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As Holocaust survivors mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Kamloops is home to a rare trove of Holocaust memories.
The only archive of B.C.’s Holocaust survivor testimonies is kept at Thompson Rivers University. TRU is home to 74 DVDs kept by philosophy faculty member Jeff McLaughlin.
He purchased the discs for the school in 2007, part of a larger collection created by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, where testimonies were given in 32 languages by people in 56 countries.
McLaughlin, who at the time was an assistant professor, discovered the Holocaust archives while researching ‘Ethical Decision Making of Persons Involved with the Holocaust’ for his Philosophy 491 course.
The collection was established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg after filming Schindler’s List. The Shoah Foundation documented the experiences of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust by videotaping more than 50,000 testimonies.
Universities, libraries or government departments around the world have some association with the Shoah Foundation, but McLaughlin discovered there was no such collection associated with any institution in Canada.
“The Holocaust has been studied at length from psychological, historical and political perspectives. There has been limited analysis from philosophers on the ethics of the Holocaust,” McLaughlin said.
Nancy Levesque, who at the time of purchase was TRU's library director and has since retired, said: "It enables us to support the teaching, learning and research activities of the university. As TRU grows and offers more graduate programs, accessing primary source research materials to our students becomes increasingly important.”
The visual testimonies in TRU’s collection include those imprisoned in concentration camps, as well as those who survived either by hiding through the pogrom or those who hid others and how a member of the Sonderkommando (special unit for the gas chambers) escaped death during the Holocaust.
— With files from Inside TRU
