Laurel Vlock---Growing up Jewish in America during the Holocaust

    Unlike Dori Laub, Laurel Vlock has been an American from birth, growing up in New Haven in a predominantly non-Jewish middle-class neighborhood. From an early age, she was aware of being "other," experiencing discrimination on several levels at the public elementary school: initially and repeatedly singled out by a kindergarten teacher for having a "fancy" given name and then by playmates for being Jewish and nearsighted. Catholic peers boasted that the imposing Catholic church that dominated the neighborhood was out of bounds for her, and the nuns who lived in a separate building only two doors from her home pointedly ignored her when greeting other children. Ms. Vlock and her younger sister both vividly remember being called "Christ killers." Patient explanations at home that Jesus was Jewish too and was crucified by the Romans, not the Jews, did little to relieve Laurel's anxieties.
     The sense of being an outsider pursued her in the fall of 1936. National elections pitted Governor Alf Landon of Kansas against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The sidewalks leading to the elementary school were covered with slogans, some simply supporting Landon with the sunflower symbol, others quite vicious anti-FDR scrawling--even suggesting that FDR was really Jewish. All the political activity had only one message for Laurel: her parents, and by extension she, were on the other side from her playmates and their families. Her house had National Recovery Administration stickers on the window, along with other evidence that her parents were Democratic party supporters, out of step in a largely Republican neighborhood.
     Ms. Vlock remembers this period of her life with mixed emotions about relations with neighbors and friends. Her parents, always alert to signs of anti-Semitism, indicated a deep ambivalence. While they showed respect and friendliness toward gentile acquaintances, they also expressed, in the privacy of their home, suspicion about how much one could count on non-Jews.

Experiences in Europe on the Brink of War

     The Fox household was the scene of several family get-togethers to hear about the experiences of two bachelor uncles who had traveled widely and gave exciting descriptions of their adventures, always remembering their young nieces with special gifts. One particular report in the mid-1930s had disturbing elements that left an indelible impression on the family. It involved both the sinister atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Germany and the plight of cousins living in the Soviet Union. One of the uncles had spent the summer of 1936 touring Europe, concluding his trip with a visit to a small shtetl on the outskirts of Odessa called Otchakoff, from which Laurel's grandparents had emigrated in the early 1880s. Finding family members living there in desperate poverty, he gave them everything he had, returning to America with only the clothes he was wearing: a shirt, trousers, and a pair of shoes--no socks or even, so the family story went, underwear. To his impressionable young niece, this story was haunting.
     The uncle's summer excursion precipitated a major event in Laurel's early years. He insisted that his sister accept his offer to pay for a transatlantic voyage for the family the following summer so that the girls could see Europe as they might never see it again. It would also, he pointed out, be an opportunity for Rose Fox to visit their much older sister, Anna Phillip, and her family, who lived outside London. Thus Rose and her daughters sailed for England aboard the Queen Mary in late June. The itinerary included a long stay in England and travel in France, Belgium, and Holland.
      In England, Laurel and her mother and sister were disturbed to see evidence of anti-Semitism. Oswald Mosley, a fascist and Nazi sympathizer, was conducting a virulent anti-Semitic campaign on billboards and posters in the London underground. Caricatures of Jews were everywhere on the walls of the transit system. Often the ugly drawings depicted Jews with glasses, suggesting inferiority, which was particularly distressful to an already self-conscious young girl. The graffiti and Mosely's demagogic harangues in Hyde Park were the subject of considerable disagreement between Laurel's mother and her English relatives, who dismissed the "aggravations" as representing only a minority point of view.
     Several experiences on the continent proved even more intimidating. In Brussels, Rose had become friendly with two English women, who invited seven-year-old Marian to accompany them to a sweetshop while Rose attended to other matters with Laurel. As Marian reported when she returned, the two ladies stopped by a store displaying a picture of Adolf Hitler in a fancy silver frame. Marian became alarmed when the women commented that Hitler was a "wonderful man." She felt trapped; she knew she could not find her way back to the hotel by herself, and she was now afraid of these new "friends." When one of them later asked her what her religion was, she immediately responded, "Catholic," which, she was relieved to see, pleased the two ladies. After hearing about Marian's scary experience, Laurel felt anger, admiration, and guilt: anger at the supposedly nice ladies who admired Hitler; admiration that her little sister had the presence of mind to protect herself; and guilt about her sister's untruthfulness.

