Mondays at Beinecke: In the First Person with Konstanze Kunst

Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/3z8Tsd0

The second of two talks on the new exhibition, “In the First Person,” marking the forty-fifth anniversary of the first videotaping by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a grassroots New Haven community initiative that evolved into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. “In the First Person” is the first large-scale public exhibition of footage from this groundbreaking collection. Powerful excerpts from nineteen video testimonies presents the experiences of survivors and witnesses to the atrocities and genocide committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

These videos are presented alongside a display of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, documents, and other items from the collections of Yale Library that presents a history of Jewish efforts to document anti-Jewish persecution by means of eyewitness accounts, from the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through the Holocaust and its aftermath. The exhibition confronts the myth that survivors were silent about their experiences in the immediate post–World War II period and provides further context for understanding the Fortunoff Archive’s historical significance and impact.

The exhibition was curated by Stephen Naron and Konstanze Kunst, who give this talk. Naron is Director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and Kunst is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Librarian for Judaic Studies at Yale Library. Naron is the Mondays at Beinecke speaker on September 30.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.