December 31, 1998

A Nightmare Told in Words and Pictures

SURVIVORS: TESTIMONIES OF THE HOLOCAUST

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(Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation; two-disk set for $29.95, or $69.95 for two sets with a study guide; Macintosh 7.1 and up and Windows 95 and up.)

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his set of CD-ROM's features accounts from the huge digital archive of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Something of a technological marvel, the 150-terabyte archive (a terabyte is a trillion bytes or 1,000 gigabytes) contains videotaped oral histories from close to 50,000 Holocaust survivors. The foundation was started by the director Steven Spielberg after he made the film "Schindler's List." The recording of survivors' accounts began in 1994.

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	Overview • For the Oldest of Lessons, the Newest of Tools This Week's Articles • Historian Dominates a History • From the Torah to the Zohar • A Nightmare Told in Words and Pictures • Telling the Story for Children

This CD-ROM compilation uses the stories of four survivors -- Bert, Sol, Sylvia and Paula -- to teach the history and geography of the Holocaust to students in grades seven and above. (A 32-page study guide created by Facing History and Ourselves, a Holocaust education group, comes with the purchase of a two-set teacher's pack.)

The CD-ROM is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder, two Hollywood heartthrobs the foundation no doubt hopes will draw in young people.

The graphic design of the CD-ROM is muted, which is appropriate given the horrific nature of the information conveyed. Over a charred parchment background, sepia photographs and occasional snippets of black-and-white newsreels appear and dissolve as in a movie.

One very effective aspect of the CD's interface is revealed by placing a pointer on a photograph. The contrast darkens and a couple of lines explaining the context of the picture appear in a window below it.

A total of 80 minutes of survivors' accounts is divided into nine time periods: before the war, after the war and year by year, starting in 1939 and ending in 1945. Students can follow the progress of a particular survivor throughout the course of the Holocaust or track all four of them in any given period.

A map of Europe is available for each time period. A valuable index of terms, locations, historical figures and events benefits from the Shoah Foundation's extensive cataloguing of the oral histories. You highlight a selection in a frame on the left of the screen and definitions appear in a frame on the right; the definitions range from a sentence to several paragraphs.

A two-sentence entry on Birkenau, for example, explains that it was a death camp added to the Auschwitz complex in 1941 and that more than a million Jews were murdered there "with horrible efficiency." The index devotes three paragraphs to war criminals and war crimes, mentioning the Nuremberg trials and the cold war's impact on prosecutions and listing prominent Nazis who were never brought to justice and a couple who were.

The shortcomings of Testimonies of the Holocaust are minor. You have to sit through the same two-and-a-half-minute introduction every time you start up the CD-ROM. Some screens scroll down in a jerky fashion, leaving users wondering whether they have gone too far down in the text. And then there is the background music, somber strings that play while no one is speaking. It just isn't necessary and gets to be slightly grating after a while.

But this is an excellent educational resource, thoughtfully designed and thorough in its presentation. The foundation gets high marks for approaching this task by telling the stories of four individuals, putting faces and voices to the horrors of the Holocaust.