Bearing Witness
“Bearing Witness” – Documenting one’s own life story
Today, Holocaust survivors are all elderly people. Their personal persecution story is also a biography with historical meaning. The desire to stand as a witness for the experience of one’s own family, for the Jewish people or for neighbors and friends, or to communicate their own experience in the past and the present is often expressed by Holocaust survivors. We consider the documentation of the persecution stories of Holocaust survivors who live in Switzerland to be an important task of Tamach. The goal is to make one’s own life story, based on interviews or appropriate archive materials, available to future generations. Tamach conducts these interviews in cooperation with the Archiv für Zeitgeschichte (Archive of Contemporary History) of ETH Zurich and within the framework of its contacts with the memorials at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. The interviews about personal experiences usually last from two to three hours. To date, Tamach has conducted over 50 interviews with Holocaust survivors.
Mein Leben als Arier (My Life as an Aryan) by Jerzy Czarnecki.