Ep. 49: Reframing Holocaust Testimony with Noah Shenker

Many of us have seen or listened to recorded Holocaust survivor testimony.  But have we thought about HOW that testimony was created?  And what role that process of eliciting testimony might play in the kinds of things survivors talk about it?

In this episode, I talked with Noah Shenker about how three different archives approached gathering testimony but also about what this means for our understanding of the Holocaust and the ways that survivors remember and recount their experiences.

Noah Shenker is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University.

Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony (2015)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.987)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today we're looking at testimony. And I've looked at Holocaust testimony in some other episodes. but I have a really, really great guest here, Noah Schenker to talk, to talk about, particularly testimony, video testimony or, or, recorded testimony in a couple of different places. but also really thinking in detail about what does it mean to

take testimony, to listen to testimony, and then to sort of ingest that testimony as someone who is experiencing it, watching it, or using it. And so Noah, thanks so much for coming on.

Noah (00:42.146)
Thanks, wait a minute. a pleasure being here. Looking forward to it.

Waitman Beorn (00:45.403)
Can we start by talking about how you got interested in this particular topic?

Noah (00:52.654)
It started back in grad school. was in getting my, actually it was before my, even got my PhD. was just doing a master's in critical studies at USC in the film school. And I thought I was going to work in the film industry. And at that time, the figures of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were looming large as the buildings were named after among others, those figures, Spielberg.

famously turned down, rejected by USC Film School at least twice, I think. But I was always interested in kind of interrogating, you know, these works that I grew up with. I thought I was gonna, you know, write a dissertation maybe about if I ever went back for a PhD about Spielberg and kind of thinking about him and blockbuster film more broadly. And then for like a methods class, I...

They took us to the backlot of Universal Studios where DreamWorks was housed and they had a bunch of trailers, a lot of just your typical movie trailers there, where the celebrities might normally get their makeup done. And they converted these trailers into...

recording studios and indexing suites and editing suites. For four years before that period in 1998, I was starting my master's. So this is 93 and 94 when Spielberg set up the USC Shoah Foundation for Visual History and Education, which the name has changed so many times.

I became really fascinated with the project to collect Holocaust survivor testimony and how literally it was embedded in this back lot of DreamWorks, you know, that he had been doing post-production on Jurassic Park while he was also working on Schindler's List or vice versa. I always get that story confused, but it is true that he's working on those at the same time. And a lot of the initial criticism

Noah (03:11.276)
or concern about that project stemmed from his kind of being the figure that he is. Is he the right person for this story? And with Schindler's List, that validation seemed to be confirmed for him. He could embark on that. And as somebody who was working in LA as an intern for a film production company, I was like, that's really interesting. I wonder what's ever gonna happen to that. It's probably not the path I'm gonna explore.

And then I eventually worked in the film industry for a couple of years. And in that span of time, I really kept going back to these questions about, just always kept up to date with what that project was doing. And when I decided to go back for my PhD, it just seemed like this was a project for me to do where I could still look at blockbuster cinema. I could look at the roles of various kind of

histories of film and narrative in American cinema and have that bleed into, so to speak, how the Holocaust was being represented in these testimonies. So that's how it started. I don't have family who lived through or perished during the Holocaust. It doesn't come from a place of me being a descendant of survivors. It comes from a place, I think, of

being immersed in a lot of, growing up in Evanston, Illinois, right outside Skokie where I went to Jewish day school and Skokie at one point had the largest per capita population, I think of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. And then ironically I moved to Melbourne where has the, and that became the second most populous.

the second most densely populated area of Jewish survivors outside of Israel. And so I think I've always been interested in how survivor stories become part of whether it's growing up, having experienced listening to their stories at school, seeing them represented in testimonies in film. And so that's, I've always been interested in that issue of representation. So that's how I came to this question.

Waitman Beorn (05:29.683)
And I think before we get into sort of your work on this and the project that you embarked on after coming to these experiences, maybe we can talk a little bit about the history of testimony itself, or at least of video testimony. Because I think for a lot of our listeners, particularly those people that have grown up in the past 20, 30 years,

You know, the, idea of, having video testimony of a Holocaust survivor or having a Holocaust survivor come talk to your school is kind of sort of a normal sort of ordinary experience. Um, but actually there is a prehistory, you know, there was a time when people weren't, for example, collecting testimonies in a certain sense. I mean, I know I'm glossing a little bit over, um, David Boder, but I mean, in the sense of like these large repositories of, of Holocaust testimony, particularly, um,

the video format that we're familiar with today. So can you talk a little about the history of particularly, I guess, video testimony, because that's what you're most interested in.

Noah (06:36.814)
Yeah, I mean, I can, but I would say that part of me exploring this topic also had to do with, and as I've taught more and more in incorporating Boeder into my teaching, and to think about so much of the work that's been kind of engaging with audio testimony, with wire recordings in the case of David Boeder.

I think there is something that in hindsight at the time, by my own admission, I think when I was working on my book, I didn't give that enough consideration. And I think that there is like a, I guess there is a genealogy there, which is just what I'm going to be working on on this second book. not about, you know, lots of work of course is already, I'm not going to be retracing that genealogy. That's something that other people have done and are doing.

But I do think that there is a connection between Boder and the first archive of its kind that is a video archive of Holocaust testimony, which is the Fortunoff archive, which started in New Haven in the late 70s and 78 and 79, and which just wrapped up an exhibit of its history.

Noah (08:05.422)
the idea that a grassroots effort was established within the New Haven Jewish community to have those stories recorded by people like Dory Laub among others and to kind of have that grassroots nature was really fascinating to me, but also in conversation with the Boeder, this idea that I don't think Boeder was deliberately thinking this way, but I think it-

in listening to a lot of his tapes, this idea of giving agency to witnesses in how they tell their stories. And so for me, what stood out about the Fortunoff Archive is that it built its whole kind of method and its whole culture, its whole ethos is established on this idea.

that the survivors themselves, the witnesses themselves should be guiding the process, or at least they should be driving the process and perhaps the interviewers can help to guide that process. And so for me, that comes about, of course, in the late 1970s, quite deliberately in some of the holdings of the Holocaust Museum, the Fortunoff Archive, as a response to what's being done.

in popular culture about the Holocaust most famously. I mean, it's almost become a cliche that Holocaust, the mini series becomes this impetus, right? Among other things for we need to tell the story from our own perspectives. Elie Wiesel comes out and writes a series of pieces, deplying the appropriation and trivialization of the Holocaust. There's all these debates that though they've been existed before,

the late seventies kind of crystallize at this moment, including, you know, Jimmy Carter's decision to, I think it's to give, to sell jets to Saudi Arabia fighter jets to Saudi. This is a really, it's a moment that becomes almost like the way in which Fibio Orca talks about the era of the witness, which with all of its kind of historical trajectories that go back even further than that, it is still a moment where like, wow, in America in the seventies, we need to record video testimony.

Noah (10:28.398)
And what's so striking to me, and I know that I'm diverting from your question, is that it's not that dissimilar from this moment now where it's like, it seems like since I've been studying this field, this area invocations of survivors are now dying, we need to record their stories. That has been going on since the seventies and we're now in 2025. And that's, it's changed, but it's still there. You know, that idea of like the physical presence of survivors is in jeopardy.

and we need to come up with technology that's going to preserve that. Sorry, I strayed, I think, from your question.

Waitman Beorn (11:02.529)
No, I mean, that's, I think it's, I think you're right. And it's interesting because there's the, there's, this is off topic as well, but it's my podcast. We can go off topic if we want to. I think there's the same thing with like the, and I hate this term. So I'm like the greatest generation. hate that. I hate that term, but, it makes me kind of, I don't like it, but, the way that the United States at least has sort of reacted to World War II veterans, you know, the same kind of like, my gosh, these people are dying. They're old now.

