USC Shoah Foundation
Shoah Worker Indexes Armenian Genocide Testimonies
11:21, 23 Nov 2015 Siranush Ghazanchyan
Though Shoah means "Holocaust" in Hebrew, Manuk Avedikyan is working to document survivor accounts of the Armenian Genocide for the USC Shoah Foundation, which has an agreement with the Armenian Film Foundation to preserve and disseminate these testimonies, Daily Trojan reports.
The USC Shoah Foundation dedicates itself to documenting audio visual testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocides throughout history. It contains nearly 53,000 testimonies in 39 languages and is conducted in 63 different countries.
"An Armenian's identity is inevitably tied to the Armenian Genocide," Avedikyan said.
Avedikyan's grandparents survived the systematic extermination of the Armenian minority in what is now Turkey. The Ottoman Turks killed around 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 with the express purpose of ending their collective existence.
His current job came unexpectedly after speaking to Hrag Yedalian, a program administrator at the Shoah Foundation. Avedikyan wished to enter local politics at the time. However, when Hrag mentioned he was looking for an indexer for the Armenian Genocide, Avedikyan could not resist as he had been surrounded with this topic throughout his life.
Even though the genocide happened before he was born, Avedikyan said it's affected him in many ways.
"I have been surrounded by the topic of the Armenian Genocide through so many aspects of my life; from my grandparents as survivors, to my Armenian school, my Armenian history, my parents being raised in Turkey, lectures I've attended in Los Angeles since my teenage years and my college education," Avedikyan said.
Avedikyan, along with Yedalian and Visual History Archive curator Crispin Brooks, assigns keywords to each minute of testimony using the Shoah Foundation's 63,000 keyword thesaurus. He is mainly involved in indexing English, Armenian and Turkish testimonies.
Avedikyan said the testimonies add depth to history.
"Many of the testimonies are impactful in different ways," Avedikyan said. "Some due to their eloquent and unique historic details and others due to the emotion and extremely sad story."
Avedikyan described a testimony from an Armenian from Chomaklu (near Kayseri, Turkey) who was forced to march all the way to Jordan, an uncommon occurrence. Though some villages did "host" his caravan, they were essentially left to die.
The Armenian's recount of throwing his dead mother down a well is especially haunting. Death was so rampant around him that he did not even think twice about his action at that moment but regretted it years later in an orphanage in Jerusalem.
"Another testimony gives light to the attempted arrest of Armenian resistance fighter 'Murad of Sepastia' in Govdun [now Göydun], Sivas [Province] by Ottoman forces from the eyes of his sister, an incident likely not known to many historians," Avedikyan narrated. "She later discusses her forced march and escape in the Mesopotamian desert."
The third testimony describes a survivor's escape with his father and brother from Kurdish bandits and lords to the mountains of Mu. Later, he avenged his father's murder when he was captured a second time to serve as a peasant.
Avedikyan said that each testimony tells the story of the Armenian Genocide from a different perspective.
"Though these are just three out of nearly 400 testimonies, they shed light on unique historical realities and experiences that are rarely looked into or understood like escapes, orphanage life, Islamic conversion, life as a peasant under a Kurdish or Turkish landlord," Avedikyan said.
This is the first time that a significantly large collection of audio visual testimonies of the Armenian Genocide are going to be presented for the wider public's educational use. This collection also gives researchers the opportunity to ask questions about the often overlooked period of modern history that may not have been previously addressed and have them answered.
"This collection is important for the USC Shoah Foundation as we continue to expand to experiences other than the Holocaust," Avedikyan said. "The Armenian Genocide collection is the second largest in size behind the Holocaust and ahead of the Cambodia, Nanjing and Rwanda collections."
Avedikyan majored in history with a focus on the Middle East at California State University, Northridge. He also received his master's in political science and international affairs at American University of Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia, writing a dissertation about the Justice and Development Party reforms toward non-Muslim minorities in Turkey.
