In 2002, Dr Bea Lewkowicz filmed 20 interviews for an installation in the “Continental Britons: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe” exhibition at the Jewish Museum, London. Inspired by the success of the film installation, Dr Lewkowicz together with Dr Anthony Grenville, both children of Holocausts survivors and refugees from Nazism, submitted a proposal for a larger national video oral history archive of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazism, entitled Refugee Voices.

The AJR, the organisation founded in 1941 to represent Jewish refugees who had fled from Nazi Germany and Austria to Britain, understood the importance of such a project and decided to fund it. The first interview was carried out in January 2003 and the first phase of interviewing (150 interviews) was finished in 2008. The interviews were carried out by a small number of experienced interviewers. When it became clear that there were still many people who wanted to record their testimony, the next phase of the project was commissioned and in 2015 interviewing re-started and is still ongoing today. Since 2019, the interviews and their related materials (photographs and documents) have been digitally represented on the AJR Refugee Voices website and shared though the popular AJR Refugee Voices Social Media channels.

The regional spread of the interviews ranges from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Winchester and Southend, from Batley and Knaresborough to Bristol and Cardiff. A considerable number of interviews were filmed in the Manchester area and in London. The archive currently consists of more than 300 interviews and the largest single experience in the archive is the Kindertransport, 85 interviewees arrived in 1938/1939 in the UK through this visa waver scheme for unaccompanied children.