Noah (11:17.677)
yeah.

Waitman Beorn (11:31.099)
we need to capture their thoughts, their experiences. There is that sort of...

you know, you don't appreciate something until it's gone kind of, kind of feeling, but I think it's similar to what you're describing in terms of like Holocaust, Holocaust survivors are these kinds of scarce resources in terms of a particular perspective on, the event. they, need to capture their, capture their thoughts. And, so in the, in the book, you, where you focus on three sort of different, I guess we could say three different attempts.

Noah (11:44.696)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (12:11.515)
to capture this information. Different approaches, different motivations, and I think that's one of the things that's really interesting. So can you talk a little bit about maybe introduce us at least to the three sort of areas that you look at?

Noah (12:16.386)
Yeah.

Noah (12:26.083)
Yeah.

So there's the Fortunoff Archive, is the, so basically it's built around three case studies, the book, the Fortunoff Archive, which was the first video testimony archive of Holocaust survivor interviews. When I say first, I mean, there had been smaller projects, but a really like a kind of a more centralized coordinated effort. And then you had

the Holocaust Museum in DC, which started its own effort in the mid to late 80s under various directors, including at one point Joan Ringelheim. But the difference with the Forchnerf Archive, it's resided at Yale for almost the entirety of its existence, always in New Haven.

It's had a continuity all the way from, Joanne Rudolph as being one of the first archivists there and Stephen Naran, who was trained by, Rudolph, this idea that there has been a lot of kind of institutional continuity there. And it's always been hesitant to make its holdings until over the last 10 years or so, you had to go to Yale itself.

as I did for the book and sit with, you know, at a media bay, pop in a VHS version or duplicate of what they had shot on beta and then to watch that testimony. now with the Holocaust, sorry, and then, you know, that's changed much to the credit of Stephen Niren, the executive director, who's made that available online. It's a tool that I use here at...

Noah (14:22.702)
know, through requests and setting up a server, like I use that with my classes all the time. Now, when the case of the Holocaust Museum, you know, so the imperative for the Fortunoff Archive was communal memory. Memories of the Holocaust, but really community-centered, and it became more expansive over the years, so you're looking at over 4,400 testimonies from, you know, and over a dozen languages from places all over the world. And in the Holocaust Museum instance,

It really started as a way of how are we going to make sure that survivor stories are a part of the museum narrative, part of the exhibit? And so that was something that they really struggled with. And ultimately, they played around with the idea of having survivors' testimonies being featured in little excerpts to supplement parts of the permanent exhibition. And there was a lot of debate, in part because there was a

I think back in the 80s when they were kind of conceiving of the museum and how it was going to look, that that would be, that was still a relatively kind of, it had been embraced at places like the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, sorry, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that if you go to in Israel, there's some pretty good exhibit space there about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and in that museum.

there is some use or was some use, I haven't been there in a while, of testimonies. But it was still something that was new, that was considered somewhat new, not completely. I think, so they played around with that idea and they initially, collected those testimonies with the idea not that they were interviewing people for their own stories in their own words so much as it was fitting a particular curatorial mission.

exhibition imperative. And so you see a lot of these testimonies where they dedicate as much tape as they think is needed to cover, let's say, the Soviet war uprising, because here's a story of resistance. We want to make sure that we document that and integrate it into the museum. And so was very instead of about agency and kind of following the paths, allowing survivors to follow their own paths of memory. Yeah, it became much more

Noah (16:45.442)
What can you tell us about this moment? What can you tell us about that moment? Creating a sense of a somewhat chronological account of particular stories that highlighted the story points that the museum wanted to focus on. And in the end, they collected all these testimonies, but they were never used in their intended purpose. They instead refilmed.

a smaller group of survivors and they place them in an amphitheater that is still there, the testimonial amphitheater that's at the end of the Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibit, or they created the spaces in the digital little wing where you have the Wexner Learning Center and you could interact with it. But the idea that you could include their stories as being a central part, they are at the end.

But this idea that you would somehow have them telling history within that space as opposed to recalling memories after you've gone through the majority of the space, that's a very different framing. There still is this anxiety at this point to some extent, unfortunately. And I think it's not keeping pace with what was going on in terms of Holocaust historiography, which you could speak more of.

but this idea that there still is an uncertainty and an anxiety of what to do with survivors recollections vis-a-vis the writing of history. And I still felt like that was being, you could read a lot of tension and anxiety about that in the institutional archives at the Holocaust Museum. And that was never the imperative of the Fortunoff Archive. The Fortunoff Archive was not designed to create histories of the Holocaust. It was created to be more of a ego document or, you know,

Waitman Beorn (18:10.704)
Nothing.

Waitman Beorn (18:19.469)
One of the that you

Noah (18:32.334)
Collections of recollections, right? Or to think about Christopher Browning's work, your advisor and mentor, to think of collected memories, thinking of that as, this wasn't yet an eye towards we are going to create these as historical sources per se. And that's important because that's not the structure that was designed for the methodologies and approaches.

of conducting those interviews. It wasn't conducted with an eye towards, how are these sources going to be useful to historians? Right? That kind of a lot of that is retrofitted back onto it after the testimonies have already been collected. And so when you get to the Shoah Foundation in 1994 in the wake of Schindler's List and as the story goes, whether what kind of

interaction happened that survivors of the Holocaust watching in Poland as he films saying, why don't you tell our stories? You're telling these stories. And so he famously goes on his plane home. And I remember talking to Bronko Lustig, who was a very eminent survivor as well as producer in Hollywood who produced among other things, Schindler's List and on the plane home.

You know, they discuss like this plan to collect testimonies. And as the story is Bronco told it to me, he's no longer with us, you know, Stephen said to me, I want to do this. How many should I record? And it's basically like, well, let's look, let's run the numbers because we got to see what the budget is for this. they just came up with I think the idea was initially 50,000. That was the that's what they could kind of

account for. And now we're talking about over 55,000, many of which are not testimonies of the Holocaust, but I mean, the majority are, but now Rwanda and Guatemala and Armenia and other holdings that have been collected over the years. And that project, I think, really tapped into something which was what we've talked about now, which is, okay, the anxiety issue of

Noah (20:50.646)
and the fear of what's happening with the passing of survivors. This became a project which is different in its nature and its scale. It set up a network precisely to try to cover as much territory as possible, to collect as many testimonies as possible within that parameter set of 50,000. And even if that meant recording testimonies that had already been recorded at places like the Holocaust Museum or the Fortunoff Archive, this is idea of a kind of a completist archive.

We need to have an archive that is complete. We need to have an archive that is going to run in perpetuity, that the testimonies could be as long as they want. We're going to digitize them. And so there's not going to be the hindrances and limitations of the VHS tapes. We're going to just create, as the saying went at the time, would take you 13 years from start to finish to watch every testimony without break, right? This idea of like a temporal monument that we are going to

create the largest, most comprehensive archival embodiment of memories of the Holocaust, right? And not accounting for the fact, as you mentioned, that whether it's Boder or also the work of Yad Vashem and places elsewhere in the Fortune of the Archive and the Holocaust Museum that had already been doing this work over the 70 years plus. So it's kind of, or 70 years plus at that point, 50 years plus. it's a very, each of these archives has very different sets of motivations.

And it's not just that, oh, well, that's not important. It just happens to be those where there are areas that they were focusing on. That actually shapes how these testimonies are done. Like what you're getting, like the form, not to be McLuhan about it, but it is true. Like that form and the content are, I'm film and media scholar. Like you cannot just take any methodology and expect that it's going to have the same results.

every strategy from how you frame the camera for how you mic the sound to the lighting, to whether you move the camera, to whether the interviewer is taking notes, whether there's a pre-interview set up where you're actually filling out documents well in advance and whether you're doing studying about the area well in advance as an interviewer so you're familiar with the paths and the maps. That's all going to shape how we interpret and how we

Noah (23:17.026)
disseminate these testimonies. again, I'm kind of riffing and I apologize if I'm not staying. I mean, it's on topic, but I'm not sure if that's what you're asking for.

