David Pablo Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with displaced persons. Arriving in Paris in late July, Boder would spend the next two months interviewing 130 displaced persons in nine languages and recording them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. The interviews were among the earliest (if not the earliest) audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. They are valuable not only for the testimonies of survivors and other DPs, but also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded at various points during the expedition. Boder's itinerary included four countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and German—and sixteen different interview sites. On most days he conducted between two and five interviews, with each interview lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. As the weeks went by and Boder sensed his time drawing short, he stepped up the pace. Toward the end, he completed as many as nine in a single day (on September 21 in Munich). Most days total half that number; some days are unaccounted for. Boder left Europe in early October, having recorded over ninety hours of material and completely used up the two hundred spools of wire that he had brought with him. A very detailed biography is published at http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder and in Alan Rosen's The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Crowd of DPs moves off a field, wild panning shots show faces, volleyball net, camp buildings at a DP camp. The young men and women congregate in a line. 01:19:37 CU, man with two mugs smiles and talks to the camera; two women. DP camp camp building with people in the window. Large residence. VAR CUs, DPs, young girls dancing, schoolchildren. The children stare at the camera, hold hands, dance in concentric circles, smile, play, and chat. 01:22:35 Brief shot of Boder with the children, boy sings for the camera, playing. 01:23:27 Elders pose for the camera. (glimpse of girl with head bandage seen before on FV4234)
Children at displaced persons camp