Ilana Safran, a Dutch Jew who was imprisoned in the Sobibor extermination camp during the Holocaust, recounts her time there and her escape in 1943 to join the local partisans before eventually immigrating to Israel. Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born Jew active in the underground during World War II, speaks about fighting in the Israeli War of Independence and later becoming a brigadier general in the Israeli army. He served as director of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, from 1972 to 1993. 

Their voices are among those featured in a special audio exhibition at The New York Historical in New York City. They are drawn from interviews conducted by the renowned French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann as part of his research for the nine-hour-plus-long Shoah, his groundbreaking 1985 Holocaust documentary. Safran and Arad’s audiotaped interviews, along with those of 23 other men and women, are presented in honor of the centennial of Lanzmann’s 1925 birth.

Titled “The Recordings: Voices from the Shoah Tapes,” the exhibition, which runs through March 29, features audio that has never been available in the United States. The setup is deliberately spare: one intimate room with 10 listening stations where visitors can hear the recordings in the interviewees’ original languages, with English transcripts displayed on adjacent screens.

Lanzmann and his staff interviewed survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, recording those exchanges on audio cassette tapes. When speaking with Nazi perpetrators, the interviewer’s recording device was usually hidden, for instance in a bag. Among the interview subjects available at the New York exhibit is Edmund Veesenmayer, a German diplomat and high-ranking SS officer.

What distinguishes the exhibition is its focus on hearing, said Tamar Lewinsky, curator for audiovisual media at the Judisches Museum Berlin (Berlin’s Jewish museum), who also curated the New York City exhibition. “This turns a visit into a lesson in listening,” she said. “In terms of content, it provides previously unknown insights into Lanzmann’s complex and longstanding research work and his conceptual considerations long before filming began.”

Among them, she said, was “that the filmmaker first explored all aspects of the Shoah before the Final Solution—the mass murder in the extermination camps—became his main theme.”

Selections from the Lanzmann audio archives are also available at the Judisches Museum Berlin through April 12 and at the Shoah Memorial in Paris through March 29. Together, the three concurrent exhibitions mark the first public presentations of the cassettes.

In 2023, both the Lanzmann audio archive and the Shoah documentary were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Program, meant to preserve the world’s documentary heritage, particularly in areas affected by conflict and/or natural disaster. Unused footage from the actual filming of Shoah is in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 

 “The recordings that can be heard in the exhibition were made only three decades after the Holocaust,” Lewinsky said. “The voices of the contemporary witnesses are thus also unique oral documents about memory in the 1970s.

“Today, with the passing of eyewitnesses and growing antisemitism,” she added, “it remains an important task to convey knowledge about the Holocaust and keep its memory alive.”

Louise Mirrer, president of  The New York Historical, echoed that sentiment, referencing the significant rise in antisemitism in the United States. “Listening to these accounts of people of the past should be a lens onto thinking about the present,” she said. “I think that young people, in particular, should listen to these tapes because they will gain an understanding of how quickly people can forget about things that happen in the past, and not learn from them.”

Jane L. Levere is a New York-based freelance journalist and contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Forbes.com, among many publications. She is also a life member of Hadassah.