Avedikyan's knowledge continues to expand as he indexes the hundreds of survivor testimonies, relating them to his family's history and travels in Turkey and Armenia.
http://dailytrojan.com/2015/11/22/shoah-worker-indexes-armenian-testimonies/
http://www.armradio.am/en/2015/11/23/shoah-worker-indexes-armenian-genocide-testimonies/
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USC Shoah Foundation to Add Testimonies from Armenian Genocide Survivors
Wednesday, December 31st, 2014 | Posted by Contributor
Dr. J. Michael Hagopian recorded many of the video testimonies that will be added to the USC Shoah Foundation's archives
LOS ANGELES--In honor of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Armenian
Genocide that will be commemorated on April 24, 2015, USC Shoah
Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is
readying at least 40 of the nearly 400 Armenian testimonies it has
secured from the Armenian Film Foundation for inclusion in the Visual
History Archive. It is anticipated the entire collection will be
integrated by the fall of 2015.
USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation signed an agreement in April of 2010 to digitize the interviews the late Dr. J. Michael Hagopian recorded on 16mm film between 1972 and 2005. Hagopian was an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who made 70 educational films and documentaries during his career, including 17 films about Armenians and the Armenian Genocide, winning more than 160 awards for his work.
"This project will unveil a trove of film testimony about of a horrific chapter of human history that remains woefully under-examined," said Karen Jungblut, director of research and documentation at the Institute. "It also brings a new viewing experience to the Visual History Archive in that these interviews - most of which predate our 1994 founding - were conducted mainly for the purpose of creating documentaries, not necessarily standalone life histories."
The Armenian collection contains a broad range of interviewee categories, including not only survivors of the Armenian Genocide, but also of other groups targeted by the Ottoman Turks, such as the Greeks, Assyrians and Yezidis. Also included are non-victim witnesses to the atrocities - such as Christian missionaries and Arab villagers - as well as descendants of the survivors and several renowned scholars.
The Institute is integrating the testimonies into the Archive with the help of Richard G. Hovannisian, a professor emeritus at UCLA and a leading expert in Armenian studies.
"The addition of these interviews to the Visual History Archive will provide broad access to a multilingual collection of material," said Hovannisian, now an adjunct professor of history at USC and the project's scholarly adviser. "It will help to bring sorely needed attention - and study - to this dark corner of human understanding."
Because these interviews were conducted by a documentary filmmaker, this collection brings diversity to the Visual History Archive when it comes to the style and format of the testimonies, as well as the methodology used to collect them.
The most immediately noticeable distinction is that all of the interviews were recorded on film -- so a clapboard kicks off every take to synchronize sound and picture. The testimonies themselves are generally much shorter - averaging 15 minutes in length, while the other testimonies in the Visual History Archive run more than two hours on average. Some survivors are also interviewed more than once, over a period of time.
Unlike the other existing collections in the Visual History Archive, the Armenian testimonies - with a few exceptions -- are not chronologies. Filmmaker Hagopian intended the interviews to be filmed depositions - limited only to the eyewitness account of the survivor during the genocide - and not beyond. Interviewees in the Archive to date have given their life stories before, during and after the genocide in question.
The filmmaker also relied on pre-interviewing the subjects, to be certain they were actually eyewitnesses to the events. The camera was only turned on when he was satisfied they were indeed eyewitnesses, and not speaking from hearsay. The interviewee would then be asked to tell Hagopian his or her story - the same story relayed in the pre-interview process.
On occasion, the Armenian interviews were conducted in groups - such as in churches or old-age homes.
Unlike existing collections in the Visual History Archive, this is a documentary film collection, containing the complete unedited interviews, including behind-the-scenes footage. While the camera positioning on all testimonies currently contained in the Visual History Archive are fixed, the camera in the Armenian collection zooms in and out, and pans left and right. The purpose of moving the camera was for establishing and editing shots - standard practice for documentary filmmakers.
Unlike video interviews, where the sound and picture are combined on one tape, 16mm film interviews include separately recorded sound and picture. Each interview includes both the "synched up" sound and picture, as well as any additional sound the filmmaker recorded (labelled as "audio only" sections).
To save production costs associated with shooting in 16 mm film, Hagopian only turned the camera on when the survivor or eyewitness was speaking about a relevant issue (based on the pre-interview). If he thought they were wandering off track, he would only record their sound. If he thought the anecdote was worthy of recording on film, he would turn the camera on. All of the extra sound for every interview is included in the collection (in "audio only" sections).