Crossing the Bridge into Hitler's Germany

     Another experience developed into something more threatening, indeed terrifying. In planning their tour on the continent, it was arranged that they would join their aunt and uncle at the Spa in Mondorf, Luxembourg. Aunt Anna's husband, born and raised in Germany, had brothers who had been decorated for heroism in the German army in the Great War. Both Anna and Morris Phillip were comfortable with German people and felt that reports of German anti-Semitism were grossly exaggerated. After a few days at the Spa, Aunt Anna suggested the two women and the girls take a day's sight-seeing trip to Remich, where they would see the historic bridge that the German army had used to invade Luxembourg and Belgium some twenty years earlier. It was to be an educational experience.
     As they approached the bridge, however, Aunt Anna pressed Rose to let her take the family across into Germany so her young nieces could glimpse the beauty of the German countryside. It would be a shame, she said, to come all the way to Europe and not even set foot in Germany. Laurel's mother was hesitant; they had no visas for Germany. But Anna insisted that hers would cover all of them. Besides, the names Fox and Phillip did not sound at all Jewish, so that was not a worry.
The German border guards had a very threatening appearance, quite unlike that of any other policemen she had seen, dressed in black uniforms, high black boots, and stiff peaked caps with what appeared to be a skull and crossbones above the visor. Two guards sat on shiny black motorcycles, and two others held growling German shepherds on leashes. Aunt Anna showed the guards her German visa and all their passports and, in fluent German, persuaded them to let her take her visaless American relatives for an hour's walk in Germany.
     Ms. Vlock's memories of that short excursion are very graphic. It was close to lunch time and the sun was very hot, and she wondered how those mean-looking German border guards could wear their dark, heavy uniforms on such a warm day, especially since the little guard house was not shaded by a single tree. She and Marian were wearing their usual travel clothes, camp shorts and white blouses, and their mother and aunt were also in light summer clothes. After walking a short distance on the dusty rural road, they began to be thirsty. In a field alongside the road, three children were playing. When they saw the four pedestrians, they stopped and gave the Nazi salute, arms raised straight out in front, and yelled, "Heil Hitler." Laurel and Marian exchanged looks at this unpleasant reminder of where they were.
     Aunt Anna spotted a wayside inn, where they stopped for a drink. It was very dark and pleasantly cool inside, and it took a while to see the room clearly after coming from the bright sunlight. Ms. Vlock remembers a long bar of dark wood and several men sitting on stools. Laurel and her mother, sister, and aunt were seated in a booth across from the bar. A waiter came over, and Aunt Anna asked for four Coca Colas. When the drinks came, to Rose and Anna's astonishment the waiter asked for four American dollars. Rose was upset at this exorbitant charge, and Anna admitted that the inn was taking advantage of Americans but said they shouldn't make a fuss. They hadn't taken more than a few sips when Marian pointed to two larger-than-life portraits of Hitler and Goering hanging above the bar and stuck out her tongue. Rose and Anna whispered that they hoped no one had noticed and, without allowing the girls to either finish their expensive drinks or take them along, hustled them out of the inn and began walking rapidly back toward the border. They were walking so fast and so deliberately that this time the children playing by the road just stood and stared at them. Laurel later conceived other more terrifying images from listening to her mother's angry speculations about what might have happened had they been detained and identified as Jews. (The experience was so affecting that forty-one years later in 1978, during a European vacation with her husband and daughter, Ms. Vlock insisted on showing them the Spa in Mondorf and the bridge in Remich, retracing the route right up to the door of the inn, which was still in business.)

