Three artists find inspiration in the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies

Through it artists-in-residence program, Yale Library’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies invites musicians, writers, and visual artists to explore and respond to its extensive collection of survivors’ personal stories.

The Fortunoff Video Archive is an oral-history repository of more than 4,400 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Nazi regime’s atrocities committed during World War II. These artists’ works are creative expressions of public history, engaging and informing a broad audience, while helping to keep the stories of the past alive for future generations.

As one of the three current artists-in-residence—Grzegorz Kwiatkowski—told Yale News, “I think that by facing the horrors from the past, we can be better people.”

Kwiatkowski, a native of Poland and the grandson of a survivor of one of the camps, is incorporating witness testimonies, historical research, and his own creative vision in his work as a poet and musician.

Author and illustrator Nora Krug, associate professor of illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York City, is a native of Germany. She is conducting research for an illustrated nonfiction book about the narratives in the Fortunoff Video Archive collection.

“The Empty Shell of War,” by playwright, filmmaker, and Belorussian dissident Andrei Kureichik, premiered at Yale’s Slifka Center in January. Kureichik based the work on the Fortunoff Archive’s testimonies of women survivors from Belarus, including the testimony of a 12-year-old girl who escaped the Nazi-occupied region.

Read more about these artists-in-residence, featured in Mike Cummings’s recent article in Yale News.

—Deborah Cannarella