Film school students will be interested to see and hear off-camera moments in this collection, which include occasional technical faults, and directions by the filmmaker to his sound recordist, translators and camera assistants. Members of the crew can sometimes be seen milling about in the background, performing sundry duties such as setting up gear or operating the clapboard.
In every testimony, Hagopian can be heard giving direction, either to his crew or the interviewees. Himself a child survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Hagopian - who died in 2010 at age 97 - asks his subjects to retell certain stories, sometimes over and over, in an effort to say, in the most succinct way, what they actually saw with their own eyes. Similar to a lawyer obtaining factual detail for a legal deposition, he wanted to know the "who, what, when, where and how" of the survivor's eyewitness experience. If a survivor said, "They did it," Hagopian would ask, "Who? Who did it?"
"Michael Hagopian generously gave us full access to his film dailies, which is akin to a diary in that they normally wouldn't be seen by the public," said Hrag Yedalian, a program coordinator with the Institute. "This lends a certain candor to these interviews, which are at times unsettling to watch, but poignant."
Like all the testimonies in the Visual History Archive, these will be searchable to the minute thanks to a team of indexers who tag specially created indexing terms to a digital time code. The distinctive nature of this collection has raised some indexing challenges.
For instance, all too often, Armenians were rescued from the death marches by self-interested parties who wanted to use them for slave labor. This raised a question: Should this type of situation be tied to the indexing term "rescue" -- which is widely used in the Visual History Archive's Holocaust and other genocide testimonies - or something else?
Similarly, in a tragic theme that played out during the Armenian atrocities, desperate mothers often tried to give away their children in a last-ditch attempt to ensure their survival. The families that took them in could be abusive or exploitive. What term should be used to describe a phenomenon that falls in the gray zone between adoption and kidnapping?
Working closely with Hovannisian, indexers expect this collection will necessitate adding as many as 300 new search terms to the 62,000 already in the Archive.
"While the patterns of mass violence during this period are sadly familiar, there are certain characteristics unique to this history that can be captured and brought to light with the creation of new terms," said Crispin Brooks, curator of the Institute's Archive.
To highlight the distinctness of the Armenian testimonies, USC Shoah Foundation is releasing two advance clips on its website at www.sfi.usc.edu. One features Mihran Andonian, who was just a boy when his family was deported from Isparta in western Turkey in 1916. By his telling, in a matter of days, a death march of Armenians led by Turks would reduce his extended family of 11 to three: his mother, his sister, himself. The others died.
Like all of the testimonies in this collection, Andonian's account is prompted by the clap of the slate-board. In this particular testimony, the interview starts with a sound recording before the camera records actual picture. Hagopian can be heard giving direction and talking film jargon with crew members.
The other features Haroutune Aivazian, who said that his family's vineyard was confiscated by the authorities at the time. Aivazian survived because his mother dropped him off at a German orphanage built by missionaries to shelter kids whose parents perished in the Hamidian and Adana massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively, killing between 100,000 and 350,000 people.
This testimony begins with a slow, dramatic pan of the camera from left to right. Here, too, Hagopian asks Aivazian to tell his story - the story he told Hagopian in the pre-interview process.
"Even those of us who did survive, we lost something very precious," Aivazian said. "Something which is the birthright of every person: childhood. We lost our childhood."
The testimonies have served as primary source material for Hagopian's documentaries about the Armenian Genocide, including "The Forgotten Genocide" - recipient of two Emmy nominations in 1976 - and the Witnesses Trilogy ("Voices from the Lake;" "Germany and the Secret Genocide;" and "The River Ran Red").
"He understood the importance of recording the testimonies of aging eyewitnesses before their accounts were lost forever," said Carla Garapedian of the Armenian Film Foundation. "We are gratified to see this collection included in one of the world's most extensive and respected video archives. The voices of the people haunted by these atrocities will now be accessible to teachers, students, scholars and the general public on a global scale."
http://asbarez.com/130340/usc-shoah-foundation-to-add-testimonies-from-armenian-genocide-survivors/
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Stephen Spielberg's Holocaust Archive To Include Armenian Genocide Testimonies
epress.am 01.30.2012
A video archive, set up 18 years ago by Steven Spielberg, of tens of thousands of Holocaust testimonies has arrived in Britain.
