In addition to survivors’ autobiographical texts, the first of which appeared soon after 1945, projects involving interviews with Holocaust survivors have taken on increasing significance in the past few decades, enabling us to learn about the experiences of the Holocaust from personal testimonies. Every interview grants us an insight into the personal history of a survivor, and into his or her experiences in the Holocaust and particular way of processing what occurred. These reports by contemporary witnesses convey knowledge that comes of “having been there.”

Oral-history interviews with survivors of the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp are found in many of the contemporary-witness projects of the past decades, including the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University; the Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute; Israel’s official memorial center, Yad Vashem; and the project “Documentation of the Life Histories of Former Forced and Slave Laborers,” coordinated by the Institute for History and Biography in Hagen.

Because the testimonies of the survivors are central to the concept of the Norbert Wollheim Memorial, an independent interview project was carried out, with survivors of the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp as the interlocutors. Edited versions of the interviews can be viewed on this website and in the Pavilion of the Wollheim Memorial; in addition, 68 video interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute are available in the Memorial’s workroom. Norbert Wollheim himself spoke about his life story in two interviews, and the transcripts of these interviews with Nikolaus Creutzfeldt (1986–88) and with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1991) are also on hand.

(MN; transl. KL)

Interview Project of the Norbert Wollheim Memorial

24 Video Interviews with Survivors of the Buna/Monowitz Concentration Camp

Monowitz Interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Collection in the Workroom of the Wollheim Memorial

Norbert Wollheim’s Oral-History Interviews