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USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive: Spain

Established in 1994 to preserve the audio-visual histories of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, the USC Shoah Foundation maintains one of the largest video digital libraries in the world: the Visual History Archive (VHA).

Spain

The USC Shoah Foundation collected 435 testimonies with content about Spain. Many of them contain the experiences of Jewish refugees who fled from France after the French capitulation in 1940 and were often detained in prisons and internment camps such as Miranda de Ebro.

The help given to Jews by the Spanish consulate in Budapest is covered in a small number of interviews; the role of Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian who worked in the Spanish embassy issuing protection papers and assigning safe houses to Jews, is discussed in particular.

Some interviewees discuss their encounters with members of "La División Azul", the Spanish troops who volunteered for the German Army and who fought on the Russian front.

From the prewar period, there are first-hand descriptions of the Spanish Civil War, including testimonies of participants in the International Brigades. On other testimonies, there are mentions of Spanish civil war veterans who were encountered in French internment camps and camps in Austria during World War II.

The USC Shoah Foundation gathered 1,354 Spanish-language interviews, almost all in Central and South America. Seven interviews were recorded in Spain, all with Jewish survivors, 6 in Spanish and 1 in German. These interviewees came from various parts of Europe (Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Yugoslavia) and settled in Spain after the war.

Visual History Archive Curator

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Crispin Brooks
Contact:
crispinb@usc.edu
213-740-6001
Website