San Diego (special) -- By coincidence, 1999 marks the beginning of Phase Two for both the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and for a local educational outreach program sponsored by the Agency for Jewish Education.

For the last four years, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has been videotaping nearly 50,000 testimonies of Holocaust Survivors all over the world. This year, in Phase Two of the project, some of these personal accounts of the Shoah will become available for public viewing via computer networks at five centers: 1) Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; 2) the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.; 3) the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles; 4) the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and 5) the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

A decade ago in San Diego, the Agency for Jewish Education launched a program named "Jewish Education Week" which featured rabbis and other Jewish educators providing lunchtime lectures on Jewish topics at venues throughout San Diego County. Many of these ersatz classrooms were in office buildings, with the idea being to bring Jewish education to the workplace. This year, in Phase Two of the project, "Jewish Education Week" has metamorphosed into a two-week-long "Festival of Jewish Learning" Feb. 1-14. The noontime lectures are being supplemented by a pair of half-day workshops and other presentations.

One of these workshops will focus on the Shoah, with three speakers including Daisy Miller of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation scheduled to make presentations from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 5, at the AJE offices at 4858 Mercury St. Joining Miller as speakers will be Phil Schlossberg, a Holocaust Survivor who resides in San Diego, and Leon Stabinsky, an expert on the currently hot topic of providing restitution to Holocaust victims or their heirs.

Miller recently told HERITAGE that the Survivors for the Shoah Visual History Project may revolutionize not only our understanding of the Holocaust but also how the world goes about recording, documenting and analyzing major events. Fifty thousand, two-hour interviews are being digitalized, indexed and catalogued so that researchers may focus on a place, or a theme, or a person, and be able to access direct testimonies from all over the world.

"There are times that we have a story told by someone in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the same story told by someone in Ukraine as well as someone in Australia," Miller said. "These witnesses, even though they experience in a different way, are giving the same accounts of the same events."

Say a researcher is interested in learning as much as possible about a community that was affected by the Holocaust--to pick an example, Mandok, Hungary. As part of its interview with Survivors, the Foundation asks them "to talk about life before the war, life during the war and life after the war," Miller said. "So when we hear about life before the war, we are getting a tremendous amount of detail and information about that life, Jewish life, in communities before the war. So a researcher who would like to know about a certain town or village or place, and what life was like there, would get it from those who were there, who lived it, who experienced it. There is no end to the possibilities."

Miller, herself, was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and spent the war years as a child hidden in Florence and other parts of Italy. She came to the United States in 1951 when she was 12 1/2 years old. 

"Every experience is experienced by the individual in a very unique way- even if it may have been in the same camp, the same hiding place or with the same family," Miller said. "The experiences of those who were children during the war--which is the population that I am part of--these are quite different than the experiences of someone who was older, and someone who was in their teens.

"Those of us who were very young, as we were going through our lives, have had to deal with the notion that our experiences were not quite correct and that we really didn't remember it right, and whatever we remembered is really meaningless in some way, or it is belittled, or it is denied, or it is questioned, or it is discouraged because 'you know, you don't want to think of the past, you want to think of the future' and 'you were only a kid; you don't remember anyway. What you remember is not accurate.'"

Miller added that the experiences she had as a child in hiding was "very different from the experiences of my sibling, who was older, or from my parents because I saw it through the eyes of a child."

The Survivors of the Shoah Foundation videotapes the testimonies of all who were Holocaust victims--young, old, Jews, and non-Jews. It gives all Survivors an equal chance to be heard, to tell their stories. Among the non-Jewish groups whose testimonies have been carefully recorded are Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals, Miller said.

While the popular conception of a Holocaust Survivor is someone who was incarcerated in a death camp and who has a number tattooed on his or her arm, Miller said the project includes such people's testimonies, of course, but also reaches out to "those who were hidden, those who had false papers, those who were in the underground, those who were in the resistance, those who were in any way affected under the nazi occupation in Europe during the Second World War."

She said that Holocaust victims, in a sense, have adopted a "hierarchy of pain" in which they themselves tend to think of those who were not in the camps as not being true "Survivors." However, she said, "in reality, the experience of hiding is as terrifying as anything you can think of because you are constantly living under the threat of being discovered."

There were different ways of hiding, she added. "Some were pretty incredible, like literally being underground, living in a hole underground...living under conditions that were unbelievable. There is a misconception that exists even within the Survivor community," she said. "We are hoping to sensitize people through our work at the Foundation."

I asked Miller what are sensitive questions, given the efforts of anti Semites to minimize the Holocaust, and in some cases to deny that it ever existed. What if individual Survivors, who are aging, get their facts wrong? What if their memories fail them? What if they mix up places, dates, times? What if their stories over the years have been embellished? 

"This is a very major issue," she replied. "Oral history really comes from and is based on the recollection of the individual who tells the story, and sometimes after the passage of time, people forget; sometimes some of the details become a little blurry or change and that is understandable. So oral history needs to viewed keeping that in mind.

"At the same time," Miller said, "the plus side of oral history is that it provides you with the details and flavors that one could not get through a book."

Are any efforts made to verify the information in the Survivors' accounts?

"We don't verify and we do not alter in any way the accounts that are provided," Miller said. "If there are some that are not accurate, then we realize that there are some that are not accurate, but that still gives us thousands and thousands which are, and which are much more than we ever had available to us. So our sense is that even though there may be some that are not 100 percent correct, the majority, more than a majority, are, and that is what we need to focus on."

When national polls are conducted, a sample of 400 persons is said to have an accuracy factor of plus or minus 5 percent. How much lower the error margin must be in individually compiled testimonies from 50,000 persons!

The foundation was established by Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg with proceeds realized from the success of his film Schindler's List. Spielberg still serves as chairman of the foundation "and will continue to do so as far as I know," Miller said. "This is something that he conceived, that he put in place and that he sought to establish. He is still very much involved with the foundation, not on a daily basis obviously."

Nevertheless, "the foundation cannot and must not be perceived to be Steven Spielberg's Hollywood creation because the connotation might be that this is some sort of Hollywood fantasy movie, which clearly we are not," Miller said. "This is very serious work, this is a very important archive that has been established, and it is clear that although this was founded by Steven, it is a work that now has its own life."