Some scholars are still uneasy, unsure, and ambivalent about how the history of the Holocaust will be presented and represented and how it will consequently be received. Historical research on the Holocaust has provided mountains of information about perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and rescuers. More and more historians are convinced, too, that accounts of victims who survived are nothing less than logical entry points into the study of that epoch. Combine these personal accounts with the historical context and a more informed appreciation of the history gradually emerges. Personal and public together, historical objectivity and private passion complement and illumine each other.
Private tragedies open a listener's ears to the historical cataclysm.
Without the combination, there remains either emotion, lacking knowledge, or factual information without compassion and engagement. For 14 years, Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has interviewed Holocaust survivors. The University's Mardigian Library has been the repository of these interviews. As a University of distinction, the campus has demonstrated its dignity and character because of the respect it has accorded the tapes and the people who made them. We have been and are engaged in rescuing fragments of fragments of memory.