Rwandan genocide survivors learn to preserve their stories from USC's Shoah Foundation

A group of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide are in Los Angeles to learn over the next month how the Shoah Foundation at USC has documented and indexed its collection of testimonies from Holocaust survivors. The group will then return to Rwanda with the knowledge as they set out to record their country’s own stockpile of mass killings.

The training took place in a bright conference room decorated with a collage of Holocaust survivor pictures on one wall and a large image of director Stephen Spielberg filming Schindler’s List on another.

With a wireless keyboard and mouse Shoah Foundation curator Crispin Brooks taught four visitors from the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre how to choose key terms for a survivor’s testimony.

For every minute in the video, Brooks and the trainees choose from a list of 60,000 index terms to describe what the Holocaust survivor is talking about — from the mundane to the unspeakable.

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“We were talking the other day about distinguishing mass executions from just executions,” Brooks recalled. “So [to separate] smaller groups of people from individual killings or murders, we separate terms for each one, and we define each term.”

Indexing is one of the most time consuming parts of the job. But, in historic terms, it is arguably the most important. It’s what will allow historians anytime in the future to easily access the details of genocide.

There are over 50,000 digitized testimonies of people who survived the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.

Fast forward almost five decades, to when inter-ethnic conflict led to the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans during a three-month period in 1994. The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in the Rwandan capital has videoed 2,000 testimonies, the vast majority of which are from Tutsi survivors.

Diogene Mwizerwa works at the center as an indexer, listening to fellow Rwandans’ testimonies of death and survival — and finding the words to describe the experience.

“When you give an interview, when you give a testimony you have to be too detailed,” he attempted to explain. “You have to give it in details... it is still being hard for me to do it.”

Mwirzerwa was 12 years old when the Hutus reached his village — but, despite archiving countless survivors’ testimonies day after day, it is still too painful for him to tell his own story.

“I ask myself, when will I be ready?” he said. “I don’t know yet. But I think I will be ready before I die.”

The Shoah Foundation is paying for the Rwandan visitors’ training and for digitizing, storing and disseminating a batch of the Rwandan genocide testimonies.

The Jewish Holocaust is no longer the organization’s sole mission, said Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith.

“I would like to use the power of everything we’re learning together," Smith said, "not to be documenting testimonies 50 years after but preferably five years before, so that we can listen to the voices of those who are already experiencing persecution and perhaps save their lives, rather than documenting the fact that they lost them.”