The extraordinary catalogue of personal testimony, collected by the Shoah Foundation Institute since the film director made Schindler's List in 1993, is housed at the University of Southern California, but on Friday it was formally shared with academics and students at the research centre at Royal Holloway to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The archive footage, which can be viewed by members of the public by appointment, chiefly features the memories of Jewish survivors, but some of the 52,000 videos also tell of the experiences of other persecuted groups, such as homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, as well of those of the liberating troops.
This year, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is broadening its archive to incorporate testimony from survivors of other genocides. It will be adding Rwandan and Armenian testimony to the visual history archive.
David Cesarani, of the Holocaust Research Centre at the University of London, believes the archive will give much needed historical weight to the experiences of survivors.
"It is going to have a huge impact," he said. "This is an authentic resource for British researchers and historians which will give them access to the experiences of people who have never written anything down. Too much of the history of the Holocaust has been about the perpetrators. The survivors, with a few exceptions, have tended to disappear from the scene."
Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and his brother James M. Smith, who founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire and the British-based Aegis Trust, noted, "It's a mistake to think of it as a historical archive. It contains historical data, but it's a look at how society can unravel and unfold."
"This is a voice of a conscience of our age. It's there to help guide us and has a social value of conscience which I really hope can make a difference, and if it doesn't, we'll come to rue the day, but it won't be because the survivors didn't warn us," Stephen Smith said.
Compiled from an article published by The Guardian.
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Shoah Found. Director Discusses Digitization of Armenian Survivor Testimonies
asbarez Friday, April 13th, 2012
USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Dr. Stephen Smith
The USC Institute of Armenian Studies' Leadership Council will honor the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, established by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg, for championing the Armenian Genocide Digitization Project, at a gala banquet to be held on Sunday, April 15 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
The Shoah Foundation Institute, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, has been part of the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences since 2006. Its Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust; it is one of the largest archives of its kind in the world.
The goal of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies' Leadership Council is to bring together digital copies of all of the collections of interviews with Armenian Genocide survivors and eyewitnesses, essentially creating what may become the largest archive of Genocide eyewitness interviews. With the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's support of the Armenian Genocide Digitization Project, the interviews will be indexed, preserved and made available to scholars, students and researchers via the institute's Visual History Archive. The J. Michael Hagopian/Armenian Film Foundation archive of nearly 400 filmed eyewitness testimonies will be the first collection in the Armenian Genocide Digitization Project.
After touring the facility, Asbarez Editor Ara Khachatourian caught up with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's Executive Director Dr. Stephen D. Smith, who discussed the foundation and detailed the partnership with the Armenian Film Foundation. We present the interview below:
ARA KHACHATOURIAN: Tell us about the Shoah Foundation and how it came into being?
STEPHEN SMITH: The USC Shoah Foundation came into being after the filming of Schindler's list when film director Spielberg realized that many Holocaust survivors who wanted to tell their own personal life histories. And he set out the project, to enable as many survivors as wanted to tell their own stories. And 52,000 survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust were interviewed in 56 countries in 32 languages, creating a vast audio-visual archive.
A.K.: What is this archive going to be used for?
S.S.: The archive has several purposes. First of all it is about the documentation of personal life histories. So that what we have is not just the large scale of what Genocide looks like, but also the individual stories that make that up. It is very important to document that. Secondly, it's about giving voice to the individual so they can talk about their families, communities and the things that really matter to them, because when Genocide takes place the intention is to wipe those out. By these individuals talking about what happened to them, they reinstate them in memory and in our lives. The third, and most important, perhaps, is education. To give opportunity for people around the world to have access to these vitally important life histories and to understand what it means to them and their lives today and to learn about their experiences.
A.K.: What about the partnership with the Armenian Film Foundation. What is that entail and where are you in that process?
S.S.: The archive of the Shoah Foundation was donated to USC in 2006, creating the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. What we have here is an infrastructure by which the testimonies of Holocaust survivors have been documented. But we have the infrastructure is about to digitize, to preserve, to index, to catalogue and to disseminate audiovisual life histories. We put together a partnership using the USC Shoah Foundation as the basis in which the architecture and infrastructure of the Shoah Foundation is going to be utilized to be able to digitize, to preserve, to index, catalogue and disseminate the testimonies of the Armenian Film Foundation.
