Midwest Visual History Collection

The IHMEC Midwest Visual History Collection of
the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education

Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of volunteers of Steven Spielberg’s Survivor of the Shoah Visual History Foundation interviewed over 52,000 survivors, rescuers, and liberators, creating the world’s largest archive of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Now part of the University of Southern California, the Shoah Foundation has catalogued and indexed nearly all of the testimonies and provides access to them in universities, museums, and institutions around the world.

The Brill Resource Center of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is thrilled to be one of the first museums to provide full access to a Visual History Collection of over 2,000 testimonies from the Midwest.  View the list of testimonies here >

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute has developed a digital tool that allows researchers to search using over 30,000 experiential and geographic indexing terms to find relevant segments of testimonies. The software program permits researchers to identify both whole testimonies as well as specific segments within the testimony that relate to their area of interest.

The IHMEC Midwest Visual History Collection of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is available to visitors in the computer stations of the Brill Resource Center during regular center hours.

Download the list of the Midwest Visual History Collection now>