I Did Not Interview the Dead

Synopsis

In 1946, psychologist Dr David Boder travelled across the American zones of war-torn Europe to record 120 interviews that remain unique. In Yiddish, Polish, German, Spanish and English, mostly Jewish young men, women and orphan children were asked to tell their personal stories of survival and loss in the world of Nazi concentration and death camps.

Boder also gathered from them the songs of the ghettos.These recordings are arguably the first ever oral histories and the only contemporary interviews with people who had survived the worst but whose immediate fate was unkown. Alan Dein listens to those still making sense of their terrible experiences.