Waitman Beorn (23:29.997)
Yeah, I mean, it's it's a great introduction because, you know, as you point out, each one of these three archives is doing. You know, on the surface level, the same thing, which is recording someone talking about their experiences during the Holocaust, but at the deeper level, at the institutional level, they're actually all three doing different things, you know, that they think is in common, but they also have very different motivations.

which introduce bias, right, into the the. Into the and I'm using bias here, obviously, for listeners, you know, not not in the sense of like they're being propagandistic per se or they're trying to deceive anybody. But, you know, they have an approach and that approach, as Noah points out, I think really well in the book. You know, they have they have positives and negatives. There are are there advantages and disadvantages to the different ways in which these.

places approach the act of recording someone and asking them about their experience in the Holocaust. So maybe we can talk a little about what some of those are and some of the examples of what we can and can't get from these different ways of approaching survivors.

Noah (24:49.91)
I can give you an example by means of focusing on one.

Noah (24:56.43)
on one survivor, actually two, but they're married, were. Because there was, mean, part of the project included a chapter that was looking at testimonies that had been collected across the Fortunoff Archive, the Holocaust Museum, and the USC Shoah Foundation. So I was able to have this sample of, that I was able to, I mean, there's more than a dozen, but I.

I kind of whittled it down to focus on what I thought were like some key figures and how it could help us understand how the same people could be interviewed across the span of a decade plus in some instances by three different archives and the stories would come out in very different ways. So there's a story, there are the interviews of Selma Engel and her husband Heim Engel.

who were, know, Haim being a Polish Jew and Selma being from the Netherlands. And they met as they were forced into labor sorting clothes at Sobibor. And they ended up having...

you played a part in the uprising there. And I'm thinking about especially Salma's testimony from the Fortunoff archive in kind of the pretty early period. I don't have the dates in front of me, like early 80s, maybe even late 70s. But the testimony that she gives is the first of its

the first video testimony that she gives that I know of. And in the testimony itself, she has this level of animation, which she always has. She was a very vibrant person and someone who was very, I should say, like very charismatic. mean, when we talk about performance and you just said bias, there's preferences.

Noah (27:16.142)
There's also just modes of performance that are encouraged or discouraged. There's also the individual. When I use the term performance or staging, I'm not talking about those as like a valued of judgments of this is a bad thing to do. should never stay. You place anybody in front of a camera, that's staging right there. doesn't documentary fiction, testimony, interview right now.

This is a staged encounter that you and I are having. It doesn't mean it's untruthful. It just means that it sets the terms. It sets some parameters for the kinds of truths that we're going to have discussions about. And it's going to encourage or discourage different people to perform themselves differently. And in the case of Selma, how she performs herself is with a kind of seeming, appearing to be spontaneous.

a kind of range of gestures, physical gestures, and a kind of looking around with and kind of gathering herself. And as I'm talking to you, I'm just thinking about my memory of how she looked in those first interviews. And it's not so much about like, OK, can you take us back? What is this? No, no, you were saying this.

come back in time. In other words, this was very, very little, not no intervention, but in terms of the actual questions themselves, relatively free reign within boundaries of keeping people at least on point chronologically for the most part. And so there is a sense of immediacy, which of course it's a sense of, it's not the same as I think the work of

of Hank Greenspan has reminded us, and he was my first class I took in college was with Hank Greenspan. I'm listening to Holocaust survivors, little did I know. I guess I buried the lead when he asked you, how did I get into this? I didn't know I was getting into that. But freshman year at University of Michigan taking class and listening to Holocaust survivors probably had something to do with it. I didn't know it at the time. And I'm thinking like, yeah, mean, these people have given, know, someone given her stories.

Waitman Beorn (29:25.285)
Yeah

Noah (29:38.678)
several times before to other people, to herself, to her husband, to her children. So it's not like this is the first time she's given her story, but this is the first time she is performing it in this kind of context. And in that sense, you have, at least from the Foreshot Archive, what you're learning about them is this kind of, you know, we're kind of new to this and we're trying to figure out like, you know, what are you going to bring to this? And they set very few parameters. There's a very generous way of basically saying like,

This is new to us and this is new to you. And so there was a generosity in that process, I think that underlies it, which is not to say that it's ungenerous in these other archives. I just think it's also a reflection of that moment in time, right? And it's also a reflection of the fact that, know, Dory Lau being who he was, but then you also have Laurel Vlach, who is the co-founder and a TV journalist. And she has her own...

interventionist approach and lab less, you know, kind of interventionist approach, more of a psychoanalytic approach. And you kind of get the middle between those two positions. But then when she would I find still interesting, I cannot get over the fact that at the end, I mean, they were still dealing with the tech. They had to say, we're not going to work with more than two tapes because at least earlier on, they were still trying to figure out the budget and the tech and the tech.

And so this is one of the through lines through her testimony, but a lot of other people's testimony is it ends at the very end of her testimony. just ends. It cuts to black. Not literally. It cuts to like, you know, this other kind of filler that you would often the color scheme that you would get when a TV would when a station would go dead. And you've got the story of her talking about

her experiences after the war, which people weren't accounting for. She starts talking, you she's gonna go into detail about her son and it just cuts out and they don't film another tape, they don't put in another tape. And so you have the sense of like what constitutes the important part here is the little bit of the pre-war, but the war time is the real, that's the real deal. We're gonna focus on that. And what's so interesting is when she gives her testimony at the Holocaust Museum, rather,

Noah (32:03.64)
She's being interviewed in part, why? Because Heine had survived Sobibor and the uprising. And they're some of the few who survived after they escaped, right? So they escaped, they hid in a farm. They managed to make their way out and to survive the Holocaust after that revolt. And the same thing happens. We're using her to tell a story of the Sobibor uprising.

And everything else is kind of secondary. so too in that tape, she's going on about, she's going to tell a story about losing her son, Emil, after the war, just as in the Holocaust, the fortune of RKF. And they don't, they decided, you can hear them, the interviewer and the producer talking to each other and saying, we're not going to do another tape. We've got enough information here. And she's, it cuts out, right? As she's talking about the loss of her son.

So what we have at that moment is this, that is not the central experience. It's not until the Shoah Foundation interviews her, you know, 10 years or so later, and it interviews her twice, which is interesting, where we get the story of Emile, the son who dies of dysentery, and we get a sense of that post-war loss. I mean, they're on a boat, I think to Odessa, and...

They are trying to feed her child. She's trying to give him sustenance. And he just, he dies. And it's a horrible, just horrendous mournful story. And she has a bit more space. And in the photo sharing segment that they gave, and they did give a lot more time relative to the other archives, time for the period after the war.

talking about. mean, see if in the latest, we see a picture of a meal, what he looked like. And then I discovered that there was like a four hour interview. I think it was it was done for audio that was just recorded on audio. And for me, wait, man, going back to Boater, I guess, by me going back to Boater, it allowed me to have more appreciation for the for the audio recordings, because, yes, it's not the same. But there is a kind of expressivity and a form of trying to

Noah (34:29.62)
imagine on the part of this, the interviewer and this, the witness in us, what, what, what is, what is, especially for us, like what are we conjuring in our minds when her and Haim, when she and Haim were talking about Emile? And they go into great detail in the audio recording about Emile, a great, like in a way that is doesn't, just isn't approached at all to the same extent. And so for me,

Waitman Beorn (34:56.761)
I mean this is one of those things where, sorry, this is one of those things where, and you point this out, where there's a sort of conflict between what, or maybe a perceived conflict on my part, but between what the interviewer thinks is important about your experience in the Holocaust for their purposes and what they think is important, right? mean like they've experienced Auschwitz or whatever, they've experienced the Holocaust, but

They survived that and for them, the loss of their child was the thing that was like super traumatic and that they really wanted to sort of get out. But that wasn't that didn't necessarily fit right. The narrative of the. What the what the filmmaker in this case with what the interviewer wants to sort of get on tape.