American Jews and the War

   Back home in the United States in the late 1930s, there was also ample evidence of anti-Semitism. Laurel's parents were alarmed by the radio demagogue Father Coughlin and his companion in anti-Semitic fervor, Gerald K. Smith. By the spring of 1939, there was even more awareness in the Fox household of the plight of European Jewry, as the refrain "No one wants the Jews" was dramatically demonstrated by the voyage of a ship called the St. Louis. That boat, with its cargo of Jews trapped on it, took on enormous proportions for Rose and John Fox, who were in a frenzy of activity, sending telegrams, writing letters, and talking on the telephone constantly, to whom, Laurel did not know. What she did know was that all the efforts to find a country in the Americas that would accept the Jews on the St. Louis were of no use, and her parents were extremely upset.
     The tense atmosphere in the Fox household and the preoccupation with the fate of the Jews just before and during the war years had a considerable effect on Laurel's relations with peers in high school. Breakfast-time radio reports, followed by anguished discussion and speculation, set the tone for the day. Joining friends on the walk to school, it was difficult for Laurel to participate in the usual teenage banter when her head was full of images of war-torn Europe and what was happening to the Jews.
     The atmosphere became more charged when Laurel's mother, distraught over a story on the news about a tragedy that had befallen a group of Jewish girls in Poland in the early spring of 1943, prevailed on Laurel to have her invited to a meeting of Laurel's high school sorority, Pi Epsilon Pi. The agenda for the meeting included plans for using the group's treasury for a dance. Sororities and fraternities being strictly segregated, all the Pi Ep girls were Jewish. At the meeting, Rose Fox dramatically told how ninety Jewish girls at a boarding school in Poland had been ordered to "prepare" themselves for a "visit" by German officers. Knowing what this meant, all of the ninety took lethal doses of poison rather than submit. When the German officers arrived, they found their reception marred and immediately shot and killed the school administrators and teachers.
     This tragedy, which was revealed as reports of Hitler's Final Solution were starting to appear in the war news, so impressed and horrified the sorority members that they unanimously voted to forgo the dance and send all the money in the treasury to organizations trying to save Jewish children in Nazi-dominated Europe. Laurel was proud of her mother and of the reaction of her peers, but she was also made painfully aware of her otherness by the response of some parents, who protested that their daughters' innocent pleasures were being denied by the introduction into their young lives of an unhealthy preoccupation with distant, nightmarish events. Heated discussions followed in which these parents declared that Laurel and her mother had no right to push their ideas on others.

A Determination to Understand

     When she became a student at Cornell University in the fall of 1944, Laurel found her own inner motivation for activism, which was triggered by the housing situation at the university. It was the first of several indications that prejudice toward Jews was to be found even at an institution like Cornell, in those days the only fully coeducational Ivy League school. No religious or ethnic identification had been asked for on the application forms, yet when Laurel arrived on campus, she found herself assigned to a six-person dormitory suite with five other Jewish women--the only Jews in the entire dormitory complex, which housed a hundred women. This obvious segregation perplexed and annoyed all six women. Only three had names that sounded Jewish: Altman, Marks, and Reinhardt. The other three were Daniels, Fox, and Topkins. On what basis did the university make the residence assignments? And how was it that Catholic women were also assigned to all-Catholic suites? This demeaning segregation was obviously imposed by design.
     Laurel subsequently joined a college sorority, where her preoccupation with the plight of the Jews after the Allied victory and the opening of the concentration camps set her apart once again. This concern became a determination to understand the history of the Jewish people and help realize their destiny. She spent the summer of 1946 at the Brandeis Camp Institute, a Zionist-oriented youth retreat attended by two representatives from each U.S. state. The war was now over, and emanating from Palestine was a movement to gather the remnants of European Jewry and reestablish the Jewish nation, Israel. It was an intense experience of training in Jewish history and culture in a kibbutz-like environment, and Laurel loved it. The age-old persecution of Jews in the diaspora was presented as a rationale for the philosophy of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who maintained that wherever Jews were a minority, they were bound to suffer intolerance. The remedy for this ineluctable discrimination, which culminated in the Nazi atrocities, was a home for the Jews in the land from which they had been expelled some two thousand years before, but had never forgotten. The program at the Brandeis Camp Institute fostered a utopian Zionism, a dream of creating an exemplary society in Palestine, in which Jews would experience a cultural, spiritual, national, and physical rebirth, fulfilling their biblical destiny of being "a light unto the nations." It would also be a place where, in the post-Holocaust era, persecuted Jews would find a haven, protected by their own government and army, living like normal people in their own nation.
     The experience strengthened Laurel's determination to raise the social and political consciousness of her fellow students, and once again, this time deliberately, she set herself apart from campus social life by becoming an activist for the Zionist cause. For a time after the partition of Palestine in 1947, she seriously considered helping build the Jewish homeland by joining a kibbutz. Her idea never materialized, however, and after graduating in 1948, Laurel married and began raising a family in the New Haven area.

