Czech Republic – Prague has become the third European capital after Berlin and Budapest to have access to a unique U.S.-based database of Holocaust survivor testimonies.
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Project coordinator Jitka Drahokoupilova says Prague’s Center of Visual History Malakh began on Friday to offer access to the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, a Los Angeles-based organization founded by director Steven Spielberg.
With a collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies from Jewish survivors in 32 languages, representing 56 countries, including the Czech Republic, the archive is one of the largest visual history archive in the world.
Drahokoupilova says the center located at Prague’s Charles University offers the service to anyone free of charge.
I was in Prague in 1993. The building where the wall of names is had been under renovation. Some painter had decided to paint over the wall with the names…names that had actually been painted there during comunist times. It was flat white. There was an art student on a ladder with a tiny caligraphy brush painstakingly painting names one letter at a time. It must have taken years to repaint all the names.