10/20/2026
In 1993, while Steven Spielberg was filming *Schindler’s List* in Kraków, Poland, something unexpected began to happen. Holocaust survivors started showing up at the locations where the movie was being shot, many of them places where the actual events had taken place fifty years earlier. They wanted to meet the director and tell him their stories, not the version written in the screenplay, but what they had personally experienced as children on those very streets. Spielberg listened to them, and the more he heard, the more he realized that no screenwriter could ever invent stories like theirs. These people were growing old, and he understood that one day, before long, the last survivors would be gone, taking their memories with them if no one recorded them.
The director was Steven Spielberg, and the film was *Schindler’s List*. Released in 1993, it won seven Academy Awards and became one of the most acclaimed films ever made. Spielberg was already one of the most commercially successful directors in the world, but the film gave him a different purpose. He had turned his camera toward one of the darkest chapters in human history and forced audiences around the world to confront it. Yet he knew that making the movie was not enough. In 1994, using the attention and resources the film had brought him, he began a race against time. He established an organization initially known as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, with an ambitious mission: to find Holocaust survivors and witnesses around the world, sit them in front of a video camera, and record their life stories in their own words before it was too late.
Spielberg was not interested in recording only a small, representative group of survivors. He wanted to preserve as many stories as possible because he knew the number of living witnesses was limited and shrinking every year. Every person who died without sharing their experiences took a piece of history with them that could never be recovered. He set a target of 50,000 testimonies and sent trained interviewers across the world to make it happen. They recorded survivors in 56 countries and 32 languages, meeting them in living rooms, kitchens, and care homes. Elderly men and women sat before the cameras and, sometimes for the first time in their lives, spoke openly about the towns they had come from, the families they had lost, the concentration camps, the hunger, their liberation, and the decades they had spent trying to rebuild their lives afterward.
By 1999, just five years after the project began, the foundation had recorded nearly 52,000 testimonies. It had become the largest archive of Holocaust survivor accounts in the world. Today, the collection contains more than 56,000 video testimonies, representing over 100,000 hours of recorded human memory. In 2006, the foundation moved to the University of Southern California, where it continues its work as the USC Shoah Foundation, making these accounts available to students, researchers, and scholars around the world. Spielberg has remained involved in this effort for more than three decades, ensuring that the survivors’ experiences continue to be heard by generations who will never have the chance to meet them in person.
Among those who shared their testimony was Celina Biniaz, who had been one of the youngest people on Oskar Schindler’s actual list as a child, saving her from the gas chambers. For much of her adult life, she rarely spoke about what she had endured. Even her own children did not know she had survived the Holocaust because she did not want them to carry the weight of that painful past. Everything began to change after she watched *Schindler’s List*. She eventually sat down with the foundation and told her story. Years later, she stood before Spielberg and told him that he had given her voice back.
That is what made Spielberg’s work so important. He could have made the film, accepted its success, and moved on to something else. Instead, he chose to race against time, sending cameras to 56 countries to find people whose experiences might otherwise have disappeared from history. He gave them the opportunity to speak, preserving more than 50,000 voices that might have been lost forever. At the heart of this effort was a message reflected in the Talmudic saying associated with his film: whoever saves one life saves the world entire.
Today, nearly all the survivors who shared their memories are gone. But because one filmmaker
