ARGENTINA: A Multimedia Project to Revert the Diaspora

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 24 1996 (IPS) - Hundreds of the Jews who took refuge in Argentina following the Holocaust are likely to participate in a monumental multimedia project headed by U.S. film director/producer Steven Spielberg, who is gathering testimony from survivors of Nazism throughout the world.

At least 100 elderly Jews have already begun working with a team of 130 professionals in this country under the leadership of Graciela Jinich, who was chosen from Los Angeles by the group carrying out the Visual History of the Survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) project.

Jinich told IPS there were “very many” people willing to provide testimony. She calculated that in Argentina there were between 500 and 2,000, if the definition of survivor included not only those who were in concentration camps, but any Jew who lived in Nazi Europe.

The videotaped testimonies will be fed into a supercomputer in Los Angeles along with 100,000 other accounts from all over the world — a route contrary to the Diaspora that stigmatised the history of the Jewish people.

In 1997, the various aspects of the Holocaust related by its protagonists in their own homes will be available in 22 languages.

And using some 10,000 key words extracted from the testimonies, it will be possible to delve into the horrors of Nazism in the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Fortunoff Archives, the Museum on the Jewish Heritage or the Museum of the Holocaust — all in the United States — and in the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel.

At an estimated cost of 60 million dollars, the project created by Spielberg has attracted 600 professional cameramen. Thousands of interviewers and volunteers who have offered to collaborate on an undertaking that will also extend to Internet and cable TV.

On the day of the martyrs and heroes of the Holocaust — Apr. 15 — the TV news channel CNN broadcast a one-hour telefilm with segments of testimony already gathered in the United States. In the near future, those accounts will be available in Internet, libraries and schools.

Spielberg decided to embark on the project after filming Schindler’s List, a black and white feature-length film that won six Oscars. Affected by the testimony he gathered at that time, he felt moved to share the experience through this monumental project.

In Argentina, the survivors meet in groups that replaced the families they lost in the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War (1939-45), when six million Jews died, and prior to that, when the persecution began.

Those groups wear the mark of the suffering of their members: “Friends from Auschwitz”, “Friends from the War”, “Friends from the Warsaw Ghetto” or simply “Friends from the Boat”.

One hundred interviewers specially trained to interact with the survivors, and six teams of cameramen, each consisting of five experts, will collaborate with Jinich in work that for the time being will be limited in the region to Argentina and Uruguay.

“At first they also wanted to do it in Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Peru. But then they decided there would be a lot of work in Argentina alone,” she explained. Argentina is home to Latin America’s largest Jewish community – 500,000 people – the fifth biggest in the world including Israel.

Jinich personally contacts the survivors to discuss the project. If they agree to participate, an interviewer visits them and helps get their accounts in order. Later their testimony is taped with minimal intervention by interviewers who are only there to help prompt the survivors’ memories, without appearing in the filming.

In the first part of the two-hour interviews, the narrators talk about what it was like to live as a Jewish person in Europe. They recall their childhoods and teenage years.

The longest part of the interview includes memories dating back to 1933. The participants talk about the nightmares they experienced.

In the last segment they tell how they arrived to the country that offered them refuge, and whatever else they wish to recall.

For many, Spielberg’s project will serve as a sort of unburdening that will help them to live and die more peacefully, while they contribute to the historical legacy.

Others see the programme as a kind of triumph and revenge. “I outwitted Hitler,” one man said with satisfaction, hugging his children and grandchildren at the end of the interview.