May 8 marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, also known as VE Day, when the U.S. and its World War II allies formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender.
Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library’s Central Branch, 200 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., has a trove of materials related to this period in history, including numerous first-person remembrances of the Holocaust.
For starters, the branch’s Indiana Room has about 120 testimonials that were mostly recorded in the 1990s. This archive is in DVD-ROM format, and the library obtained it in 2005. Most of the accounts are from residents of Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. “They range from 20 minutes to six hours,” says Erik Estep, EVPL’s local history librarian. “It depends on their recollections and comfort level.”
A newer and much larger source of Holocaust testimonials is available to EVPL users in a digital format. The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which the library gained access to about six months ago, has more than 55,000 survivor accounts of atrocities throughout history, including the Holocaust as well as more recent acts of genocide in the South Sudan Civil War, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Shoah Foundation is based at the University of Southern California and dates to 1994. Estep says its database of historical accounts is searchable by name, and in the case of Holocaust testimonials, by concentration camp. “It’s an international archive,” Estep says. “… Through USC, you just click a link and watch them from home with a library card.”
Estep notes one historical account in the Shoah Foundation’s archive is from the mother of Ralph Shayne, author of “Hour of Need,” a graphic novel on those who saved Danish Jews during the Holocaust. Shayne last month gave a presentation at Victory Theatre, through a partnership among EVPL, the Committee to Promote Respect in Schools (CYPRESS), and the Rechnic Foundation.
An additional, dignified touch in Central Library’s Indiana Room is a wooden table with sculpted ledgers, candles, and a pocket watch, signifying the spirit of Holocaust survivors. The work, called “Remembrance,” was created by John McNaughton, a founding faculty member at the University of Southern Indiana and a large presence in USI’s Art and Design Department for 35 years. The sculpture was installed at EVPL Central on Sept. 19, 2005. McNaughton passed away in 2022.
Estep describes McNaughton’s piece as “a creative expression of the Shoah collection. The candlesticks represent Shabbat candles, and the pocket watch represents the passage of time. To me, the books symbolize historical memory, about not forgetting the Holocaust and the crimes of genocide. There is something solid and physical about a book that you don’t get in any other medium. The books are here to stay.”