Noah (35:33.058)
Hmm. Yeah.

Noah (35:46.252)
No, that's exactly right. And I think like what I was trying to suggest more than that, I argue that, you know, that term testimonial literacy, which is like looking out with an eye and listening out with your ear for those moments of, well, we want to call them tension or at least.

potentially opposing or contesting agendas or preferences on the part of the interviewers and the archives they represent and the witnesses, right? And those are not always in sync. In fact, oftentimes there is tension and opposition so much so that going back to Selma, we can see her giving a very scornful look at the interviewer at the Holocaust Museum for shutting down that conversation where there is just

very different aims and ways of expression that are conflicting with one another. And to me, those are generative. Those are really interesting because they reveal not only about the recollections of the survivor and the preferences of the institution, but also like an underlying, the kind of symptoms of what was possible at that time within that institution and perhaps within the larger space of Holocaust commemorative culture.

especially in the US at that time, that we kind of get a sense of like, wow, these questions can reveal to us and these methods, in addition to all the content and all the stories and recollections that are being documented, it also tells us something about the moments in which they're being recorded. And that to me is equally as revealing as also the actual historical details, which are rich and is...

which Christopher Browning has already made such an eloquent case and set the standard for about a lot of historians have been able to incorporate survivor accounts into their stories. So, and I think that's really important for me. I'm also interested in addition to those questions about what it reveals about like the politics of memory, the cultures of memory around the Holocaust at that time or those times.

Waitman Beorn (37:58.095)
I mean, what? That's a really good point. I mean, and this gets to sort of and I guess we'll come maybe come back to this, too, because one of the kind of implicit themes that runs through through the book is a sort of how how should you listen to a testimony? I don't mean that like in a that you're like a prescriptive sort of like you should do it this way, but that meaning more that there are more things to look at than just sort of.

you know, the rudimentary, what are they saying and what, what are they, what historical facts are they adding to my, my, you know, my research? Right. And I think we've all, at least I've been guilty of this at times of sort of just, okay, what did you say about the thing that I'm trying to write about? You know, what are you, but, that actually what you suggest, I think is that, you know, that there are other things to watch for, you know, nonverbal things, framing things,

You know that are beyond just the transmission of data from you know, the survivor to Whoever is watching does that make sense?

Noah (39:07.552)
Yeah, no, absolutely. mean, think the setting, you know, setting the interviews in the home of a survivor is the case with the Shoah Foundation and then some of the interviews of the Holocaust Museum as well, or who's the director at that time. So if you look at as an example, and this is something I don't, I mentioned in the dissertation way back when, I mean, I wrote a lot more about Joan Ringelheim and I trimmed down a lot of that information.

for the book, but that was a really crucial moment for the museum because after the museum kind of gives up on that effort to collect survivor testimonies strictly for kind of exhibition context, when Joan Ringelheim comes, someone who is a scholar of gender in the Holocaust, who's looking at women's experiences, among other things, you start seeing a lot more focus.

on those kinds of stories, on experiences of menstruation, sexual violence, a lot more accounting for the variations of experiences within the Holocaust. I still think that there was prior to Joan Ringelheim a tendency to kind of...

And I'm generalizing here, but I think it's a fair generalization. There's exceptions, of course, but there's a tendency to think of the survivors as being kind of of the same experience difference. But by and large, these are survivors. here's the you've kind of alluded to that, or that, you you survived, Ashwood. We all kind of we can think of this as a part of a tapestry and what everybody's kind of woven to

but thinking about those discontinuities and the lack of, the differences, right, of women's experiences as an example was just really revolutionary on her part. And to kind of delve into the specific features and experiences that were different for women was so crucial. And then thinking about like,

Noah (41:29.262)
Ari Joskiewicz's work on the Reign of Ash on Romany's survivors and how their stories in a way had to make their way into the public realm by way of in essence being cargoed in through the Jewish experiences of the Holocaust and thinking about how we can. So, I mean, in a way there's something really interesting there about saying like,

how do these kind of established methods create spaces for difference within the range of experiences being talked about? And what that means also means in a way having to read against the grain of those preferences to say, they're really not focusing on this. So I was dealing a lot with absences or where there would be an absence of a question about something but the

themselves would kind of insist on talking about something that hadn't been asked of them. So we're thinking of Ari's work where, you know, this idea of performing towards an archive with the expectations of how is your story as a Romani survivor going to be heard or seen, if it can accord with that it might be more likely if it accords within a certain set of archival preferences in a way of performing your testimony. So to

with experiences of sexual violence at Anaheim Cove's work is it had been taking us like, what were the spaces where there are silences, where they're silencing? That's all other issue that probably not for this discussion, but the idea of like, what are those moments where like, yeah, what is that absence about? What did it allow for or not? Is it a complete silencing of women's experience? Of course not. Women's experiences were being talked about before John Ringelhoff. My point is that

you had to do it in a way through an oppositional reading where you're reading against the preferences and agendas and methodologies of the archive. And you just really have to listen to the survivor and how they push back or how they demure. And in that sense, that I feel now we're at a moment where to some extent, to some extent,

Noah (43:50.894)
The Shoah Foundation, you know, more recently, I think has become a little bit more critically, well, that's a separate question, I guess. But I guess what I'm saying is that we also learn about the historiographic parameters. Like, what does it mean to write history of the Holocaust? You can see that through these archives. You can see like, here's a moment where women are becoming very important, issues of sexual violence are becoming important, where the Romani are becoming very important.

So we can also see that trajectory in the testimonies themselves about what is allowable and what is preferred within those spaces as areas of discussion, if that makes sense.

Waitman Beorn (44:24.891)
Well, yeah, and there's another piece to this that I think is interesting to hear more about, which is the role of the interviewer in these, because I think, you know, sometimes for again, general public or someone who might just, you know, watch one or two of these things. And again, you kind of if you're not thinking about it carefully, the interviewer is just kind of there to, you know.

Noah (44:32.931)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (44:50.395)
ask the questions and then the interviewee answers the questions and that's sort of it. But actually, you one of the things that I'm particularly interested in just as a kind of aside interest is the longitudinal role that these interviewers play in eliciting testimony, right? Because those of us that, you know, use testimony,

for any reason, you we're often sitting there and then we probably all had this experience where you're sitting there, you're watching the survivor approach a topic that you're probably interested in or a topic that is clearly difficult for them for any one of a number of reasons. And the interviewer kind of like veers them away from it, you know, or redirects them in a different, a different place. And you kind of want to like reach through and like grab the interviewer and shake them and be like, stop, like, please like

She was going to say something important here and you you sort of. Preempted that and again that this is without any malice towards the interviewer, but the fact that, you know, many of these interviewers or some of them, some of them were some of them weren't, you know, experts or knew anything about really what they were talking about or had their own. Their own interests, which which, as you sort of point out, kind of bleed into it. And I mean, I've seen this before and then I'll shut up.

But I've seen this before where like, you'll get an interviewer, particularly for the Shoah Foundation, who is an observant Jew, like who is religious and that's important, clearly important in their life. And they will continue to sort of ask, like repeatedly ask survivors religious questions, even after the survivor has indicated, for example, that they're not religious at all. You know, I remember one example where, you know, the survivor was talking about, they were being forced out of their house on a...

you know, roundup of some kind. And the interviewer kept asking them, well, did you, what religious items do you take with you? And the survivor was like, kind of like, who cares? Like, you know, we didn't care about that. Like that wasn't important to us. You know, and so there are ways in which the interviewers, and I'm not saying that's not interesting or couldn't be interesting to other people, but the interviewers themselves could sometimes really affect or what they're eliciting from the survivor themselves.

