the dynamics of testimony as a format; to interrogate how and why certain questions were asked, and how survivors responded in speech, body language, and mannerism. “I would love to see everyone at Yale engage in the archive in some way,” Samuels added.
Fortunoff’s ways of working with testimony are getting more creative, Rous’s podcast being one example. The reach of these stories may go much farther in an untraditional format—most people do not have the interest, let alone the patience, to sit down and watch a multi-hour recording. But as these testimonies are adapted, we may lose some of their original magic, of whatever powerful, hours-long release figures like Laub were able to initiate.
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When I stumble upon the room marked “Fortunoff Archive” in Sterling Memorial Library, my heart still spikes. I half expect to open the door and see my great grandmother inside, wrinkled and beautiful, blond hair piled on top of her head.
I am only beginning to understand what it means to have my familial experience absorbed into my university’s archive. I remain uncomfortable with the dual ownership of the testimonies, with our prized stories in the hands of someone else. After watching the testimonies multiple times, my own memory starts to slip: which are the stories I was raised with, and which did I learn in her testimony? Now that my great grandmother is gone, the responsibility of telling her story rests heavy on my shoulders. I am the eldest in my generation, blessed with the most time with my great grandmother and burdened by the task of attempting to communicate her magic to those younger than me. Her testimony, preserved thanks to Fortunoff, will always be a narrative safety valve. I will return to it again and again. And when I tell my children of Hana Kantor, I will tell them her story exactly as she would have wanted them to hear— in her own words.
-Tali Kantor Lieber is a first-year in Benjamin Franklin College.
Images courtesy of Tali Kantor Lieber.
