The Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archives includes testimonies from nine survivor and witness experience groups.  These experience groups all lived under the rule of the Nazis or other Axis powers; all experienced persecution and/or the exclusionist policies of the Nazi regime.  Over 90 percent of the interviewees are Jewish. 

The nine experience groups include:

Homosexual Survivors: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution based on their homosexuality or suspected homosexuality.

Jehovah’s Witness Survivors: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution based on their religious convictions and/or expression of those convictions as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Jewish Survivors: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution under laws and/or policies against the Jews.

Political Prisoners: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution based on their political convictions and/or expression of those convictions.

Rescuers and Aid Providers: Interviewees who rescued those targeted for persecution and/or interviewees who were involved with the planning and implementation of aid programs during and after the war.

Sinti and Roma Survivors: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution under laws and/or policies against the Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”).

Liberators and Liberation Witnesses: Interviewees who participated in the liberation of concentration camps and/or interviewees who entered concentration camps immediately after liberation due to assignments in or around camps.

Survivors of Eugenics Policies: Interviewees who were targeted for persecution under eugenics laws and/or policies.

War Crimes Trials Participants: Interviewees who were involved in war crimes trials after the war.

Interviews were conducted in the following 56 countries:

Number of Testimonies By Country

Argentina	737		Kazakhstan	6
Australia	2,484		Latvia	79
Austria	188		Lithuania	137
Belarus	248		Macedonia	9
Belgium	205		Mexico	111
Bolivia	23		Moldova	278
Bosnia & Herzegovina	55		Netherland	1,048
Brazil	570		New Zealand	55
Bulgaria	611		Norway	34
Canada	2,840		Peru	2
Chile	65		Poland	1,438
Colombia	15		Portugal	2
Costa Rica	19		Romania	146
Croatia	326		Russia	675
Czech Republic	566		Serbia & Montenegro	345
Denmark	95		Slovakia	656
Ecuador	10		Slovenia	11
Estonia	9		South Africa	250
Finland	1		Spain	6
France	1,673		Sweden	334
Georgia	6		Switzerland	75
Germany	674		Ukraine	3,433
Greece	303		United Kingdom	876
Hungary	80		United States	19,841
Ireland	5		Uruguay	126
Israel	8,504		Uzbekistan	25
Italy	417		Venezuela	227
Japan	1		Zimbabwe	8

The Shoah Foundation has conducted interviews in 32 languages:

Bulgarian • Croatian • Czech • Danish • Dutch • English • Flemish • French • German • Greek • Hebrew • Hungarian • Italian • Japanese • Ladino • Latvian • Lithuanian • Macedonian • Norwegian • Polish • Portuguese • Romani • Romanian • Russian • Serbian • Sign • Slovak • Slovenian • Spanish • Swedish • Ukrainian • Yiddish

The Shoah Foundation began the indexing process with the English-language testimonies, which make up nearly half of the archive. The English-language portion of indexing was completed in January 2004. Now the Foundation's staff is indexing interviews in other languages. Indexing will be complete by the end of 2005.

The Shoah Foundation's Cataloguing Department catalogues and indexes each testimony. The cataloguing consists of the entry of brief biographical information about each interviewee while the index links a controlled vocabulary of 30,000 key words to time codes in the video. Keywords include cities, villages, and other geographical locations (e.g., Oswiecim, Poland) and place names (Auschwitz [Poland: Concentration Camp]), as well as descriptions of experiences during the Holocaust (“sense of time in the camps”).  Much of this information was collected in a Pre-Interview Questionnaire (PIQ), a tool that interviewers employed to gather background information from survivors, so that they could tailor the interviews to each survivor’s experience.

In addition, staff members also index each testimony by assigning index terms to every one-minute segment of video viewed. This level of indexing permits researchers to locate all instances in which interviewees discuss a given topic in detail, and provides access by time-period, place, and theme. The names of individual people are also indexed, using a set of basic biographic data associated with each person in the testimony.