OOGgetuigen van de 20ste eeuw

The memories of just about two thousand (older) Zeeuwen have been recorded on tape. A cross-section of the population, from high to low on the social ladder, cooperated in the interview project Eyewitnesses of the 20th century.

The interviews recorded through the project are on CD and have been collected in the Zeeland Library and can be listened to there. In this way, a lot of information is available about professions, some of which have disappeared, important events of the 20th century, leisure activities and developments in ten villages.

Most of the interviews were recorded on Walcheren and in Zeelandic Flanders.

A selection from the collection of 816 interviews in the sound bank:

• Primary education – 22 interviews
• Beurtvaart – 19 interviews
• Forced labour – 31 interviews
• Immigration – 10 interviews
• Children’s broadcasting – 21 interviews
• Recreation – 8 interviews
• Roman Catholic Church – 10 interviews
• Ferry service – 6 interviews
• Flax – 8 interviews
• Flood disaster – 197 interviews
• South Moluccans – 19 interviews

Kees Slager wrote several books based on oral history:

Landarbeiders (1981), hertiteld tot Armoede treedt binnen, levensverhalen van landarbeiders

auteur: Kees Slager

ISBN: 9789076815206

This book tells the story of an occupational group that is now extinct but for centuries formed the largest in the Netherlands: the agricultural workers. Poorly paid and treated by farmers, they traditionally stumbled behind the rear ranks of the proletariat. Until – in the 1950s – machines began to take over their work. Barely 20 years later, they had become redundant and there was hardly a farm worker left.

De ramp, een reconstructie, 1992

auteur: Kees Slager

ISBN: 9789046707968

(op basis van interviews met ruim 200 mensen)

What happened on the night of 31 January to 1 February 1953, when large parts of our country flooded as a result of an unprecedented spring tide.

On the night of 31 January to 1 February 1953, the Netherlands was hit by one of the biggest natural disasters in its history. A spring tide combined with a severe north-westerly storm flooded Zeeland and parts of North Brabant and South Holland. 1,836 people and tens of thousands of animals drowned, 4,500 houses and buildings were destroyed and 200,000 hectares of land were flooded. Kees Slager did extensive research in archives and spoke to over 250 eyewitnesses for The Disaster. The result is a gripping and revealing account of what happened hour by hour and place by place during those fateful days in the winter of 1953.

Zeven Zeeuwse vrouwen, 1995

auteur: Kees Slager

ISBN: 9789072138491

In this book, seven women from Zeeland, ranging in age from seventy to eighty, tell the story of their own lives in a penetrating way.

They are all very ordinary women; most of them grew up in families of labourers and middlemen and none of them attended secondary school. But they are women to whom life has not passed unnoticed. They have been scarred and sometimes bruised by it, but they have not succumbed to it. Most have become strong and militant because of it. They have dared to tell the many emotional and harrowing, but sometimes joyful and endearing moments of their lives honestly and openly. As a result, these ‘ordinary’ women grow into extraordinary women in their self-portraits.

Visser verhalen over hun leven in de delta, 1990

auteur: Kees Slager, Paul de Schipper

ISBN: 9789072138088

(op basis van interviews met 60 vissers)

This book is about the fishermen of the south-western Delta region in the first half of the last century. About the men who tried to earn a living on the Oosterschelde and Westerschelde, Grevelingen, Hollands Diep and on the coastal waters of the North Sea with their longboats and studs, their blowers and lemmer yachts. Sailing, they were hunting for shrimp and flatfish, oyster spawn and mussel seed. But also about their wives who worked in mussel sheds and oyster pits, lugging heavy baskets of fish and also spending many lonely hours at home.

