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This collection of eyewitness testimonies from Holocaust survivors and refugees from countries occupied by Nazi Germany was created by the Wiener Library in the 1950s.
The project was the initiative of Eva Reichmann, head of research at the library. The intention was to acquire as many reports as possible from those who had lived through the period to supplement the extant documentation. Funded by the Claims Conference, it was agreed that copies would also be sent to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
The methodology for gathering the testimonies was as follows: advertisements were placed in the British (later also European) press for eyewitnesses to come forward. Trained interviewers working for the Wiener Library were dispatched and the transcribed interview was shown to the interviewee to ensure that it was a reliable and authentic record of what they had said. In some cases eyewitnesses submitted their own written accounts. The testimonies were then analysed, catalogued and indexed.
In all some 1300 testimonies were gathered over a period of approximately 5 years from 1956. Included amongst the testimonies are contemporary documents which supplement the collection.
More recently the whole collection has been microfilmed and later digitised.
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This collection consists primarily of testimonies of Holocaust survivors who describe life before during and after the Nazi era. Most of the material focuses on the period of persecution. Some of the items in the collection are not testimonies per se but contemporary documents which were donated and later subsumed into this collection. These latter have nonetheless been catalogued and indexed in the same way as the testimonies.
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