Dr. Stephen Smith — born near England’s mythical Sherwood Forest and the son of a Methodist minister — visited Yad Vashem for the first time with his brother James in 1991.
He expected to be touched, even speechless. He was both. But the encounter also resulted in a moment of pivotal discovery.
In 2009, Smith became executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, established in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg to amass testimonies from 52,000 Holocaust survivors.
It might seem ironic that a Christian theologian holds the reins of one of the most respected Holocaust organizations in the world, but Smith found his professional calling like one of Robin Hood’s infallible arrows.
His journey actually began at age 13 when his family traveled to Israel “to see the Holy Land as a Christian family,” Smith tells the IJN the day after keynoting the annual Fred Marcus Holocaust Memorial Lecture.
“I found it fascinating and became interested in the Jewish tradition. That led to the study of Jewish-Christian relationships and in particular the threat of anti-Semitism that was emerging in the Christian world.”
Smith, 46, was raised in an environment untainted by anti-Semitism. “In fact, there was an appreciation of Judaism because it was viewed as the basis of Christianity.
“The more I realized that Christianity had been at the bottom of virtually every anti-Semitic incident over the past 2,000 years, I became very troubled.”
He grew increasingly frustrated in the 1980s due to the lack of educational resources on anti-Semitism in England, the topic of his proposed dissertation.
Smith then enrolled at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on that transformative tour of Yad Vashem.
Upon leaving the vast Holocaust memorial, emotions raged inside him.
“I came out and said, it’s not OK to just see that and walk away. It’s not OK that the Holocaust was perpetrated by European Western civilization and that most of my peers were ignorant of the consequences.
“It’s not OK that the Jewish communities are carrying the burden of the tragedy of the Holocaust while the perpetrators and bystanders that caused it get away scot-free.”
His anger falls in a rhythmic litany.
“It’s not OK that that we have to go to Israel to find out what happened in Europe. And it’s not OK that we went through school and university in the UK and took an interest in issues that were never incorporated into our education.”
He pauses.
Yad Vashem and its burning aftermath convinced him to launch Britain’s first Holocaust center in 1995.
Located in Nottinghamshire, the folkloric birthplace of a hero who stole from the rich to help the poor, it epitomizes Smith’s desire to give a richer understanding of the Holocaust to impoverished minds.
Spielberg handed over the archival collection of thousands of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to USC in 2006.
“Spielberg was a visionary leader of the organization,” says Smith.
“He saw the real value and importance of placing the archives within an educational setting, framing this major asset of Holocaust studies in the arms of higher education.”
The USC Shoah Foundation now has 50 partners (mostly universities) in 14 countries, making it an international phenomenon.
Before Smith accepted the job with the foundation, he was “not at all a techie. But I’ve become a techie,” he laughs.
Aware that some feel technology inhibits the stark palpability of the Holocaust, Smith defends the foundation’s transference of testimonies from an audiovisual to a digital format.
“There’s a myth about digital preservation in general,” he prefaces, “because we think that if you digitize something you have preserved it. The reality is, the newer the medium, the shorter its lifespan.”
For example, a movie film (whether home or Hollywood) has a minimum of 50 years before it starts to degrade. A video can expect a 20-year lifespan. If a film is converted to a CD or digital medium, deterioration will occur within five years.
“Digitizing something is a sure way to say goodbye to it in a very short period of time,” he says, unless it is regularly and scrupulously maintained.
The USC Shoah Foundation is the only Holocaust Institute to utilize Bit Level Preservation. Nothing is left to chance.
“The integrity of the data is extremely important,” Smith says. “Fifty-two thousand testimonies are checked every three months.
“There’s a continual process of evaluation and checking in order to keep this collection alive.”
The Visual History Archive connects user to content in an instantaneous manner.
“You’ve got 52,000 testimonies, which translates into 107,000 hours of material,” he says.
“To play the archive from end to end takes 12 years, listening 24 hours a day.”
The Visual History Archive can zoom in on a particular subject —concentration camps, ghettos, resistance movements, roundups, massacres and much more.
“For instance, we applied 55,000 key words that will take you to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There are infinite variations.
“At the Marcus lecture, I input Denver, Colorado and came up with 275 testimonies. I happened to pick one that belonged to a survivor in the audience.”
Lastly, the foundation is streamlining educational distribution.
“We’ve taken a subset of 1,300 out of 52,000 accounts that covers the gamut of classifications: countries, gender, religious, non-religious, camps, partisan groups, hidden Jews, etc.
“This enables teachers to build lessons in a virtual classroom, and students can search a video archive, organize it and retell the story.”
The process also is built into the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.
At one point, Smith moves his seat and takes out his laptop. He pulls up a screen of a dignified male Holocaust survivor and initiates a conversation.
“Hello,” Smith says. “How are you? I’d like to ask you a question.”
The man smiles on the screen. “You can ask me anything you like.”
Smith wants to know why he tells his Holocaust story. The moving response is spontaneous and captured in real time.
Or is it?
Smith admits that he isn’t really talking to the man, and the man is not talking to Smith.
The Holocaust survivor is very real, but his comments were recorded a while back. He answered 500 questions, which were later reduced to 50.
“He can talk to you about G-d, family, the camps, whether he goes to synagogue or raised his family Jewishly,” Smith says. “There are all sorts of ways you can ask the same question.”
This virtual projection should be available in 10 years.
By then, the survivor may be dead.
“Yes, exactly,” Smith says.
But this technique may unlock the door to future conversations.
Adolescents and teenagers are typically in extremis. Expose them to the Holocaust and they forget their own dramas, get swept up in the larger picture and search for a better future.
