Kansas City-based MCHE highlights its testimony mapping project

The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE) has announced “Through Hell to the Midwest,” a mapping project that traces the stories of survivors who settled in the Kansas City area.

MCHE’s collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies, the Witnesses to the Holocaust Archive, is the centerpiece of its teaching resources. Preserving the testimony and ensuring that it is used responsibly in service of teaching the lessons of the Holocaust is the measure by which MCHE evaluates all requests to utilize the testimonies. One such request came to MCHE from Dr. Amber Nickell and Professor Hollie Marquess in the Fort Hays State University history department. As longtime MCHE partners, they had a vision for an innovative project utilizing the testimonies, which became “Through Hell to the Midwest.”

Using oral history testimony collected by MCHE and dually housed in the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University, they have meticulously followed the path of each survivor in the archive, tracing their steps from their hometowns in Central and Eastern Europe through their Holocaust experiences to their new lives in Kansas and Missouri.

“Working on this project has been incredibly rewarding,” Marquess said. “We hope this can function as a teaching tool for future generations, and we look forward to expanding the project to trace the experiences of other Midwestern survivors.”

Stephen Naron, director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, called the project remarkable due to the collaboration of scholars, students, archivists and educators to visualize the movements of survivors with modern technology.

“But, more importantly,” he said, “on a collective level, since these are all survivors who landed for one reason or another in Kansas City, it is a reminder of the fact that the Holocaust is not some history far remote in space and time, but a history that is close to home and an integral part of the American experience. These KC survivors could have been your neighbors, and thus, their wartime struggle and pain, their family histories as well as their multifaceted contributions to postwar life in Kansas City are part of our story as well.”

Read more at the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle