World Documentation Center

The Jews began gathering documents and writing diaries while the Holocaust was still taking place. After the war, the documentation process was continued by the She'erit Hapleita (lit. the remnant that survived). Collecting documentation began in Yad Vashem's early years when the Department of Oral Testimony began gathering testimonies from survivors. These testimonies form the basis of the immense testimony archive in Yad Vashem today. 2800 testimonies were recorded before the opening of the Eichmann trial and as a result, Yad Vashem was very instrumental in choosing witnesses for this trial. The significance of this project grew with the years, as testimonies became more and more central to sharing the Holocaust story with the public. The Yad Vashem Archives is responsible for gathering all Holocaust-related material and preserving it for posterity.

With the opening of archives in Eastern Europe in the early nineties, Yad Vashem's collection work was expanded, and important and rare documentation has been acquired by Yad Vashem as a result.

The collection as a whole currently includes close to 60 million pages of documentation in forty different languages, 260,000 photographs and about 40,000 testimonies in written, audio or video format. The Yad Vashem Library, with the most comprehensive collection of Holocaust-related publications in the world, comprises approximately 87,000 titles and a unique collection of about 4000 newspapers and articles, some of which date from the Holocaust period. Yad Vashem has become the central and largest repository of information about the Holocaust in the world..

Yad Vashem Homepage

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