Noah (47:12.718)
No, I think it's a great point, Wait a minute. mean, I think in that way, what I've always been interested in is someone who trained as a documentary film. That was my area of concentration within film and media studies. And so for me, always looking at different approaches that filmmakers bring to their work and how that shapes the relationships that are created on screen.

and off screen and everything from the kind of role that they see for themselves and how to what extent they insert themselves into the making of this film or in this case, testimony. I there's not a whole lot of difference between other than like the claims that are being made and the status that is being ascribed to testimonies. They're not that different from

your talking head, standard talking head documentary. I mean, we use the term testimony, Hank Greenspan, we use the term interviews. To me, testimony is still interesting because it does really foreground that I am attesting to something that happened to me that I experienced, that I saw, that I heard, that I smelled, that I felt. And so I still think that that matters a great deal, but

when we look at documentary film and we think about whether someone is going to be taking an active role and really like pushing the conversation in directions that we as an audience don't want to see it go, we are held captive to their own whims and their kind of their own interests. know, even though, even if that's not the job, especially in the Shaw Foundation case where they like, they're supposed to be a standardization. They're supposed to be

You all need to follow this scrimmage. There really is a, you know, it's, it's a pretty, tight script. It's not, it has leeway, but it's, you know, it's compared to the other two. mean, this is the archive that had a 40 page plus pre-interview questionnaire that you're filling out and they're using to like plot a classical Hollywood narrative of like, you know, 30 % pre or 30%, uh, sorry, think it's 20 % pre-war.

Noah (49:36.878)
60 % wartime, 20 % post-war as opposed to just a generally looser frame. Already that, right, is being establishing a narrative linear progression versus going off on tangents and allowing those tangents to be explored. And I think that already sets in motion a certain kind of, if you're looking,

Waitman Beorn (49:42.651)
Right.

Noah (50:03.47)
to get to certain dates that have been filled out or events on that pre-interview questionnaire, an interviewer is gonna be more likely than not to wanna make sure that they hit those points as opposed to at the Fortune F Archive and you're not allowed to have notes in front of you, you're going to just, that's going to engender a much more conversational and more, I shouldn't even say that, a way of active, careful listening, which is very different than like being driven by the questions that you

have. So I would still say that the role of the interviewer is often of their own kind of interests and whims, but it's also, I think, in part a function of ripping off of a structure that's creating an imperative towards when did that happen? Can you step back? Did you see that firsthand or did you hear that from someone else? Did you dream that or did you see it?

Already this kind of emphasis on did you see it firsthand as opposed to, and through Todd Pressner's work, a way of trying to make archive ethical after the fact, it's a really interesting question. Not that I think these archives were unethical, but how do you create points of entry into these archives where you could maybe account for that.

frustration that you felt, wait a minute, saying like, wanted to go reach behind the camera and strangle this interviewer. and I hope I put words on your mouth, in which case you can edit that out. No, no. you know, and, and so I feel like there is this kind of, I think it does speak to like a lot of the quote unquote new developments around testimony have to do with, okay, well, how can we revisit them and kind of.

Waitman Beorn (51:34.843)
Well, I mean, I get you know, I don't want to murder anyone, you know, but you

Noah (51:53.398)
repurpose them, but also reimagine them in ways that we might have initially found frustrating, or how can we make them more useful to us?

Waitman Beorn (51:58.713)
Well, there's the, there's also the trade off that you just, that you sort of just mentioned a little bit about, which is that the Shaw Foundation seems to me to be in search of a form of completeness. mean, they want to have a beginning, a middle, which is the Holocaust and an end, is bring us up to date right now with family and everything else and sort of your final, your final closing thoughts.

Noah (52:13.516)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (52:26.965)
whereas, you know, for example, fortune off is, more kind of, we'll go with where you want to go with it and we'll let you sort of in a cyclical analytical way, just kind of talk. and then each of them has their, their, drawbacks, right? I mean, like when you go for this sort of like once over the world completeness, you may not get into what you call and what other people call deep memory, right? Cause they're just.

you're, you're, they're, they're sort of plotting along their story, which may often, particularly, I think, as we get into later years, might map onto the one they do when they go to the middle school every year and they tell the same story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end a moral. but then conversely, the, you know, the more open-ended interview type of, you know, just kind of tell us everything about whatever you think.

you may miss out on or may be difficult to follow because it may not be 100 % chronological. Does that make sense? mean, like that these things sort of, you're never going to have a perfect interview unless you maybe do one of each kind for the same person, you know, multiple times. And even then, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's difficult.

Noah (53:41.292)
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would respond by way of bringing back something that you said before about over the last that that. About access, access to testimonies and to survivors, right? I don't know. mean, in my conversations. With colleagues, it's just anecdotal, I don't have any hard numbers in front of me or data, but.

I mean, I certainly see it with my students. I just don't know to the extent, I guess I would push back and I don't mean that in a forceful way. guess I would, I'm questioning to what extent my students now who are in college and what they experienced over the last say 10 years, the degree to which they've had any exposure outside of those students who

you know, even, even among my Jewish students here, I don't know how, I don't, I don't know if there is this reservoir of like memory of, I remember when I went to the synagogue or a survivor came to my school and we heard the story. I mean, I asked for a show of hands in my, one of my classes recently about how many of them had.

Waitman Beorn (54:57.851)
Mm.

Noah (55:06.99)
taken any kind of modules about the Holocaust. And I had one student out of 23. mean, these are good sharp students come from pretty established, really good high schools, right? They've got great skills, they've been trained well. And I just don't know how common that kind of encounter is. And I see...

I guess my concern is going back to the Shoah Foundation, it gets back to a point that's been kind of the through line is like you create testimonies for different purpose. You create them now for, let's say, in the going back to the Fortunoff archive, stories of survivors need to be heard because the grassroots memories are as important as those that are coming from the top down through popular culture and through official histories and memories and memorials.

in the case of the Holocaust Museum, a way of illustrating stories and giving life to stories have now been given the kind of the stamp of approval by the US government. And then in the case of Shoah, to really mainstream this experience as being like, through Schindler's List, like we are in a period of accelerated Holocaust representation. We've getting all these films about the Holocaust.

And we're gonna use this for educational purposes. So that's the only difference I would say is that the Fortunoff Archive is, sorry, the Shoah Foundation is the only one of these three that is consciously trying to think ahead towards educational application. And you've got Facing History and ourselves that's pre-existed that, but it's still like.

They're very much interested in that, but now it seems like the trepanation is even doubling down on that bit with a different end, is.

Noah (57:06.392)
chronicling stories of, let's say, October 7th and experiences of October 7th, and also to document experiences of antisemitism or to repurpose, as has always been the case, testimonies for modules like Eyewitness that could be used to teach lessons about antisemitism. And that's a very, and I think that's kind of where my current work is kind of thinking

Waitman Beorn (57:26.779)
Hmm.

Noah (57:35.758)
about is, all right, these are very different methods and approaches that are built around a set of aims that at the time were not including like fighting anti-Semitism or documenting experiences of Hamas's terrorism, right? Like that, those are different contexts and we don't have a one size fits all model that can somehow be used. And my concern, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (58:03.931)
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's something that I think is interesting coming into, as, we sort of look at your, at your current work, which is about the future, right? About what are we doing with this in the, in the future? Because, you know, one of the things that, that Shoah Foundation did for our listeners might not be familiar, but they, they, they have been at least sort of putting a lot of energy into this sort of virtual survivor experience where you have sort of a hologram of a survivor that then uses a

Noah (58:05.518)
Sorry.