A.K.: Where are you in that process?
S.S.: So, the collection of 400 histories that J. Michael Hagopian filmed over 30 years is being compiled so it can be digitized. That will be done this year. Once the digitization is done, we take each interview and index it minute-by-minute. There are things that we have to do, especially for this collection, and, indeed, for any other Armenian collection we will work with. Because we have very different geography, all the names of the places, the languages and terminology need to be addressed. We are bringing in experts to help with that., to make sure that what we do has integrity - historical integrity - and also the integrity of ensuring that we take great care over these testimonies.
A.K.: One of the concerns that I've heard in the community is by giving this archive to the USC Shoah Foundation it might be lost as an asset of the community. With this and with future archive, how can the community be able to access it and use it and how we can ensure that it is not lost?
S.S.: The beauty of a partnership like this is that the Armenian Film Foundation retains the ownership of the collection. What we do is we license a copy of it - the digital copy. Then we have an arrangement with our partner that we have permission to use that digital copy and make it accessible to a wider public. What we are interested in, as a research and an educational institute, is making sure that these testimonies are given the greatest opportunity to reach the widest public.
One of the things that we're all interested in - within the Armenian community, within the academic community and, indeed in the Jewish world - is how do we who experienced these experiences, such as the Armenian Genocide, tell the world what happened and give them a chance to learn.
The great thing here is that through this partnership the testimonies themselves will remain as part of the Armenian community's legacy and will remain within the Armenian community, but the power of those testimonies will reach the world.
A.K.: How did you get involved in the Shoah Foundation?
S.S.: I was born in a mining village in middle of Nottinghamshire, England. My father was a Christian minister in the Methodist Church and my mother is a religion education teacher. I had no connection to the Jewish world at all until I went to a family holiday to Israel. We found a fascinating experience and I got very interested in the Christian-Jewish relationship initially. With the more I learned about anti-Semitism within the Christian world the more I realized that Holocaust did not come out of nowhere and there are real issues to address here. One of the big moments in my learning experience was being in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. So there I was, a young guy in my early twenties, coming from Britain and a Christian background in Israel learning about the Holocaust.
One of the things I learned in Yad Vashem was about a group of people called `Righteous Among the Nations.' These were people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust -all of them rescued at least one Jewish person except from one of them: his name was Armin T. Wegner. And, I was very impressed by this individual, because, he had, in 1933, when the Jews were first boycotted in Nazi Germany, written a letter to Adolf Hitler saying `in my name, in the name of the German people STOP, because what you are doing could result in the distraction of the Jews and certainly would bring shame upon our country forever.'
What I was surprised to find out the same Armin Wegner that spoken out on behalf of the Jews was the Armin Wegner that taken photographs during the Armenian Genocide, documented it and then tried, in the 1920s, to be a part of the legal process to bring this to the attention of the world. So he was a man that experienced the Armenian Genocide, and was equipped to try to prevent the genocide happening in the rest of the world. He failed in both counts. The Armenian Genocide happened and the Holocaust happened. But he was the very same man that sat with Michael Hagopian in 1967 and said `Michael you are filmmaker, wouldn't it be wonderful to use your art to collect the testimonies of the Armenian Genocide survivors.' So, this is a part of the legacy that we all share. Armin Wegner has been a tremendous influence on my life, because he was the guy that never stopped trying and gave us a tremendous example of why we want to learn about these genocides. Because, we want to prevent it in the future too.
A.K.: It's ironic, because Israel has not recognized the Armenian Genocide officially. In fact, a couple of months ago one of the foreign ministry officials said there cannot be a comparison between the Holocaust and Genocide, because Holocaust was a unique experience. What are your thoughts on that?
S.S.: Human suffering cannot be compared. How can I say that what I suffered is greater than what you suffered? It's a travesty to do that. However, the causes and the consequences absolutely must be compared, if we as a human race are to be able to understand what we are we capable of and to be able to prevent that? What we don't need is comparison. What we do need is compassion.