Smith, who returned from Warsaw a week ago, is overwhelmed by the commitment of the young not only to understand the Holocaust but to ensure it never happens again.
Their hopeful enthusiasm contrasts with some survivors who hate all Poles because they are Polish and all Germans because they are German — regardless of their chronological proximity to the Holocaust.
Smith freely acknowledges that the proliferation of anti-Semitism in those countries is “horrifying.”
Still, he urges people with intractable attitudes toward countries complicit with the Nazis either in deed or silence to look not at the sky but the ground.
“My work takes place on the ground, with teachers, educators, students and universities,” he says. “I would urge everyone to find these people and make a contribution — on the ground.
“You don’t overturn anti-Semitism by worrying about it. You overturn it by tackling it, confronting it, dealing with it and educating others.
“The people fighting anti-Semitism in Europe are the most amazing, inspirational people you’ll ever want to meet. The Poles have made incredible strides — and young Poles are at the forefront of these educational efforts.”
None of the Shoah Foundation’s 52,000 narratives are identical, Smith says. Similar experiences expressed through prismatic perspectives heighten their veracity.
“Whenever we recount anything in our lives, our memories are subject to feelings and emotions,” he says. “That is the nature of all history. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong.
“It’s like the perennial fish story: ‘The fish I caught was this big . . .’”
Literary skills, not historical research, are applied to audiovisual testimonies in the Shoah Foundation’s archives. “It’s not our job to say, ‘This is accurate, this is inaccurate,’” says Smith.
In the near future, readers and historians will be able to flag interviews if they spot contradictions: “Miss so-and-so said this happened in Warsaw, but it actually was a suburb of Warsaw” or “there were crematoria but no gas chambers at this camp.”
Memory can vacillate, but that does not diminish its authenticity.
Asked whether inaccuracies in testimonies can be used as fodder for Holocaust deniers, Smith renders a qualified yes.
“Holocaust deniers will use any source they can get their hands on and try to demonstrate that it’s false or inaccurate. These deniers go to Auschwitz and stand in front of the gas chambers and say the gas chambers never existed!
“We expect the same behavior from them when it comes to audiovisual testimony: turning painful realities into myths and legends.”
What defies the deniers is the sheer volume of material in the Shoah Foundation’s collection.
“We have such a large pool of material,” Smith says.
“Taken as a body of evidence, it is irrefutable. It tells its own story.
“Notwithstanding the ill intentions of a very small number of people, we must make this material available to the public so they can use it for good.
“We will deal with those who use it to do harm when we come across them.”
A few years ago, the USC Shoah Foundation decided to make its skills available to voices that survived genocides other than the Holocaust. The archives now include 60 testimonies from the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
The foundation has obtained survivor and eyewitness testimonies of the 1915 Armenian genocide gathered by the Armenian Film Foundation from 1969 to 2000.
“They are being digitized as we speak,” Smith says.
The inclusion of genocides apart from the Holocaust under one roof in no way implies that the foundation is edging out the Shoah.
“Of course not,” Smith says. “We know that each genocide that has occurred in history is a distinct and individualized event. They aren’t getting lumped into some huge archive where people will confuse an Armenian survivor with a Jewish survivor.
“These are distinct collections.”
The Armenian genocide, which Turkey firmly denies, is fighting for acknowledgement in an era that condemns institutionalized terror directed at races, tribes or religions.
Some Jewish groups waffle on the issue.
Israel has not officially recognized the Armenian genocide.
The cognitive disconnect between Jewish post-Holocaust awareness and sidestepping the Armenian genocide infuriates Smith.
“What I find so disappointing is that when we’re working so hard to make sure that Holocaust denial does not win out, for us to be part of an environment of denial with regard to the Armenian genocide is atrocious.
“That’s the only word I have for it.
“I think a select number of Jewish groups are refusing to take a stance out of political expediency,” he says.
“But we cannot sit in an ivory tower and then complain when people deny the Holocaust.
“We have to be true to the events of history, or not at all. The Armenian genocide is a fact.”
While technological advances and virtual encounters are intended to prolong the conversation, Smith says the visceral connection to the Holocaust will survive longer than any other human event due to the sheer amount of personal testimonies.
“As every historical event recedes into the past, some connection is lost,” he says. “But we are living in a very different age in terms of collecting data. There has never been an historical event in which so much personal testimony has been gathered.”
Smith was always concerned that the Holocaust would be reduced to a kind of shorthand consisting of one or two facts — you arrive at Auschwitz, you see the gas chambers, and that’s it.
The Shoah Foundation precludes this.
“Those 52,000 stories all differ from one another,” he says. “They are not duplicates.”
Once again, his words flow like a litany.
“They avoid closure, which I think is good. They complicate our understanding of the past, which is a good thing. They give us unique perspectives, because there is not one single narrative.
“And I think that’s the right thing for the future. It means people will remain connected to the Holocaust longer and on a more personal level.”
Smith says he often hears students commenting, “When I met this survivor . . .” But they never actually met that survivor. “What they mean is they saw her on video and now have a bond.”
Only time will demonstrate the significance of these relationships.
Ultimately, students will become “raconteurs themselves,” Smith says, his eyes aglow.
“We’re not giving them a textbook on the Holocaust and saying, ‘The Holocaust was this.’ What we’re saying is search, find, consider, reflect, listen to these survivors and then construct your own history.
“Become the writer of history yourself.”
Smith concedes it could take years or decades to actualize this hopeful agenda, but he believes humanity is on the right road.
“It’s a lengthy process. It’s not revolutionary. It’s intergenerational and will take a very long time. But it is worth the effort.”
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountan Jewish News