Noah (58:11.566)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (58:33.325)
a large language model. You can sort of ask it questions and it should respond. They, he, she, whatever should respond almost as if you were there, which has all kinds of issues behind it. And, this is also in a certain sense, trying to replicate this, this now sort of industry standard survivor experience, right? Where you, the survivor stands and sits in front of you and tells their story and you ask them questions about it.

But that actually might not work when the survivor is not an actual person, which isn't actually... Are we trying to then, as you're suggesting, of retrofit modern technology onto an interface, a relationship, an interaction that you just can't do unless it's an actual living person?

Noah (59:27.116)
Yeah, I would ask, I mean, I think about the work that you and your colleagues have done and the amazing work on geographies of the Holocaust and all the other various trajectories that have grown out of that. I'm not misspeaking, am I? no, I wasn't sure if I, did I get something? Maybe I got, no, but I'm thinking of just like whether it's through data visualization and mapping and in our conversations before this interview started and coming up with.

Waitman Beorn (59:39.171)
No? I don't know.

Noah (59:54.74)
recreating the space or virtual spaces for particular campsites and thinking or thinking of the work of Catherine Sturdy-Coles and others, like thinking about how do we get new sources of information? How can we visualize in new ways? Which is a very different set of questions than we have this testimony. I mean, it is related in the sense that we have this testimony.

But now how can we develop new ways of thinking about those testimonies and new technologies for re-rendering them and approaching them from different perspectives? Which I think as opposed to the work that you and Paul Jaskid and Nulls and Todd Pressner and others have done, the list goes on, which is really important work about the

where I think there is like a set of questions that kind of precedes the work that helps to structure questions about the work. And then it's brought to a site rather than having the technology necessarily drive the process. And I'm wondering to what extent the technology sometimes can drive certain processes. I mean, a colleague and I having written a piece about what you're talking about.

the dimensions and testimony witnesses is famous. It's just so interesting. I it's not a hologram, but everybody talks about it as a hologram and it was promoted as a hologram. And even that idea of like the aura associated with the hologram as being the closest we can get to replicating the authentic self in a physical representation, right? You know, that somehow this is

Waitman Beorn (01:01:42.465)
Mm-hmm.

Noah (01:01:49.226)
And it's no coincidence that that was devised by the Defense Department through the Institute for Creative Technologies, which was housed at USC where I went to graduate school, which was fortunate for me that the Shoah Foundation also relocated to USC while I was writing my dissertation. It made it a lot easier. And thinking about the fact that the producers of

a lot of the people involved with the engineering of this technology were big Star Trek Next Generation fans and loved the holodeck. And that's what they had in mind. We're going to have an encounter with someone from the past or still living. Many of them were going to record. We're going to re-record survivors who've already given testimony to the show, finish, record them using this motion capture technology and using a large language model and.

voice recognition technology off the shelf through Google. And this is going to allow you to have a conversation with a survivor after their even after their dead. Right. And that totally is changes that that is a completely new experience that is not nearly as is, in my own opinion, as effective. It's it's training us to do something that is very different.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:12.827)
Mm-hmm.

Noah (01:03:13.09)
than what we would be doing with a video testimony. With a video testimony, you have the entire corpus of the testimony available to you outside of the interstitial, that is to say, all the stuff that doesn't make it onto you. Maybe you're not gonna have access to the off-camera conversations unless they happen to keep the camera on. And there's a process that exists before they sit in front of the camera in between, taking lunch breaks and all that stuff. And those are conversations that are very important.

But for the most part, you have access to it. You have the work. when a rendering of Pinkus Guter is placed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage or in the USC Shoah Foundation, you don't have access to those four days of interview questions that were conducted with him unless you're able to access it, which I was after the fact, and to see what was built into that system.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:44.324)
Yep.

Noah (01:04:10.924)
And you realize like, wow, you're just really getting a very, very small slice and an often very inaccurate, misconstrued slice of this person's experience. And so to me that, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:21.849)
And this one of the things that I have kind of a beef with the idea of reenactment in general. Right. And this goes all the way to war reenactment and that kind of stuff. Because obviously you can't do it. mean, it's not going to be accurate enough to really

Noah (01:04:35.758)
Hmm.

Noah (01:04:41.376)
Yeah, no, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:49.729)
have an impact on someone. And if it was, you wouldn't do it because it wouldn't be ethical to like put somebody through that. And I think that what's interesting to me about the application in the Holocaust world with survivor testimony is it, I mean, maybe I'm old fashioned, but you know, for me, know, watching someone on a flat, on a two dimensional screen, you know, tell a particularly horrendous or traumatic or powerful story.

is not that the value of that or the power of that experience to me is not increased by having them be like a 3D digital person in front of me anyway. And so I sort of feel like, know, is there is there's a sort of it's kind of this idea that sometimes.

Noah (01:05:32.492)
No.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:36.389)
technology people think, you know, that everybody is just, is like an ADD, you know, kid. And unless we give them lots of bells and whistles and crazy new sorts of forms of technology, then they, won't get anything out of it. And so in a certain sense, sometimes it seems like that that's what happened with the hologram because it's, you know, it's, it's bite size and it's interactive, rather than sort of the other way to do it, which might be, you know,

kind of, kind of a smoother way of what they have now, which is like, you want to hear about what it was like when I came to Auschwitz click on this link. And it'll take you to that part where I talk about what you're going to Auschwitz. And what you want to hear about what had happened to my family, you know, rather than having to sort of ask them and have them respond as if they're like, create this false reenactment of listening to a survivor talk.

Noah (01:06:30.606)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a matter of, yeah, I think it's a really interesting point is to think about how, I used to, no, I think I still adhere to this idea that duration, that the process of whether listening and watching a video testimony or listening to an audio testimony requires,

a kind of in and of itself is about engendering a careful listening of helping to forge to some extent an ethical contract between you and the interviewer and the interviewee that there is this tripartite at the very least kind of relationship here where there's a degree of also transparency within the limits of what's possible. Like I can hear

the interviewer asking questions of the witness. And I can see that this is a process, whereas if you're going to encounter, again, just thinking about Pinkus Guter, you're going to have to start that conversation. You're going to have to come up with a question based on a very limited understanding of the Holocaust if you're your general audience member or patron at that museum. And so for me, and you would never, and you're not going to hear the interviewer asking the questions.

You're not actually being placed in the position of being someone watching a process of witnessing. You're being positioned as someone who is, to use Lauv's term, though it's not at all what's going on. I think there's issues with what he's described too, by the way, co-witnessing. But you're kind of being asked to be the interviewer in that situation. like, I mean, how much information do you know about the Warsaw ghetto or about Krakow?

Waitman Beorn (01:08:13.006)
Right, yeah.

Noah (01:08:24.386)
where he was or Loge where he was from. Like what is the set of information that you have at your disposal? It's a mirror upon, it's basically mirroring your knowledge or lack thereof. And so whatever you bring to it is what you're gonna get out of it.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:43.789)
And you don't know when you ask like, you know, what it was like to be hungry. If, if the line, the large language model has sort of is telling you what it was like to be hungry in the ghetto or in a camp or it just, you know, it's basically just picked up on here's a part of his testimony where he's talking about hunger. And so you get, you get a sense of it, but again, it's, as you say that the transparency is not necessarily there, right? Because you don't know what, what actual question.

Noah (01:08:57.667)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:13.271)
engendered the response that you're getting from your question because the machine has kind of guessed it. What the best guess was.

Noah (01:09:19.502)
Yeah, I mean, it's machine learning and it's also human. It's manual too, in the sense that the people who are checking, at least on the back, but it's still like very, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. mean, like the, if you ask them, if you ask the foundation, the course of interviews, like, yeah, the kind of interview, the kind of questions that you get, the kind of answers that you get back to your questions are more important. In other words, is it of a kind of an answer that would suit the question that you've asked? That's the standard, not is it the exact

Waitman Beorn (01:09:24.57)
Yeah.