A.K.: The fact that Israel has not recognized...What do you attribute that to?
S.S.: I think this is a tragedy, that any countries took a long time to recognize the Armenian Genocide for political reasons. This is not about politics. This is about humanity. I think we all need to be able, within ourselves as human beings - political entities or as individuals - to get over those things which hinder us from recognizing the suffering of others and to be able to just be clear about that. It doesn't matter where we are in the world.
A.K.: What of American anti-defamation groups, such as the ADL (The Anti-Defamation League), which while not denying the Armenian Genocide, is impeding efforts for international recognition of the fact.
S.S.: What I can say, is that USC Shoah Foundation Institute is very clear about this. What happened to the Armenian people was Genocide and it needs to be recognized as such by the international community and by organizations wherever they are, so that we can work together as communities - Armenians, Jews, Christians - wherever we are on a very vitally important work of education for the future. That's our mission here, and we intend to do that in very close cooperation with the Armenian community.
A.K.: Another issue that has been talked about is the component of funding for this project? I have been asked by several of our readers and viewers that are the other groups that are being represented in the Shoah Foundation collection being asked to raise funds for the inclusion of their archives? Is there a component of fundraising that goes on continuously in the Shoah Foundation?
S.S.: Basically, we have different collections - they are like different projects. So for each of those projects we need to find the appropriate people to support and fund them. And in fact whether we talk to our Rwandan colleagues or Armenian colleagues we say let's think about what's the best way to do this. If we have a story to tell, let's really take ownership for that. We take our responsibility very seriouslsy also to think how can we best contribute in terms of our time, and our effort and our energy to really make this work for all of us and to share the burden of telling the story. That's the principle that we have here.
A.K.: When do you think the Armenian archive will be up and running?
S.S.: From the time, in which we manage to find the funding for the archive, it's about an 18 month-to-a year process. One of the things that we take very seriously here at USC - we are a research university - is making sure the quality of the work that goes into this is done at the very highest level.
We're already tackling enough as it is, in terms of denial and obfuscation. So what we want to make sure is that we spend enough time on the detail of the indexing and the clarity of that, so whether people use it for research or for education, we know we've done our work very thoroughly. If that means, that we take a little longer, that's time well spent in my view, because we want this to be right for the benefit for those 400 people that gave testimonies and other archives that we might indeed work with in the future on the same subject matter.
A.K.: How do you safeguard those interviews from being taken and bastardized by those who want to revise history?
S.S.: Whenever we put content into the public domain we always have that risk that somebody will misuse it. We have to be very careful about that and build policies around that. So, one of the policies is that we release our content on a registration basis only. Maybe, we want to put some testimonies and make them available to the wider public and if somebody takes it and misuses it, we do run that risk. The greater good being served here, and the number of people that get a great deal out of it, so vastly overwhelms that small number that are very marginal to our work. Putting work and testimonies in the public domain has a very beneficial value.
A.K.: As generations are coming up, the distance between the reality of the Holocaust or Genocide and the current existence is growing wider. For the Armenian instance it's almost 97 years. Survivors are not there anymore. What is your message to the new generation that might not have direct contact with the first-person account?
S.S.: Of course, you can't replace a human being. There's nothing more wonderful than talking to another soul about their experience and feeling that sense of connection. But, of course, there's the reality of time and we have to deal with it. Video does have a very profound effect on the way in which this particular generation understands history. We are experiencing with that now with the Holocaust survivors testimonies. We weigh carefully how young people are using them and they do develop a real strong sense of connection. With a video testimony you see eyes, and the eyes are like the windows to the soul... And you see the face, you really get a sense of who that person is and it's so interesting how often people - students - say `oh I met so and so.' And of course they never met them at all, but they saw them on the screen but they get that sense of connection. So, I believe that all is not lost and there is a lot to be gained from this.
One of things that bringing the Armenian film foundation collection in is that in about 18 months from now we will have Holocaust survivors testimonies, an Armenian survivors testimonies, Rwandan survivors testimonies all will available to this generation. I can tell you, from talking with teachers and students, they are really looking forward to that, because they know that while they are not going to compare them, they are going to understand human experience in a much deeper way, to a point in which they can listen to many voices across many generations.
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