Probing the Holocaust in Broadcast Journalism

    The early 1960s were full of optimism about social change, and with all her children now at school for the better part of the day, Laurel Vlock became involved in community activities, a course that made her aware of the power of the broadcast media to focus on issues and shape attitudes. She began a new career by persuading the Yale Broadcasting Company to let her produce educational and public service radio programs for the greater New Haven community. This led to producing television shows and films and soon to hosting a television series that explored significant social issues.
One daunting assignment in 1978 was to produce a program on the commemoration of Yom Hashoah (Day of Holocaust Remembrance) in New Haven. To give the documentary a narrative thread, she videotaped an extended interview with one of the commemoration's featured speakers, the author and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski. For Ms. Vlock, the power of personal testimony of survival, captured visually during the interview, was a revelation.
At a luncheon in February 1979 celebrating awards that the documentary had won, the managers of the television station encouraged Ms. Vlock to do something more--"something different"--on the Holocaust. This was indeed a welcome opportunity, but the timing was a problem. It was some six months after the documentary had aired, and during that time NBC had presented the dramatic miniseries Holocaust. Although there was much controversy in the press about the appropriateness of fictionalizing the subject, the impact of the series on public consciousness around the world was profound. In addition, a French documentary film, The Sorrow and the Pity, which had been showing in movie theaters around the country, had provided a different perspective on the victims and the social environment in which they were victimized. What more could be done?
     Ms. Vlock discussed her predicament with a colleague and an independent producer. The idea surfaced that if she could tape survivor testimonies in a less intimidating setting than a television studio, she might accumulate enough material to prepare another documentary. This seemed a reasonable possibility, since television recording equipment had recently become more portable.
     Making further inquiries on the subject, she was told about a Holocaust survivor in the community who was a practicing psychiatrist: Dr. Dori Laub. Perhaps she could begin by interviewing him on camera. She made an appointment to see him. Thus Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock met for the first time. Both had had childhood experiences of the Holocaust--in one case direct, in the other indirect--that were recovered after years of successful work in psychiatry and broadcast journalism, and both had begun to examine the effects of the Holocaust on its victims, but the project they were to undertake together could have been done by neither alone.
     As they talked and Ms. Vlock explained the new, more flexible conditions for videotaping, Dr. Laub stated his opinion that interviewing just one person or a few people would be a token act and that what was needed was a film built on many interviews that could begin telling the story. He revealed to her that there were scores of survivors in New Haven who had preserved a public and perhaps even a private silence but who might be ready to talk about their previous lives if they were approached in the right way. Because this would be an independent, experimental effort, the two of them would have to fund it themselves.