Noah (01:09:48.702)
answer based on the data that was collected and asked of the witness in its initial recording. So in other words, what they deem to be a success is, was the reply that Pincus or others gave you of a kind that you would expect to be consistent with the question that you asked, which is a very different measurement of context and truth.

And obviously given the moments and by moments, mean a long history of disinformation that has been accelerated over the last decade plus of like, well, that's kind of important, right? To think about like, I'm all for exploring the boundaries that are blurred between fiction and nonfiction as they play themselves out in documentary and even including in testimonies when people talk about what they dreamt of and what they aspire to.

and the realities and the disconnects between them. I'm all for poetic and expressive articulations of memory that aren't about historical fact, but are about how, and even Browning talks about this, about how these memories structure the way that you, how certain recollections structure how you think of yourself in that regards to that history, right? And what does it tell you about, what does it tell us about how they see themselves?

Waitman Beorn (01:11:14.361)
Yeah.

Noah (01:11:14.882)
that they chose to say that Mengele was there at their selection, right? Even though we know that depending on the day or time of the year that that wasn't the case, right? So in this case, it's like not that, but here is very different because in this case, is really the design of the technology which is driving that way. And so this goes all the way back from, fortunately, thinking of the agency with survivors and we're talking now about user-driven

Waitman Beorn (01:11:21.219)
It can be all of them.

Noah (01:11:44.522)
Editing, which is the term that the Shoa Foundation uses to describe DIT. User-driven editing. That you are editing the testimony based on your user preferences. And so we have this agency which has become diluted and not only diluted, like shifted from the witness as imperfect as that may have been.

to now the user. And that sense, I think once we start getting into like, how can the user end of things be better, quote unquote, or less wonky, quote unquote, of course it's not any of those things, because it's very clumsy system. And it doesn't even matter. I that technology is going to be, in my view, it's, mean, Wolfgang Steiner talks about, there's obsolescence already built into it. Like it's not like something that's going to last in perpetuity.

And I do think that video testimony, it's friable. mean, it's precarious. And we just need to kind let that precarity, I kind of went out of the mind, frankly, that I talking with Henry, to think about letting witnesses just kind of be in place, to let their memories as they were recorded to stand as they are. And it's like, to me, it's just like, we need to constantly, we have to complete it. We need to add to it. We need to re-understand it.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:57.625)
Yeah. Yeah.

Noah (01:13:07.126)
You know, I understand the push for that, but I don't.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:11.097)
No, but I mean, I agree because like for me, it's the same thing. Like, you know, for me, it's kind of like there was a, there was a, there was an historical period of time in which it was possible to sit down with a survivor and have them tell you a story. Just like there was a period of time in which in a completely different realm, you know, Nazi perpetrators were interrogated by the police and left a witness statement. but, but, but those, but those times are over because

everyone's dead or will be dead or the, mean, and so then they become, they sort of then are just an historical document of some kind. you know, and, and, and you can always get something out of them and sometimes you can get more out of them by reading them in a different way or a different context, but you can't sort of squeeze something out of them that is, is, is in a certain sense, more different than what was possible from the first. mean, like, you know, it's, there's a finite amount that you can get.

Noah (01:13:45.752)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:08.29)
I mean, like without...

Noah (01:14:09.26)
Yeah, we're talking about that within Ukraine, your work on this camp that thinking of how to come up with ways of like visual, like capturing a sense of that space because that space doesn't exist as it was, right? So you're trying to, in essence, flesh that out. But you're also grappling with this questions of, I don't mean to be jumping into something that we didn't discuss on tape, but I guess my, it's, there's something there that's

new and generative of like, how can I envision and how can other people enter into a space which we have relatively little information about. And we talked about Treblinka too, like that's a different, that's different, right? That is, that is, and you're still grappling with like, how do we mark spaces that are, have some degree of uncertainty about them? And I think like, that might be an interesting thing. I I think,

Waitman Beorn (01:14:51.492)
Yeah.

Noah (01:15:06.248)
annotating and I think the work that like, and maybe the work that the Fortune of Archive has done and the work that Todd Pressner is doing on kind of approaches to accessing the testimonies as we have them can be done in a way that is ethical, a way that maybe generates new questions. That's a separate thing.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:25.851)
Well, yeah, it's interesting because like the stuff that and I'm going to have Todd on actually, he's going to come on in a couple of weeks. But what's interesting is that some of the things that I see him doing with the large data is still it's actually helping us direct us back to the individual testimonies. Right. You it's like, for example, if you map the general arc of testimonies by what they're talking about at what time stamp, for example. Right. And you're going to get a

Noah (01:15:42.626)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:54.095)
you're going to get an average, like most, most testimonies sort of follow this arc, particularly with show foundation, right? Because it's, it's structured that way intentionally, but what it can show you visually is, Hey, there's, here's like one that goes in a completely different direction. Like, then, and then to act, answer the question, why you're not turning to AI, you're not turning to, you know, some, some new sort of, analytical software, the, the way, the way you answer why is you go and listen to it like a normal

Noah (01:15:58.146)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:23.323)
Like, like an original person would write like an original scholar looking at it. mean, like, you know, don't the way you. So what sort of does is it directs you to something that's interesting. And then you go back and you, you, you essentially digest the document in the same way that you would if you didn't have the AI, but it directs you to it. I hope you're not going to try to, you're not going to hopefully click directly to that timestamp and be like, you know, exactly what's happening here, but you know.

Noah (01:16:27.064)
Yeah. An OG scholar, if you will.

Noah (01:16:44.91)
Or at least you hope that that's the case, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:53.911)
It's not, I mean, cause I think one of the, mean, we're getting to the end here, but you know, the, the, danger floating behind all of this is the AI and the like more less, less the AI that helps us to analyze stuff and the AI that scrapes information, you know, and then, creates.

Noah (01:17:12.236)
And also the AI that generates and that generates information because I, you know, and now, you know, it's, it'll be interesting to see with, with Robbie Williams, Robert, I was with, with, with Robbie Williams, who's the director of the show foundation now, it was just Robbie Williams. don't know if he goes by Robbie and I'm just getting confused with the name of the performer, but thinking of Steven.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:15.642)
Right.

Noah (01:17:41.538)
thinking of Stephen Smith and Stephen Smith and Kia were Heather Mayo rather, I should say, were really instrumental in driving the DIT Dimensions and Testimony project. And so I'm interested to see where that goes now if there's the same kind of focus on that and whether or not, like, though it seems to be a lot on recording,

testimonies or focusing on testimonies that pertain to anti-Semitism. But thinking to, but I remember having a conversation with Stephen Smith and about what the possibilities of the DIT could be. And it wasn't completely out of the question that the Shoah Foundation

was going to explore possibilities of how they discovered new information pertain to, let's say, again, let's use the example of Pincus as he was the pilot interviewee. OK, well, maybe we can find ways of actually incorporating that new data into the interface. And at the time in 2015, when I'm having those discussions, I'm like, that's pre-Chat GPT.

And I'm now thinking, and you could easily, and that's even kind of as deep fakes are becoming more prevalent and thinking like that's completely conceivable to me of the idea that you could generate new content to be articulated, expressed by an interactive witness. Ideally with the idea that it would be representing real experience, but the possibilities for that. don't think it's just in terms of how it scrapes. I think in terms of how it generates.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:35.577)
No, I mean, I agree, because one of the questions that we, you I think we were both at Legends and Legacies last time, but like there was one of the panels was somebody mentioned that, one of the dangers of the gen AI in this, in our little world is it could create like from a composite, an Auschwitz survivor.

