“We Are All Witnesses”: Eva Reichmann and the Wiener Library’s Eyewitness Accounts Collection

Abstract

In the mid-1950s, when Jewish historical research commissions in Europe were concluding their work collecting survivor accounts and other records, Dr Eva Reichmann, Director of Research at the Wiener Library (London), launched an initiative to gather as many eyewitness reports as possible. Over approximately five years and with Claims Conference funding, the project succeeded in collecting some 1300 accounts from refugees and survivors, who recounted their experiences from 1933 through the post-war period. British and continental European presses issued calls for interviewees, and interviewers (often survivors or spouses of survivors) recorded, transcribed and extensively indexed the accounts. Their methodology differs markedly from contemporary attempts to record survivor testimony, with extensive mediation on the part of the interviewers and editors. Reichmann’s initiative exhibited important continuities with the work that Library founder Alfred Wiener and his colleagues, mainly German-speaking refugees who had fled Nazi persecution, had been carrying out since Hitler’s rise to power. This chapter provides historical context for the creation of the Library’s testimonies archive and explores the justification and methodology employed in the initiative. It considers the influence of Reichmann’s scholarship on German Jewry and her experiences as a German Jewish refugee woman in shaping and implementing the project.

This title comes from the author’s translation of the original German title in the draft version of Reichmann (1954) in Wiener Library Archive 3000/7/2/1, Eyewitness testimony project: Administration.