Shoah Foundation to digitalize testimonies from Genocide survivors

The Shoah Visual History Foundation is going to archive and digitalize testimonies from the survivors of the Armenian Genocide in cooperation with the University of South California’s Institute of Armenian Studies.

"These testimonies exist because (the survivors) wanted the world to know that this happened," said Stephen Smith, executive director for the foundation, according to Dailynews.com.

Founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the Shoah Foundation Institute includes more than 52,000 digitized testimonies of the survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. It took more than 15 years not only to record the accounts, but also to index them properly so that scholars, journalists and those serious about learning could find specific stories by name, birth place or experience.

The foundation is now conducting a similar project with more than 400 films made by J. Michael Hagopian. He was a small child when his mother hid him in a well from Turkish soldiers who raided the village of Kharberd in what was then Western Armenia, now part of Turkey.