Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive launches a podcast that features testimonies from Holocaust survivors including a former resident of West Bloomfield.
Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has launched the podcast, “Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust.” The podcast allows listeners to hear first-hand accounts of the tragedies that took place during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Survivors Film Project donated their collection of interviews of Holocaust survivors to the Yale University Library in 1981. From there, the Fortunoff Video Archive made it its goal to collect individual’s stories from the Holocaust.
The podcast’s narrator, Eleanor Reissa, is a Tony-nominated director, actress, singer and writer. She is also the daughter of two Holocaust survivors.
The two most recent episodes feature testimonies from two Jewish women, Sally Finkelstein Horwitz and Heda Kovaly. Kovaly was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camps while Horwitz, mother of JN publisher/executive editor Arthur Horwitz, was a survivor of the Skarzysko-Kamienna labor camp.
Her story offers listeners insight into the cruelty she endured and witnessed during the Holocaust at a young age, and details how she and her three sisters were able to stay together and survive the war.
Horwitz started her new life in New Haven, Connecticut, and later moved with her husband Morton to West Bloomfield in 2005, where she lived until her passing in 2014. She was a long-time member of Congregation B’nai Moshe.
Co-producer of the podcast Nahanni Rous said in a press release, “I hope listening to their stories also helps attune us to the resurgence of bigotry and incitement in public discourse, with its violent consequences — and can spur us to fight against the politics of hate in our time.”