The First Videotaped Interviews of Holocaust Survivors

    Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock made no specific plans at this first meeting, but they had several telephone conversations over the next few months. Then, at the end of April, Ms. Vlock "suddenly," as Dr. Laub remembers it, called to tell him that she had a film crew available for an evening that week, May 2, and if he could find survivors who would participate, they could begin. Dr. Laub called two survivor friends and another survivor who was active in the Jewish community and was able to secure the commitment of four people to come and be interviewed.
      The taping session took place in Dr. Laub's office at the end of a regular working day. Food and drink were prepared for those who might arrive before the previous interview was finished, as neither Dr. Laub nor Ms. Vlock was able to anticipate how long each person might want to talk. The camera crew arrived and began setting up its equipment. The office furniture was rearranged, and the first survivor witness was positioned facing the camera with Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock flanking it so that the survivor would be talking both into the lens and to the two interviewers.
     Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock had never worked together before, and their styles were different to begin with, hers being that of a journalist and his that of a psychoanalyst. In spite of that, when the first testimony began, everything fell into place, because the power of the testimony silenced their differences. Everyone in the room was transported to another time and place, a setting that had been waiting untouched and unchanged for many years behind locked doors. No one, including the witnesses themselves, knew beforehand what the testimonies would contain; experiences and reflections came out from recesses of memory that the witnesses did not even know they had. Individuals that Ms. Vlock had thought of as ordinary members of the community were now revealing large areas of themselves and of their pasts that had been buried for many years. These were people who, as happened in the cases of many survivors, had engaged in almost overly full lives in response to an intense desire to recreate shattered families and careers.
     One man, now a successful baker in New Haven, spoke with shame about being so hungry that he stole a slice of bread from his sister's ration. A woman spoke of the utter humiliation of having to run naked through a line of German soldiers at Auschwitz. A third survivor spoke of feeling like an animal in a cage. She tried to imagine what passengers might be thinking as they looked out the windows of trains passing the labor camp. As if she were sitting on a fence, she felt that she no longer knew where she belonged. The fourth, after telling about her impossible and terrifying duty to warn her deaf parents and younger sister to hide during Gestapo roundups, asserted that she could not, nor did she want to, reconcile her two lives, that they needed to be kept apart to retain their integrity.
     The interviews lasted until the early hours of the morning, producing more than four hours of taped material, but no one objected or complained. By that time, Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock knew that they had found something unexpected, something the like of which they had not seen before, and they knew they needed to continue. They were determined to videotape as many survivors as possible in order to create an unvarnished record from individual, unique perspectives of this most horrific of tragedies.

Overcoming Formidable Obstacles

    Before this project could be undertaken, however, several formidable obstacles--technical as well as nontechnical--had to be overcome. The technical difficulties were attributable to the fact that portable videotaping was a relatively new technology in the late 1970s. Portable recorders, used primarily for so-called electronic news gathering, accommodated only twenty-minute cassettes, and changing the tape every twenty minutes compromised the flow of thought and expression. (Film, by contrast, with its ten-minute magazines that had to be changed in a dark room or light-impervious black bag, would have been unmanageable altogether for this experimental project.) However, rapid developments in the industry were allowing greater flexibility, and cameras were becoming smaller and quieter and thus could be unobtrusive recorders of a survivor's testimony. Their portability meant that taping could be carried on in any familiar or comfortable setting; no intimidating studio situation was necessary. Thanks to the reduced costs of the new medium, the project had the potential to include thousands of Holocaust victims and witnesses, although finding financial support beyond their own resources was at first a troublesome problem for Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock.
     Most formidable of the nontechnical problems was the general reluctance of survivors to talk at length about their ordeals. As a psychoanalyst and a survivor himself, Dori Laub understood their deep ambivalence. On the one hand, survivors felt a need to bear witness, to be heard by empathetic listeners and to exorcise the ghosts of the past. But at the same time, there was an even stronger feeling that the past could not be mended and that one's experiences were too terrible to reveal even to willing listeners. This past was a present reality for many, like the woman who saw the faces of camp inmates in the strands of her shag carpet.
     A fear that fate would strike again was central to the memory of their trauma and their inability to talk about it. The trauma was an event outside normal reality, with no beginning and no end, and thus ever present and unmasterable. And so the imperative to tell was inhibited by the impossibility of telling. Even if it were possible to tell, those willing to hear might be simply curious or, worse still, might take a certain grotesque pleasure in the revelations of human degradation and suffering. Far from providing a catharsis or healing their deep psychological wounds, relating their experiences might, they feared, simply revive the horror--as for some it did.
     A lesser, but nonetheless discouraging, obstacle was the early reluctance of leaders of the Jewish community to accept the project. They were hesitant to turn from current concerns to what they felt was an unproductive dwelling on the past. Projects to build Israel were at the top of their agendas, and this new retrospective project would only distract people, perhaps siphoning off scarce funding and, even worse, undermining the self-confidence of Jews in the United States and Israel by reflecting on the Jew as victim.

