‘Refugee Voices’ will be launched this evening during a reception at the Wiener Library as part of Refugee Week 2009. ‘Refugee Voices’ is an audio-visual Holocaust testimony archive featuring a collection of 150 filmed interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, who escaped and survived Nazi-occupied Europe and rebuilt their lives in Britain. The interviews, in English, focus on the personal life stories of Holocaust survivors in Britain after the Second World War. The collection includes 450 hours of filmed and transcribed accounts and each interview is accompanied by photographs, artefacts and documents. Visitors will be able to consult the archive at the library.

The project was completed by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), which was founded in 1941 as a self-help organisation by those refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The association now aims to provide social and welfare services to victims of Nazi persecution living in Britain and to promote and support projects related to Holocaust education and commemoration.

The Wiener Library, founded in 1933 and the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial institution, is the first UK institution to receive a copy of Refugee Voices.