on Kickstarter, a popular online crowdfunding site. Launched this past summer to coincide with the 75th anniversary of when Anne Frank received her diary as a 13th birthday gift, the Museum’s campaign, “Save Their Stories: Undiscovered Diaries of the Holocaust”, seeks to make more than 200 diaries in the Museum’s collection accessible online. The Museum asked the public to pledge any amount they can, with a goal to reach $250,000 in four weeks. If the Museum did not reach the amount, the money would be forfeited and returned to the pledgers.
“Anne Frank’s diary is many people’s first introduction to the history of the Holocaust,” says Dana Weinstein, the Museum’s director of new audience engagement and membership. “She is the most well-known Holocaust diarist, and many of us first learned about the Holocaust through her writings, which put an unforgettable, human face on this time of unprecedented evil and suffering. But there are many other accounts of the Holocaust that have the potential to teach us even more about this history. And we want to make them available and easily accessible.”
Each of the diaries in the Museum’s collection has an important story to tell, of suffering and strength, persecution and perseverance. Written by people young and old, from diverse backgrounds and countries, they bring to life a broad spectrum of individuals’ experiences during the Holocaust.
countries, they bring to life a broad spectrum of individuals’ experiences during the Holocaust.
“Especially now, as Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise, we must bring these stories to light,” says Kyra Schuster, the Museum curator who helped lead the project. “As the survivor generation passes, it is our responsibility to make sure their voices live on so that their experiences will not be forgotten.”
Indeed, the Museum is in a race against time to do the specialized, expensive and time-consuming work required to digitize and make available these collections; the handwritten pages and notes are in 17 different languages.
Through the generosity of more than 5,500 people from 26 countries and all 50 U.S. states, the Museum is able to catalog and digitize all of the more than 200 diaries in its collection. Additionally 13 will be transcribed and translated into English. The diaries in the Museum’s collection document many experiences of the Holocaust: Jews who were seeking refuge; prisoners in ghettos and concentration camps; people in hiding; and more. “We hope this project helps people better understand the diversity of Holocaust victims’ experiences and the complexity of this history,” Schuster says.
That diary, which is one of the many first-person accounts that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has collected since it opened almost 25 years ago, is now central to an innovative — and successful — campaign