Noah (01:19:40.526)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:56.985)
You know, by, by drawing on, you know, hundreds and thousands or whatever of testimonies, it could essentially fabricate an entire existence and an entire, an entire, you know, Holocaust experience that would be accurate in the sense that somebody did have that experience, but nobody had all those experiences put into sort of a narrative, right? You know, like, so like that to me, just it's interesting also because

Noah (01:19:57.144)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:26.555)
Um, and I saw this on a, on a news article recently that like, of the things that AI is this gen, this gen AI, particularly gen AI that is based on scraping stuff it is doing is actually causing a lot of institutions to become less open and less transparent because they're worried that the AI is going to like swoop into their now online archive and like hoover up all of their information and then, you know, misuse it in some way, you know? And so like,

Noah (01:20:51.182)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:54.939)
That's a challenge too, right? mean, it's like, what happens if an AI can go on to a show foundation that is now accessible to everyone and start just gobbling up information and then repackaging it however it does it. We're getting a little off track, but I mean, it's...

Noah (01:21:12.084)
No, but it's, but I think it's also, it's not just about the, and that also has, there's a feedback loop where we as users as, and even, you know, scholars and as being a part of that user community are going to have different sets of expectations about what's being, you know, we're trained, we can kind of listen and look for certain things, but this idea that I'm not trained.

to look out for certain things that I can't even anticipate, right? And so there's this, to the extent it's also what we're bringing to the process is as integral as what the process is giving to us, that we have different sets of expectations. And I don't think that there's any, I don't know if there's any going back outside of the scholarly community for a historian who wants to look at a testimony its entirety for a particular set of reasons.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:41.04)
Yeah.

Noah (01:22:03.544)
that that moment where we're going to actually see students. I part of the reason I think that the Shoah Foundation has done what they have done is, you know, a concern of how, to what extent their collections of video testimonies that have been digitized are being accessed and to what ends. So I think it's also like an anxiety, an institutional and cultural anxiety, not just about the passing of the survivors, but also about like, people accessing this archives? What's the best way of making archives accessible? How are we going to draw users in?

Waitman Beorn (01:22:19.951)
Yeah.

Noah (01:22:33.528)
You know, and in that sense, and then once you start doing that, then those users are going to bring a very different set of expectations to how they're going to assess something like the DIT or how they're going to look at different ways of organizing data. And so I feel like that that's as it's not necessarily that it's worrying. It's not that it's not worrying, but I do think that that's again, gets back to the point of these video testimonies have been collected and there's so many oral testimonies that have been collected.

And for me, I'm really all about returning to the analog, going back to use your phrase, the original, because there is something in the original that granted is representing a moment that no longer exists, but also representing a mode of encountering and working with and interpreting testimonies that doesn't really for the most part exist anymore.

And how widespread was it in the first place? Now, and I guess, I mean, I think it was more widespread. But I think, you know, this idea that if we can just kind of leave things as they are and not try to constantly reimagine the formatting or points of entry into them, I don't know if that is possible. I mean, I think as much as I think what you're

Waitman Beorn (01:23:34.117)
Hmm.

Noah (01:24:00.716)
you know, what Todd Preston is doing, that's a different set of questions, but I still think ultimately there's this part of me that just feels we need to let these testimonies not like we need to preserve them. But in terms of thinking about how we're going to access them in different ways, I would just be careful. And I know that Todd's work is incredibly careful and deliberate and thoughtful about this is like.

realizing that the entry points into those testimonies reimagined through new functionalities does change our relationship to the content in some way. And I don't know yet how that is, but I don't think it's something that is, I think it is doing that. And I think sometimes in the case of the DIT, it does become extractive. Like what information can I extract from you?

Waitman Beorn (01:24:43.301)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:58.235)
Yeah. mean, and then sort of to close, mean, like it's kind of like, I think about my other sources that I use, you I definitely use survivor testimony. definitely use video testimony, but archives aren't saying how can we get people to come in and look at police reports? You know, mean, you know, like they're just there, they're there for you. And if you want to look at them, they're there, but probably the way that I'm interacting with them is the same way that Chris interacted with them. The same way that somebody 60 years ago interacted with them.

Noah (01:24:59.266)
you know,

Noah (01:25:15.608)
Yeah, that's that's

Noah (01:25:26.466)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:27.663)
They're not like, you know, they're not, no one feels an obvious part of it is because of projectors. So they got it. But I mean, no one's feeling an obligation to like, you know, keep them relevant or, or keep people, keep people into that. So they just, they're there, they're not dying. They're not being destroyed, but they're there.

Noah (01:25:44.811)
That's it.

Noah (01:25:49.25)
That's a brilliant point. mean, like, it's almost like we're getting to the point where, you know, we were relying on perpetrator documents for a long time, you know, and then that, of course, became more balanced. And we started integrating the voice of of survivors into that experience. And we've made the case, I think we're at this case where we've made the case where people like you and Chris and

Marion Campin and others have made the case like. Testimonies matter to the writing of the Holocaust, how we write the Holocaust. We need to have survivors voices. So that means is actually saying like they are of a piece with the police records is in a way like this is thing to be proud of something that's an accomplishment. That is something that is, you know what I mean? And so now in a way to be treated as a source like any other.

And what I see going on is to treat them as sources that somehow are not sources like any other. And so it's in essence, going in an opposite direction, this push to try to make sure that voices from above, that is to say often perpetrators or liberators or whoever, or trial documents and voices from below are being integrated to think of Sal Friedlander's notion of an integrated notion of Holocaust historiography.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:09.764)
Right.

Noah (01:27:15.768)
We're getting, we are much closer, even though I still think that's a, I still haven't seen what that looks like, but we are closer to that than we've ever been. And rather than abandoning that project, I have concerns that testimony has become something that is outside of that project. And if that makes sense, that it's like, keep them in tension, you know, in conversation rather than this transcends.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:33.613)
Right. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:44.249)
It's almost like a reversal of the move away from viewing survivor testimony as this sort of sainted thing that you can't question because it's just sort of ultimate to the right move to sort of think about it as a source like anything else. But now it's sort of again being elevated. But we've taken a lot of your time already. I don't want to take up anymore. Yeah.

Noah (01:27:55.266)
Yeah.

Noah (01:27:59.648)
Yeah.

Noah (01:28:07.736)
Well, then, wait a minute, I really enjoyed it and it's been great to be on and...

Waitman Beorn (01:28:12.901)
Can you tell us before we end, what is the one Holocaust book that you would recommend?

Noah (01:28:20.27)
Right now, I guess even though I was just talking to you about it before and I'm teaching it in one of my classes, it's the Plot Against America by Philip Roth in 2001, which I think does a job of embodying Walter Benjamin's notion of the theses on the philosophy of history and history is thinking about his notion of the angel of history and thinking about all the various possibilities and the precarity and multidimensionality of histories that are coexisting.

either as realities that are existing at different levels across different groups of people in different moments, but also as possibilities as their potential. I mean, not just because, aren't we living in a moment now in the US that's very similar to the Roth world that is created of a Lindbergh presidency. I mean, there is that, but there's also the fact that it gives me some hope in thinking like history is always in flux as we live through it. And we are not, it is not

designated as being, it is not determined and it is still something that needs to be, it is experienced at the familial and interpersonal and the social and the governmental levels, but it can be contested and it can be re-imagined and it's precarious and it's precarity in all of its reactionary and all of its liberatory possibilities. It gives me, it keeps me up at night to read it and it also keeps me emboldened when I wake up. So that would be my.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:20.581)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:48.027)
Well, that's a great recommendation, and I'm sure that we can use anything we could use in this time period. So anyway, thanks for listening, everyone. Again, please give us a like, subscribe, leave a comment. If you have somebody that you want to see on, send me an email. That'd be great. And again, Noah, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your work with us.

Noah (01:29:48.27)
It's now more relevant than our-

Noah (01:29:56.909)
Yeah.

Noah (01:30:13.752)
Thanks, Wayman. Look forward to seeing you at the next lesson of legacies, if not sooner. All right, see you later. Thanks, everybody.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:18.053)
Yeah, me too. All right. Yep, bye.