"Witness: Voices from the Holocaust," a documentary film composed of first-person accounts of the Holocaust, will have its first public preview on Sunday, April 26, at
7 p.m. in the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, 80 Wall St. Admission to the event is free.
Produced and directed by Joshua Greene and Shiva Kumar, the film combines testimony from Holocaust survivors with the reminiscences of partisans, bystanders, members of the Hitler Youth, American prisoners of war held in Nazi concentration camps, and U.S. military personnel who liberated the camps.
"Witness" presents an array of never-before released testimonies preserved at the University's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Many of these witnesses comment on how, under the conditions they knew, words such as "heroism," "courage" and "morality" lost their meaning. Most comment on the compartmentalized nature of their present lives, balancing their survival against the persistent memory of loss. "I'm alive," one witness says, "but so what?"
The special screening, which is sponsored by Yale Hillel's Mark and Bernice Sobotka Yom Hashoah, will be followed by a discussion led by Alan Fortunoff, benefactor of Yale's video archive, and by filmmaker Greene, who is an award-winning television film producer. The former is chair of Fortunoff, a specialty retailer founded 75 years ago by his parents, and has been involved with the Yale video archive since 1985. The latter has collaborated with Kumar for 12 years, creating award-winning programs based on personal narratives.
The production of "Witness" was funded through grants from the Revson, Dorot and Fortunoff Foundations. Mark and Bernice Sobotka, sponsors of this preview, are survivors of Auschwitz who were married in Lodz immediately after the war. They established the Yom Hashoah Endowment at Yale Hillel to mark their 50th wedding anniversary.
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has pioneered the recording, collection and preservation of videotaped oral testimonies of survivors and witnesses. It holds more than 3,800 testimonies, recorded in cooperation with 37 affiliate projects.
For reservations, or further information, call the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, 432-1134.
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