Reaching Out into the Jewish Community

     An important psychological and financial breakthrough came on June 3, 1979, when Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock spoke to a group of survivors in New Haven, members of a labor Zionist organization, the Farband. Moved by the presentation, the Farband members pledged a contribution of two thousand dollars as well as their participation as witnesses. The president of the Farband, William Rosenberg, became a director of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project in August, when it was formally established as an organization. Mr. Rosenberg's comments reflected a new survivor sentiment: "Now we recognize our duty to tell the full story, however painful, and this project provides the help and encouragement the survivors need to come forward . . . after thirty years of silence." The silence that had been both a trap and a sanctuary for many survivors was about to be broken.
     Reinvigorated by the backing of the Farband members, Ms. Vlock and Dr. Laub decided to seek wider recognition for what they hoped would become a large and ambitious effort. The first step was to use the pledged money to edit the four hours of tape into a half-hour tape that could be shown to others as an example of the project. They could then call a press conference and enlist the support of a broad cross section of community leaders for a public launching of the project.
The press conference was held at Mr. Rosenberg's home on June 28. The project's stated goal was to record the testimony of the more than two hundred survivors in the New Haven area. Pledging support to the effort were New Haven city officials and community leaders as well as a representative of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Michael Berenbaum. The commission had been established by President Jimmy Carter to "harness the outrage of our memories to banish oppression from the world." A statement from the commission's director, Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, said in part, "We hail the beginning of the pioneering project in New Haven to videotape and record the testimony of survivors. It offers a unique vehicle to communicate the reality of the Holocaust and the dignity and life of the victims--a vehicle which can become a national model." It was announced at the press conference that twelve thousand dollars had been raised after showings of the edited version of the four interviews.
     Coverage of the press conference in the New York Times precipitated a dialogue between Ms. Vlock and President A. Bartlett Giamatti of Yale University, who expressed enthusiasm for the initiative and an interest in Yale's involvement that would bear fruit within a year and a half.
     National media attention contributed to the project's early growth. On September 3, 1979, another lengthy article in the Times coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland and the start of World War II was accompanied by photographs of a taping session. One benefit of such coverage was that it attracted the involvement of individuals and organizations across the United States and abroad. A faculty member from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a member of the Israeli Knesset joined the project's advisory board.
     Concerns about the long-term financial viability of the project were allayed by a major grant from the New Haven Foundation, a local philanthropic institution. Three members of the New Haven Jewish community were instrumental in securing the grant: Geoffrey Hartman, a professor of English and comparative literature at Yale, whose wife was one of the first four interviewees and who himself had become a member of the project's board of directors; Albert Solnit, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Yale; and Malcolm Webber, the director of the Connecticut Anti-Defamation League.
     Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock turned their attention to refining the process of drawing witnesses out, enabling them to tell their stories. Although taping was always done in a safe place, a setting in which people would feel free to let memories emerge, there also had to be a sympathetic listener who knew how to be unobtrusive, nonjudgmental, and encouraging, all at the same time. This trusted listener would intrude with questions as little as possible, using just a few words and gestures to elicit each survivor's story. Moreover, as in the first taping session, the listener would never appear on camera, so there would be no distractions for the viewer, no reactions on the face of the interviewer to suggest any sort of attitude toward or evaluation of the survivor's story. Then and only then could the past be revealed and dealt with, and witnessing could itself become a historical event, filling the gap in the historical record.
     At its best, the process of giving testimony was the creation of a narrative in which the inconceivable trauma of the survivor was finally externalized and known by both speaker and listener. The listener was an indispensable participant in the process, respecting both speech and silence, serving as the empathetic other that many survivors had despaired of ever finding.
Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock thought they would hear stories of horror and atrocity. They did, but that was only a part of the truth. Events and images were often presented in fragmentary, undigested form, with the survivor barely a part of the narrative. It was as though these imprints had been preserved unchanged and secluded from the stream of daily conscious life, like nightmares, and the survivor wanted literally to force them onto the listeners in order to rid himself of them. But beyond the anguish and dread, and invariably superseding them, was the intense yearning to make contact, to be connected with the truth of one's life.

