It takes a lot of memory to remember the Holocaust. Archivists at USC are using eight petabytes. Look it up. It's a mountain.
They're taking interviews of nearly 52 thousand people videotaped in the U.S. and Europe and converting the analog voices and faces to digital format. Analog videotape degenerates over time, so that's the only way to keep the stories from being written in water, to paraphrase John Keats.
The Shoah Foundation's hauling 15 thousand videotapes from an East Coast storage facility to its offices a couple of blocks from the University of Southern California. The foundation says it'll take five years to finish the job. One of their archivists is Georgiana Gomez, a Mexican American Air Force brat who studied film at Chapman College and who counts a 1970s movie theater viewing of Fiddler on the Roof in Dayton, Ohio as a teenager as a watershed moment in her life.
It opened a window to the Jewish world. The film sparked an interest to tell stories through film. She was three months old when she saw her first movie. She doesn't remember whether it was a sleeper or a weepie. After living abroad for years, both sides of her family ended up in the blue-collar lowlands of Wilmington.
Gomez is one of a handful of people bearing witness to the Holocaust. She's an archivist monitoring the sound and picture quality of videotapes on their path from analog to digital. She looks for video glitches and off-mic voices. But she's far from a detached technician.
The stories of parent-child separation touch her the most. One stands out. An octogenarian remembers being in a packed railroad cattle car as a little girl. The faces are a blur. She clearly remembers seeing wisps of some kind of material atop barbed wire through the slats. Were they strips of cloth? Were they branches? The girl later found out these were remnants of human hair on electrified wires. The only thing left of death camp prisoners who threw themselves onto the wires knowing that death would be a guaranteed escape from the horrors inside the concentration camp.
Georgiana Gomez has logged more than 50 hours of videotape. There's lots more. She keeps an eye on the quality of the blues and reds, the quality of the voices in broken English and foreign languages. The best she can do is listen.
Visit the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for more information.
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Hello Adolfo,
This is a beautiful article. I just stumbled upon it tonight while trying to find an old filmmaker friend's e-mail address.
My parents will be proud.
Thank you so much for taking the time to ask a technician some important questions.
Peace to you,
Georgiana
Dear Adolfo,
Thank you for this clear, concise and sensitive article.
You have captured specific and poignant qualities, that Georgiana brings to this important undertaking. Being a
long-time friend of Georgiana's (ugh...25+ years), she really does listen, feel and honor these memories unveiled on film.
An untold number of people now, and many years to come are deeply grateful to the archivists team at the USC Shoah Foundation, to Steven Speilberg's vision.
Namasté,
~ Jacquelene Hunt
I'm glad you got to read it.
You got me thinking about the sea changes in technology in the last 20 years. From film, to video, to bytes. From tapes to DVDs to downloads. Technology's a big deal. But stories and the people who tell them and being able to relay those stories is even more important than the technology. Que no?
Adolfo
Adolfo,
Any chance you could forward this to Georgiana? She's an old friend from high school (Carroll H.S., Dayton, Ohio)that I'd love to get back in touch with.
Thanks,
Mickey Patterson
Laramie, WY
mickeyp@uwyo.edu