Yad Vashem opens the biggest database of Holocaust films in the world

Maria Zawadzka, 16 November 2016
On July 27th, 2011 the Yad Vashem Institute made the biggest database of films devoted to the Holocaust available to the public. Its Internet catalogue contains almost 7.000 elements. The collection includes, among others, the 1948 documentalized feature film “Ostatni etap” (“The last stage”) by Wanda Jakubowska. The director was prisoner of the biggest extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

If we enter the title “Schindler’s list” in the search engine of the Yad Vashem Institute database, we will find – apart from over ten language versions of the film – 16 other entries connected with the Hollywood super production, among them the documentary “Żołnierze wyklęci. Losy niepokornych” by Wincenty Ronisz, devoted to fighters of the postwar anti-communist underground movement.

The collection mostly includes documentaries – 4 thousand – but also 1 thousand full-length feature films, 400 series and 250 registered accounts. The catalogue was founded thanks to the financial support of Awraham Harszalom-Fridberg. The donor wanted to commemorate his parents Mosze and Cyra Fridberg and his brother Sioma who were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943.

Awraham Harszalom (Adam Fridberg) was born in 1925 in Prużany (currently located in Belarus, before the war situated within the Polish boundaries). In January 1943 the Fridberg family was deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. In June 1944 Fridberg tried to escape from the camp but he only managed to do it one and a half years later, when he escaped from a transport during the evacuation of prisoners. He reached Praga where he was taken in by Irina Sobotkowa, honored by the Yad Vashem Institute with the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.