For decades, a large collection of cassette tapes sat untouched in the archives at Northern Arizona University. They were labeled simply “Delaware Valley Holocaust Committee.” An NAU team is now trying to unravel the mystery of the tapes’ origins — and racing to preserve their contents.
Nobody knows exactly how the 80-tape collection wound up at NAU, or where and when it came from.
But when the tapes were brought to the attention of professor Karl Krotke-Crandall — a specialist in Russian-Holocaust genocide studies — he wanted to know more.
The tapes, it turned out, were interviews with Holocaust survivors. Many were from the Tucson area. Others were from the East Coast.
“We determined that these are unheard recordings. No one else has them in their archives. And so I was not about to let these voices go unheard,” he said.
The recordings are estimated to be about 40 years old, and were nearing the end of their shelf life. Krotke-Crandall and a team of students are now working to digitize, transcribe and trace the origins of the tapes.
“I thought this was a really good opportunity to engage our students with some undergraduate research for them to hear the voices of Holocaust survivors that were on these recordings and kind of see what the process is really like,” he said
Krotke-Crandall says the recordings will be transferred to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