Testimony: Between Total Engagement and Historical Evidence

     As witnesses to the testimonies, Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock were asked not only to be totally engaged during the interviews, but also to be a future presence in the lives of the survivors as guardians of their truth, to be people they could think of or come back to and feel known. The trusted listeners became part of the survivors' relentless efforts to rebuild lives in which past and present are connected and continuous while at the same time their differentness and uniqueness are preserved. The passion for authentic contact was also reflected in the relations between Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock and their relations with others who came to participate in the project, often reaching a level of intensity that was hard to bear or to integrate into the flow of everyday life.
     Ms. Vlock received personal phone calls for more than a year after a two-day recording session in Palm Beach, Florida, in which she had interviewed more than fifteen survivors and had developed close ties with the social workers, the volunteer hostesses, and the local camera crew. Many of them obviously felt that a special relationship had been established. Dr. Laub recalled days in which he participated in as many as five interviews and experienced a need to do something different, to escape the bonds created by sharing atrocities and the anguish and injury they caused. He would jump into a cold swimming pool to regain his composure, and he wondered whether this was akin to the ancient Jewish ritual of cleansing oneself of contamination.
     So radical was the project's departure from established procedures of historical research that, even as it began to bear fruit, it encountered skepticism and sometimes resistance from members of the scholarly community, particularly historians. Scholars were not prepared to deal with a medium that went beyond the printed word, transmitting not only what the survivors had to say but also their faces and gestures, pauses and outbursts, hesitancies and determination to tell their stories. This demeanor evidence introduced a whole new element demanding interpretation, challenging both the scholarly and the casual viewer. It also added a new dimension of credibility to Holocaust testimonies: not surprisingly, a recent study has shown that the believability and persuasiveness of a speaker's message are based in large part on visual and vocal factors such as facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice.
     Some historians objected to obvious inaccuracies in survivors' accounts of long-past events. One such inaccuracy arose when a survivor spoke excitedly of seeing four chimneys explode during a failed uprising at Auschwitz. At a subsequent meeting of scholars, it was pointed out that only one chimney exploded; Dr. Laub replied, in defense of the survivor, that her testimony was psychologically true, affirming a deep but long-buried and unexpressed sense of the possibility of resistance to extermination. Ms. Vlock encountered another type of insensitive skepticism, the complaint that the testimonies were repetitive: transport in a cattle car, separation at the concentration camp gates, slave labor, death marches, and so forth. Insisting that each survivor had a singular story to tell, one that could not be duplicated, she herself became repetitive on this point.

