The aim of this portal is to make all recorded audio and video UK Holocaust testimonies more accessible. Having captured almost 300 testimonies for the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive in the last 20 years and having created our popular website (ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk), which enables users to digitally search through the archive and find specific interviewees and specific experiences, we know that it is of utmost importance to map these UK Holocaust memories on a broader, cross institutional scale. The AJR is excited to partner with Lord Pickles and the Department of Levelling Up and Communities to create the UK Holocaust Testimony Portal. The portal will enable family members of interviewees, researchers and the wider public to cross reference interviewees by name and find out when and by which archive they have been interviewed. The portal will also allow the sharing of documents relating to the interviewee’s life story. As custodians of these precious testimonies of Survivors and Refugees who made new lives in the UK, the portal will facilitate better access and dissemination of all UK Holocaust testimonies and help us to fulfil the wish expressed by most interviewees, to use their testimonies in order to learn from the past, so that history does not repeat again. In the fight against Holocaust distortion and denial, the portal can play a vital role in helping us to learn as much as we can about the lives of all the survivors and refugees from Nazism, who had the courage to share their story. The Portal will ensure that their stories will be heard in the present and in the future.
Dr Bea Lewkowicz, Project Lead, Holocaust Testimony UK
Director, AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive