#Quotes from ida fink archive

He could recall these experiences with such extreme emotional clarity that, encouraged by his partner, he eventually turned them into a book. He remembered being a Jewish child in Poland during the Second World War, and he remembered the horrors he had endured, separated from his parents at the age of three, in the Nazi concentration camps. These were not scenes from a Christian childhood in Switzerland, but from a Jewish childhood spent in the most terrible time and place to be Jewish in modern history. It was around this time that he began to write down scenes from his early childhood. Together, they moved to a large farmhouse in the country and slowly Bruno began to regain his health. A year later, he met his new partner, Verena, an opera singer who taught music at the same high school as Bruno near Zurich. In 1981 he fell seriously ill and had several operations. The marriage became strained and he and his wife separated. But the clarinet proved a hard way to make money and Bruno found it difficult to support his family. In 1964, when he was twenty-three, Bruno married a Zurich girl, Annette, from a titled Swiss family, and they had three children, two boys and a girl. He became a clarinet player and teacher, and, more extraordinarily, also a clarinet builder, assembling the instruments from scratch in his own workshop. It was music that eventually gave him a living. At university in Geneva, he abandoned a course in medicine and turned instead to history and music. At school, he took more interest in the arts than in sciences. The Dössekkers stuck with his Christian name, but in 1947, the year he started school, they changed his last name to Dössekker.īruno Dössekker was in some ways a disappointment to his adoptive parents. He was born in the Swiss town of Biel, and had been taken into care by the town authorities, since his mother was poor and he was illegitimate. The child arrived, according to all the available documentation, with the name of Bruno Grosjean. Perhaps he would become a successful physician and perpetuate the family’s name and reputation. They had high hopes for their foster son. The couple had no children of their own and no prospect of having any Mrs Dössekker was nearly fifty, her husband several years older. Dr Dössekker was a well-known dermatologist his father, Dr Walter Dössekker, had been the country’s first specialist in radiology. The Dössekkers were wealthy, German-speaking Swiss citizens who lived in a villa in Zürichberg, the most affluent quarter of Zurich. More than half a century ago, soon after the end of the Second World War, a young boy became the foster child of Dr Kurt and Mrs Martha Dössekker. I look at the picture reproduced on the opposite page-that nice-looking, sensitive boy-and wonder, not for the first time, where he thinks he has come from and who he thinks he is. To break our trust in these memories would be a cruel thing to question their veracity, equally cruel. They can teach us about the Holocaust in an educationally compelling and emotionally moving way.’ ‘Through this material, long after they are gone, survivors can speak to future generations.’ It provided, he said, ‘an unparalleled means of understanding the experience of the victim.

#Quotes from ida fink archive

The question I wanted to ask Spielberg was an uncomfortable one: would this great archive serve the future as a reliable source of history? ‘Absolutely,’ said Spielberg. That’s more than fourteen years of material, enough videotape to circumnavigate the globe.’ In Spielberg’s words: ‘We have collected more than 50,000 testimonies in thirty-one languages across fifty-seven countries.

The Shoah Foundation has done remarkable work. Spielberg diverted much of the profits from the film into another of his creations, the Shoah Foundation, which would record and videotape the memories of the Holocaust’s real survivors-people as themselves and not played by actors, delivering their witness accounts to camera, the only script their own.

The film was such a popular success that it would be fair to say that many millions of people throughout the world received their primary instruction on the Holocaust through it.

Like the novel, Schindler’s Ark, on which it is based, the film used fictional devices, invented scenes and dialogue, to dramatize fact. In the course of researching the story that follows I talked to Steven Spielberg, who made the film Schindler’s List.