UK Film Academy Recognizes Holocaust Education Resource
Recollections: Eyewitnesses Remember the Holocaust, a groundbreaking DVD-ROM including Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies from the visual history archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute (SFI), won an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) at its Children’s Awards held Sunday, November 25.
The BAFTA award is essentially the United Kingdom’s equivalent of an Academy Award. Recollections received the accolade as the best in the Learning Secondary category at the ceremony, which celebrates the cream of children’s film and television.
This educational tool, available free of cost to educators in the UK, was produced by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), together with SFI, Film Education and the Picture Production Company (PPC).
Upon receiving the BAFTA award, Karen Pollock, chief executive of the HET, said, “We were thrilled to be nominated for a BAFTA, and are now completely overwhelmed to receive such a prestigious award. It is a huge honor to be recognized by the Academy and gives us a deep sense of pride.”
She continued, “While we are grateful to all our partners — SFI, Film Education and PPC — we are particularly indebted to those eyewitnesses who feature in Recollections and to all Holocaust survivors who live with their painful experience every day, yet are willing and determined to keep telling people their story as a warning for the future. This award is for them.”
Four years in development, Recollections integrates testimony from 18 eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, including Jewish survivors, Roma and Sinti survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors and political prisoners, as well as testimony from survivors of the eugenics program.
Other accounts come from rescuers, aid givers and a British liberator. The testimony is integrated into teaching and learning activities that not only educate students about the events of the Holocaust but also reflect on the lessons that can be learned for today.
“The testimonies featured in Recollections can help students identify with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and become aware of how individual prejudices can have unthinkable consequences,” said Douglas Greenberg, executive director of SFI and professor of history in USC College. “The institute hopes that the BAFTA award draws attention to Recollections, so that educators who have yet to discover the resource will use it to teach their students about the dangers of intolerance.”
The DVD-ROM is the first UK resource to focus solely on the interactive use of visual history testimony when teaching about the Holocaust.
For more information about Recollections, visit the SFI Web site or write to vhi-edu@usc.edu.