Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.
And that's why the foundation, intent on preserving its Holocaust material for future generations, has launched a $10-million initiative to turn 105,000 hours of videotaped testimony into a vast digital archive.
The switch, foundation leaders say, cannot come a moment too soon -- with the videotapes expected to start decaying within five years and aging Holocaust survivors dying off.
"It's like a ticking time bomb," said Sam Gustman, the foundation's chief technology officer.
Gustman said the foundation plans to digitize 12,000 testimonies a year, finishing the collection by 2013. The completion will mark the latest step for the Shoah project that began in 1994 when director Steven Spielberg established the foundation to collect survivors' stories after the debut of his film, "Schindler's List." Five years later, the foundation had amassed testimony in 32 languages and across 56 countries.
Sam Goetz is among the survivors who have added their stories to the foundation's collection.
As a young boy, Goetz survived concentration camps in Poland, Germany and Austria. He recorded his story with the foundation in 1995. Documenting survivors' stories, he said, is a "time-sensitive issue."
Knowing that his story and thousands of other tales are being safeguarded for years to come has comforted the 80-year-old Goetz, chairman of the Anti-Defamation League's Holocaust education committee in Los Angeles.
"The feeling, the emotion of the event, the separation from the family, are difficult to put into words," he said. "You hope by relating these events of occupied Europe by the Nazis, that this can have a universal meaning to those growing up later and in future generations."
The foundation's videotapes have been stored in a vast facility known as Iron Mountain, a former limestone mine in western Pennsylvania. The tapes are now being packed into trucks, 15,000 at a time, and hauled across the country to the Shoah Foundation's office a few blocks east of the USC campus. There, foundation staff -- with the help of two automated "robots" that look like large vending machines, and a massive archive with 9 million gigabytes of memory -- are duplicating the tapes into Motion JPEG 2000 files, as well as other formats for computer and television viewing.
