So we never forget

It was a startling silhouette: a couple sipping moonlight cocktails as a film clip of Adolf Hitler rolled in the background. But awareness of intolerance and hatred is a prime focus of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 by producer-director Steven Spielberg.

Forget red-carpet arrivals. At the foundation’s annual Ambassadors for Humanity gala at Amblin Studios, Tom Hanks, Mike Myers, Ron Howard and the evening’s honoree, Creative Artists Agency President Richard Lovett, arrived sans fanfare, and the cocktail reception was more about images of bigotry displayed on strategically placed monitors than it was martinis.

Before being seated for the awards program and performances by Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, guests were invited to tour the foundation’s cataloging department – where the oral histories of Holocaust survivors and witnesses are kept in trailers on a back lot – and learn how to access information.

Spielberg was inspired to create the foundation when, during the filming in Poland of his Academy Award-winning “Schindler’s List,” Holocaust survivors approached him, “imploring me to take down their testimonies with a tape recorder or pencil,” he said. Later, he thought: “Why can’t we get videographers to go around the world and take everyone’s testimony?”

During the past decade, volunteers for Shoah (Hebrew for “Holocaust”) have interviewed nearly 52,000 people in 56 countries. “There are other collections in the world like this, but nothing as large or varied as this one, with the digital technology that allows the testimony to be searched as though it were text,” Shoah president and chief executive officer Douglas Greenberg said at the Jan. 14 event. “Our archive has the unique capacity to combine the experience of individuals with the greatest crime in human history as a way to educate people about tolerance and the need to stand up for what is right.”

Observed Howard: “In terms of numbers, the Holocaust starts to get mathematical instead of profoundly personal. These testimonies help us connect to the tragedy in a way that is relatable.”

Calling the foundation “a work of genius,” Hanks said that any time “you have the testimonies of human beings who have been witnesses to a dark page of history,” you are in a better position to prevent those events from happening again. “Remember – if we don’t remember our history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” he said.