En m’n zuster die heet Kee

Author: Kees Slager
Publisher: Boer, Den / De Ruiter
ISBN: 9789079875351

This book contains thirty-three self-portraits of the last Borsel farmer’s wives, women who spent their lives wearing the beautiful regional costume.They not only tell about lace hats and golden earrings, but with their life stories they give an insight into the position of women in the Zeeland countryside in the first half of the 20th century. This is a book of harsh stories about poverty and hard work in the fields or in the household, about marrying early and having children quickly. Stories of a time and a region without water supply, electricity and cars, a time of cycling and walking along muddy polder roads and windy dykes to school and work. This is also a book of happy tales of old-fashioned villages full of shops and conviviality, of the feast of the annual fair and summer evenings on the dyke with knitting and chatting neighbours. Thirty-three life stories. Not spectacular perhaps, but warmly human, engaging and poignant. ‘An impressive portrait of peasant life on South Beveland in the first half of the last century. An exemplary book’ (PZC)

Among those interviewed are Jewish camp survivors, Jewish and non-Jewish resistance fighters, political prisoners, hidden children, hidden adults, hostages, refugees, survivors of the Rwandan genocide, Spanish Civil War volunteers, anti-fascists and children of members of these groups of witnesses. Most of the witnesses lived in Belgium during and post-war.

In 1987, Johannes Blum started recording testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Belgium, and from 1993 he made audiovisual recordings. Over the years, he interviewed more than 1,100 people, some of them several times. For each interview, Johannes Blum also compiled a research file, including copies of documents, newspaper clippings, photos of the witness, (scans of) historical photos, written testimonies, publications and obituaries. In 2003, Johannes Blum contacted the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, the predecessor of Kazerne Dossin. His collection was then transferred to the archives of the JMDR. Kazerne Dossin continues to digitise the recordings and research files.

To gain a better understanding of the Dutch Catholic missionary activities worldwide and the way the missionaries experienced their missions themselves, the KDC and the CMC (Central Mission Commissariat) established the Interview Project ‘KomMissieMemoires’, or KMM for short, in 1976.

The objective of the KMM was to systematically capture the memories of these Dutch missionaries, that were stationed in Southeast Asia, Africa, America, Scandinavia and Oceania, by preserving them as audio documents.

Since 1978 the KDC interviewed over 900 Dutch missionaries and people directly or indirectly involved with the mission. And we published abstracts of these interviews from 1989 to 2006. The English publication is known as:

Dutch missionary activities: an oral history project: 1976-1988
Arnulf Camps, Vefie Poels, Jan Willemsen (Nijmegen 2005), Valkhof Pers.
ISBN 90-5625-204 (Download here)

_{Brother Adri Schoorl, Brothers of the Christian Schools, Cameroon}

The Jewish Historical Museum created access to two thousand stories of Dutch Jews from the video archive of the USC Shoah Foundation. 

The impact that these stories have on viewers, of any age, can hardly be underestimated. Each video tells a unique story. Stories about persecution, historical events, personal events, but also the power of survival.

The 2000 interviews are on display in the Knowledge Centre of the Jewish Museum and could be viewed in a temporary exhibition in the Hollandsche Schouwburg until April 2020.

Each of the 2,000 interviews on show at the Jewish Museum has a summary in Dutch and is divided into chapters. This way, it immediately becomes clear which subjects are discussed, at which location and for how long.

The interviews can be searched by personal name, keyword and words from the summary. Interested parties can search the interviews, read descriptions of the interviews and watch all or part of the interviews. Thanks to the keywords and the clear structure, interested parties and researchers can focus on a part of an interview.

The archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute contains almost 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors. These testimonies were recorded in 34 different countries between 1995 and 1998 by the Shoah Foundation Institute in Los Angeles, initiated by Steven Spielberg and financed with the royalties from his film Schindler’s List.

The entire collection of 53,000 videos can be accessed at various locations around the world. See the location-overview.

In the USC Shoah Foundation catalogue, you can search through all 53,000 videos (after registration).

Over 1200 interviews, of which 700 are publicly listenable online and approximately 500 restricted interviews can be found through the website but are not publicly listenable. The collection is supplemented with ad hoc interviews but also with so-called Veterans Interview Projects (VIP) that focus on multiple interviews around a particular theme or mission.

The ICNV is managed by Jeoffrey van Woensel and Annabel de Ruijter of the Expertise Centre of NLVi.