Margot and Warren APARTMENTS We're Celebrating 20 Years of Providing Quality Assisted Living for Older Adults Meanwhile, Mames was looking for someone to help him with survivor interviews for the Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield. We offer: • Spacious, furnished apartments with private bedrooms and full kitchens • Supportive services and Personal Care assistance provided by trained geriatric care _staff and social workers • Kosher-style meals, seven days per week • Jewish Holiday Celebrations & Social/Recreational Activities Holocaust historian Sidney Bolkosky examines a photo album that belonged to a German Jewish family. If someone you know desires a shared, family-like setting, please call Jan Bayer at 248-559-1500 Jewish Family Service uj Mrt*opolitan Detroi: If you are not wearing it... sell it!... or BORROW on it! You can't enjoy jewelry if it's sitting in your safe deposit box. Sell or borrow on it for immediate cash. We deal in jewelry, watches & gemstones. •14firr N A Service to Private Owners, Banks & Estates Gem/Diamond Specialist AWARDED CERTIFICATE E BY GIA IN GRADING & EVALUATION 30400 Telegraph Rd. • Suite 134 Bingham Farms 248-642-5575 Fine Jewelers Est. 1919 Lawrence M. Allan, President Daily °Til 5:30 Sat. 'Til 3 Lakeland is very clean and attractive. The staff are friendly and attentive, and my mother gets a lot of loving care." — JERRY PASKOVITZ. Farmington Hills ‘‘ • • • • • • 9/24 1999 42 Detroit Jewish News Clean and tranquil environment Restorative nursing program Hospice and respite care available Convenient Southfield location Reasonable rates Medicare-certified For more information or to arrange a visit, call our Admissions Department. CENTER 26900 Franklin Road Southfield, Michigan 48034 Phone (248) 350-8070 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