Don't let Holocaust memories die, Spielberg urges

by Mark Rahner <[email protected]>,
Seattle Times staff reporter

For director Steven Spielberg, eye contact is what you need to bring alive the lessons of the Holocaust.

Spielberg urged Seattle donors yesterday to help spread the testimonies of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors. The director of "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" stopped at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle for a $250-a-plate breakfast fund-raiser to benefit the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Spielberg founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994, after the release of his trenchant black-and-white Holocaust epic, "Schindler's List," to gather firsthand recollections from the aging survivors before their experiences were lost. Those videotaped interviews - including about 100 from Seattle residents - would take 13 years for one person to watch, by the foundation's estimate.

"In the public-school system," Spielberg said, "tolerance education is no better than it was when I was a student."

Now that the collection phase is mostly complete, disseminating survivors' harrowing stories is the next task. The cost would be about $50 million, the foundation estimates. That means getting more financial and technological help, as well as acceptance in classrooms, Spielberg said. Seattle is a logical place to turn, he said.

" . . . Because we are a very emotional historic archive that uses technology to get our message out there, we're looking for creative partnerships with technologists wherever they exist. And guess what: The best of the best are in Seattle."

Asked to name names, Spielberg answered only, "The usual suspects."

He quoted "Casablanca" again to explain his own involvement.

"I just so well remember that great line from 'Casablanca' when Humphrey Bogart says, 'I'm the only cause I'm interested in.' And about 20 years ago, my movies were the only cause I was interested in. And then when I began having kids, my children were the only cause I was interested in. . . . (Now) the Shoah Foundation and sort of helping to disseminate 50,707 survivors as educators in tolerance education has become the most important cause I've ever been associated with," he said.

Gov. Gary Locke, who shared a table with Spielberg at the breakfast, sang the director's praises but said he didn't know if the state would get involved in financial support for the project. "He's out there taking risks, and starting to push the envelope. His films and his work are perhaps the best way to educate students and young people," Locke said.

Renee Firestone, 76, an Auschwitz survivor featured in the award-winning Shoah documentary "The Last Days," said, "This is a tremendous project, and it's very costly. And even though Mr. Spielberg probably could fund all of it, the fact is that it must be a joint event."

The foundation has released an interactive CD-ROM, "Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust," which focuses on the lives of four ex-prisoners, with narration by Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder. And, based in Los Angeles, the organization will make its entire digital archive available at other repositories in Jerusalem, Washington, D.C., New York City and Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

Conversation with Spielberg was mainly limited to the matter at hand, but he did mention plans for one movie: "I'm planning another World War II picture in a couple of years. I don't want to talk about it right now, but it's another World War II story that's close to my heart. It's not a Holocaust story."

Spielberg said long-range plans for the Shoah Foundation include broadening its focus to "civil rights and slavery and Japanese Americans being interned in American concentration camps in World War II, as well as the story of the Turks and Armenians, the story of the Native Americans over the past 200 years, the story of gay-bashing and Vietnam veterans who came back to return to America to become pariahs.

"I'm talking about this whole kind of rainbow blend of racial bias," Spielberg said. "You just can't teach the Holocaust by itself."