During the 1993 filming of Schindler’s List in Poland, the unexpected arrival of Holocaust survivors eager to share their raw, unscripted experiences profoundly moved director Steven Spielberg, inspiring him to forgo his personal profits from the movie and establish the USC Shoah Foundation, a massive global initiative that has since video-recorded and preserved more than 56,000 eyewitness testimonies to ensure their stories are never forgotten.
Driven by the urgent realisation that these ageing survivors would soon pass away and take their invaluable, unscripted accounts with them, Steven Spielberg was inspired to renounce his personal profits from Schindler’s List and establish the USC Shoah Foundation, launching a monumental global race against time that has permanently preserved over 56,000 video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses.
By directing Schindler’s List (1993), which won seven Academy Awards and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Steven Spielberg transformed himself from the world’s most commercially successful filmmaker into an artist of profound historical significance who pointed his camera at the worst event in human history and forced the world to look.
Refusing to settle for a mere representative sample, Steven Spielberg launched a relentless effort to record every available Holocaust survivor, driven by the urgent knowledge that their finite numbers were shrinking each year and that every story untold at the time of a survivor’s death was a piece of history lost forever.
Over more than thirty years of continuous development by Steven Spielberg, teams of trained interviewers fanned out across fifty-six countries to record survivors in thirty-two languages within their own homes, capturing around fifty thousand testimonies and over a hundred thousand hours of raw human memory that created the largest archive of Holocaust survivor testimony on Earth, which, since 2006, has lived at the University of Southern California as the USC Shoah Foundation to be used by students and scholars worldwide.
Among the thousands recorded was Celina Biniaz, who, after keeping her survival as one of the youngest children on Oskar Schindler’s actual list a secret from even her own children to protect them from the trauma, was moved by watching Schindler’s List to finally sit for the foundation and break her decades of silence, later standing before Steven Spielberg to tell him that he had given her back her voice.
Instead of walking away after completing his film, Steven Spielberg chose to race against time by sending camera crews to fifty-six countries, where they located and sat down with tens of thousands of people the world had nearly let disappear, letting them speak and permanently preserving voices that would otherwise have gone silent into the ground forever.
Profound gratitude truly belongs to Steven Spielberg, his global teams, and, above all, the courageous Holocaust survivors who braved their deepest traumas to record their testimonies so that humanity would never forget.
Holocaust deniers reject the overwhelming historical truth by relying on antisemitic conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation, and pseudo-scientific falsehoods to claim the genocide was a massive hoax, willfully ignoring meticulous Nazi documentation, the liberation reports of Allied soldiers, and the unassailable firsthand evidence preserved in archives like the USC Shoah Foundation.
The reality of the Holocaust is an undeniable historical certainty cemented by an unassailable mountain of evidence, ranging from the Nazi regime’s own meticulous documentation and photographs to the horrific scenes captured by liberating Allied armies and the over 56,000 firsthand video testimonies that permanently preserve the truth.
To ensure the entire world can bear witness, the USC Shoah Foundation has expanded far beyond a single location by creating a global network that provides full access to its 56,000+ testimonies at more than 170 universities, museums, and research institutions across dozens of countries, alongside a free online platform accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Reflecting the deep emotional resonance of the archive, everyday viewers, students, and scholars frequently comment on how these personal accounts humanise the vast statistics of the genocide, often echoing Celina Biniaz’s profound tribute to the project’s impact: “Oskar Schindler gave me my life, but Steven Spielberg gave me my voice.”
Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and Nazi Party member who originally moved to Kraków to profit from cheap Jewish labour but underwent a profound moral transformation upon witnessing Nazi atrocities, ultimately spending his entire personal fortune on bribes to protect roughly 1,200 Jewish workers by famously classifying them as essential to the war effort at his factories, an act of extraordinary courage that earned him the title of Righteous Among the Nations and made him the only Nazi Party member buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
