The testimony of Rochester area Holocaust survivors is now archived online by the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information of the Jewish Federation of Rochester.
Over three years, stories and photos as well as video and audio recordings were gathered and digitized, now available for search by survivor's last names.
Rebecca Erbelding is an archivist and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and originally from Rochester. She said the project hopes to take survivors out of the history books, and put local names and faces to them.
"Holocaust survivors aren’t this abstract notion; this isn’t just a history of black and white photos of railcars. But people lived lives and came here and became members of the Rochester community, your neighbors."
Leah Malek is a Holocaust survivor. She was young, from a small town in Hungary, and didn’t want to talk about her experience for a while, but eventually decided it was best to share her story.
"I don’t know why I survived. The grace of God, I don’t know, but I survived. And if I don’t teach my children, and consequently their children and the future generations, then Hitler won."
That’s what the Rochester Holocaust Survivors archive is all about, preserving stories for future generations.
Malek hopes the archives will humanize history, and help people understand and recognize that these events happened to people right in our own community.
"If you see a person in life, it’s not like reading in a history book. But you see a human person who can tell you personally what happened. I was not in Auschwitz, I was in a different camp, so every person has a different story. But the story is still a survivor."
The website was launched at the annual Holocaust remembrance program, known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah.
Leah Malek’s story the rest of the archives at rochesterholocaustsurvivors.org.