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Meanwhile, Mames was looking for
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interviews for the Holocaust Memorial
Center in West Bloomfield.

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Holocaust historian Sidney Bolkosky
examines a photo album that belonged to
a German Jewish family.

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They became a 'team, Bolkosky said,
with Mames "nudging, cajoling and per-
suading the survivors by any means pos-
sible" to tell their stories on tape.
"Sometimes I'd be at his house until
midnight or 1 a.m.," Bolkosky recalled.
"I knew when I left he'd stay up listen-
ing to the tapes through the night."
Although portions of their work can
be heard at HMC, with Bolkosky
undertaking the Voice/Vision project at
UM-Dearborn, copyrights to the inter-
views are held by the University of
Michigan Board of Regents.
Another survivor who has become
intimately involved with the interview
project is Abe Pasternak, whose volun-
teer work has become so intense he has
his own desk at UM-D's Mardigian
Library, where the archive is housed.
The transcribed interviews are also
entered into OCLC, the Online
Computer Library Catalog.
The project is seeking funding for a
full-time archivist. But, for now,
Pasternak works with a small cadre of
dedicated library staffers, none of whom
is Jewish. They painstakingly transcribe
interviews, tracking down every small
village and translating the Yiddish,
Romanian, Hungarian or whatever lan-
guage is interspersed in the interviews.
It is emotionally draining work, espe-
cially for Bolkosky, who must probe
those he interviews for the most minute
and painful details. "It's never gotten
easier," he said. Its only gotten harder."
The hours of testimony and historical
research have convinced him that no
lessons are to be learned from the
Holocaust.
"I never talk about lessons,"' he said.
"Implications, yes; consequences, yes,
but not lessons. The only ones who
learned from the Holocaust were the
people in Bosnia — they learned to do

it better, more completely."
One survivor, Bolkosky added, did
say he had learned something: "Next
time, he would run faster."
Bolkosky said his wife, Lori, and chil-
dren, Gabe and Miriam, have helped
him keep the Holocaust from complete-
ly taking over his life.
Both children, now 26 and 28, are
accomplished classical musicians, playing
violin and cello.
"I would come home from an inter-
view completely drained," Bolkosky said.
If I was lucky, my kids were practicing.
Their music was a saving grace for me.
That, and my wife's ability to keep it all
at the door."
Even so, he added, there were some
years when Gabe, for one, would walk
out of the room when the subject of the
Holocaust came up.
"My wife says my next project should
be on the Marx brothers," Bolkosky said.
In actuality, he said, he hopes to get
back to his study of Freud's Vienna.
Barbara Kriigel has worked with
Bolkosky on the Voice/Vision project
since its inception in 1981.
"This is probably the most important
project any of us will ever be involved
in, in our entire lives," she said.
Kriigel, the UM-D library's assistant
director for circulation and technical ser-
vices, said Bolkosky is empathetic yet
persistent in his interviewing style. Time
and time again, he must keep the sur-
vivors on task as they jump around from
subject to subject.
"One survivor said she tells him stuff
she would never tell anyone else,"
Kriigel said.
As one of the premier scholars of the
Holocaust, Bolkosky is "profoundly
committed and passionate," said col-
league Deborah Dwork, director of the
Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark
University in Worcester, Mass.
"His body of work is nuanced and
sensitive," she said. It is his scholarly
strength, but also his personal passion,
that has informed, strengthened and
enriched his work."
Students in Bolkos s Holocaust
courses have a required reading list of 10
books, and must listen to or watch at
least two audiotaped or videotaped
interviews.
"There's a vast difference between
reading about it and hearing it,"
Bolkosky said. "The impact is phenome-
nal."
The 13 interviews archived so far on
the UM-D Web site have been visited
close to 4,000 times by people from
more than 30 countries, he-said.
"Everybody is obligated to know
about it. It's part of our history — not