In the continuing fight to educate the world about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and to honor the millions who were slaughtered, Holocaust educators are rushing to preserve first-person testimony. Survivors are aging; the youngest remaining witnesses are reaching their 80s, and their inevitable disappearance weighs heavily on educators, who believe there is nothing more effective and moving than face-to-face testimonies.

“I don’t like to speak of the day when there won’t be any survivors,” said Shulamit Imber, pedagogical director of Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, as reported in an article by Michael Chabin for Religion News Service. “To hear that six million Jews were murdered is overwhelming. To hear one story from someone who lived through the Holocaust makes a strong impression.”

While Yad Vashem has thousands of survivor testimonies in its archives, the importance of in-person survivor testimonies goes beyond anecdotal evidence, Imber said. In surveys, teachers who have participated in Yad Vashem’s multiday Holocaust education seminars listed face-to-face encounters with survivors as the most effective part of the program.

The race against time has prompted Yad Vashem to create a contextual kind of filmed testimony in which survivors travel to their hometowns in Europe and to the places where they experienced the Holocaust most acutely. Yad Vashem is also actively encouraging teachers to use its extensive archive of diaries by Holocaust victims, many of whom did not survive the war. “Everyone knows about Anne Frank’s diary, but there are thousands more, translated into many languages,” she said.

Survivors of Auschwitz arrive at the International Monument to the victims of Fascism at former Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Oswiecim, Poland, on Jan. 27.                                                      AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski