The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has been working since 1994 to collect and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust. The Shoah Foundation has videotaped over 52,000 testimonies from 56 countries and in 32 languages. These testimonies are collected and made available to the campus community through the Visual History Archive (VHA), an interface which allows users to search and view the visual history testimonies and any additional corresponding data.

The University of Michigan has partnered with the Shoah Foundation to make these testimonies available to the campus community via the Internet. The Visual History Archive (VHA) provides a rich bed of educational opportunities, for both classroom use and as a research tool. Access to the Visual History Archive is available from any computer on campus.

The Visual History Archive (VHA) is a software tool created by the Shoah Foundation that allows users to both search for and view the digital video footage contained in the Shoah Foundation archive. The VHA provides a way for users to search for and to locate whole testimonies of relevance, as well as to locate more specific segments within the testimonies that relate to their interests.
 
The digitization, cataloguing and indexing of the testimonies allows users to create educational value from the raw testimonies by permitting full searching of the archive. The VHA currently contains access to video and data for most of the testimonies, and digitization, cataloging and indexing is a work in progress. Because of this, users will find that they have varying levels of access to the information contained in the testimonies. Most are fully accessible, but some are only partially accessible. See Archive Facts & Figures for more information regarding the number of testimonies that have been catalogued, indexed, and/or digitized.

Each testimony consists of one survivor or witness speaking about his or her life before, during and after the Holocaust. About a week before the videotaping session, the interviewer assisted the survivor or other witness with completing a “Pre-Interview Questionnaire” (PIQ). This 40-page document was designed to elicit detailed biographical information such as birthplace, education, wartime experience, and information about family members. The answers provided a basis for the interviewer's preparatory research and enabled him or her to formulate questions appropriate to the interviewee's age, education, social and religious background, and experience during the Holocaust.
 
During the videotaped interview sessions, survivors are guided by questions from the Shoah Foundation interviewer.   At the end of the testimony, the interviewee is given the opportunity to display artifacts (such as photographs) and at this time family members are also given the opportunity to speak.   These testimonies were recorded on videotape and preserved on digital master tapes.   The testimonies average 2.5 hours in length.

The Shoah Foundation 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. For a more detailed account of the languages, countries and experiences groups, see the Archive Facts & Figures page.