The project is part of a nationwide collection of oral histories that will appear in local and national museums commemorating the Holocaust. Copies of the interviews will also become part of Yale University's Fortunoff Collection. Huberman became involved with the project in 1991 after he was approached by a staffer from the Houston Holocaust Education Center. He has videotaped approximately 90 of the 100 videos that have been shot over the last four years, said Laura Schwartz, the center's project manager. Schwartz estimates that there are 100 to 150 more Holocaust survivors in Houston who may contribute interviews to the project.
Similar projects are underway in other U.S. cities.
Huberman was asked to do the project at a time when his interest in oral history had been piqued by a project of his own. The only way I had to connect with that experience was to interview the cast and crew and technicians who worked on the film. The experience opened him to new possibilities for creating a document of historical events. There is an attraction in the idea of the very simple, pure cinematic, or videomatic, experience of sitting someone down to tell their story to the camera with the minimal amount of seductive whistles and bells. Huberman videotapes the interviews, focusing almost exclusively on the subject, not on the interviewers, and occasionally asks a question of his own.