Expanding Throughtout the United States and Beyond

    Nonetheless, the first group of four taped interviews had such an impact when shown to various groups and the press that it gave the project a momentum which has never been lost. Between the initial taping sessions in 1979 and the establishment in 1981 of a permanent home for the ever-expanding collection at Yale University occurred a period of rapid growth of participation by survivors and support by individuals and philanthropic institutions.
     Taping sessions were held outside New Haven in other Connecticut communities during the summer and fall of 1979. An attempt to secure the participation of the leadership of the Hartford Jewish community succeeded, primarily because survivors saw the various newspaper articles and were receptive to the ideas and aims of the project. A series of meetings with the Hartford Jewish Federation Endowment Committee resulted in taping of testimony by the survivors, with technical support from Connecticut Public Television. Ms. Vlock subsequently produced a documentary that was shown on the Hartford public television station as part of a Federation fund-raiser. Contributions poured in immediately after the telecast, and the expressions of appreciation by Federation leaders established a pattern that was to be repeated in other cities: federation or private donor support, contact with local social workers and psychologists, collaboration with television stations, and press coverage, all leading to participation by a cross section of survivors in the community.
     In November, Ms. Vlock began videotaping in Israel with the endorsement of Dr. Yitzak Arad of Yad Vashem, the official institution for the commemoration of the Holocaust. She also traveled to Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to get a sense of the places that had been home to the survivors with whom she was now closely involved. Visits to the sites of concentration camps at Dachau and Mauthausen were part of this trip. A Yale student journal subsequently published an article about Ms. Vlock's journey and her activities in the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, and the article led to a meeting with the author and humanitarian Elie Wiesel, who was giving a series of lectures at Yale that semester. Conversations with Mr. Wiesel were a profoundly inspiring experience for Ms. Vlock.
   In 1980, the videotaping effort in New Haven intensified, and recording was carried on in various cities along the east coast, including Bridgeport, Connecticut; Boston; Palm Beach; and Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. In addition to conducting interviews, Ms. Vlock and Dr. Laub found themselves being called on to help others begin similar projects. They also recruited and trained a corps of volunteers to assist in their efforts, many of whom became deeply and permanently involved in the gathering of testimonies.
     The same year saw Laurel Vlock serve as co-executive producer and host of a one-hour television documentary about survivors. "Forever Yesterday," a collaborative effort with WNEW-TV in New York City, received an EMMY Award in 1981.

Finding a Permanent Home for the Testimonies at Yale University

    Taping of survivors' testimony continued in 1981: a notable expansion of the effort were the sessions held in New York City in July and August. At the same time, events of great importance to the future of the growing video collection were occurring in New Haven. Contacts over the preceding year and a half with various members of the Yale administration and faculty led from advice on grant proposals to the establishment of a formal relationship between the university and the Holocaust Survivors Film Project. It was announced on February 13 that the tapes would be housed in the Sterling Memorial Library, where they would be catalogued and made available to researchers. As part of a development fund drive for Yale's nascent Judaic Studies program, a million-dollar endowment would be sought for the video tape collection. Co-chairman of the fund drive was Geoffrey Hartman. The formal transfer of the more than two hundred tapes of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project to the Yale University Library took place on December 17; the collection was renamed the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale at its inauguration on October 1, 1982.Later, as the result of a major contribution, it became the Fortunoff Archive.
     Even as the institutional life of the collection was beginning, the work of Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock was continuing to expand. Meetings were held in May and June 1981 with representatives of the Canadian Jewish Congress to help them begin their own government-sponsored video project. In June, Ms. Vlock co-anchored with the veteran CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun broadcasts on public television from the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, a historic event taking place in Jerusalem when she interviewed, among others, famed survivor, Prof. Elie Wiesel. She also produced About the Holocaust, an educational documentary commissioned by the New Haven school system and later accepted for national distribution by the Anti-Defamation League. Most important, Dr. Laub and Ms. Vlock continued to participate in the process of recording testimonies as it expanded throughout the United States and Canada and into Israel and Europe.
     The original meeting of Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock was fortuitous, but it resulted almost immediately in a unique collaboration that has borne fruit of inestimable value. Nineteen years after the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was established, its historical and moral resources are only beginning to be tapped. As the years pass, the details of individual stories may get lost in the minds of those who listen to them, but the message of each testifier and act of testimony, the connection established between past and present, dead and living, evolves with more and more clarity, a clarity that no one could foresee during the experience of testifying.
     With the thawing of the Cold War, there is a chance for the reconciliation of nations and peoples over large parts of the globe. Such reconciliation cannot be achieved, however, without a clear and open understanding of the past, especially the period before the Cold War. Faithful records of that past are contained in survivors' testimony. Just as thousands of survivors have taken advantage of the opportunity to repossess their long-hidden childhoods, so nations can find here important materials for reconstructing their own former selves and building a better future.

Holocaust Survivors - Their Stories ~ Page 3