The Oral History Collection of the POLIN Museum constitutes a unique collection of personal documents concerning the individual fate and social history of Polish Jews. The core of the collection consists of materials in the nature of produced sources: these are recordings of semistructured narrative interviews (of a biographical or thematic nature) with witnesses to history that were conducted by the Museum's staff or collaborators. The collection currently includes 1,157 recordings in audio (digital mp3, WAV formats) and video (mp4). The interviewees are mainly Polish Jews, their descendants, and Poles who witnessed the Jewish fate. The interviews are recorded with representatives of three generations: the wartime generation (people born before the outbreak of the Second World War), the post-war generation, and the youngest generation, brought up during Poland's political transformation period (the late 1980s and early 1990s). An important group of interviewees are the Museum's Donors - people who have donated memorabilia related to the history and culture of Polish Jews to our collection. In addition to the aforementioned multimedia files, which constitute transcripts of oral history interviews, the oral history collection also includes iconographic material acquired when creating the recordings. That is because the biographical nature of a large proportion of the interviews naturally evokes the subject of documents, photographs and memorabilia preserved in family archives. Witnesses often take advantage of material stored at home or bring it to the studio, perceiving it not only as an illustration of their story, but also as a form of presence in the narrative of deceased relatives or a distant temporal moment before an important change taking place in their lives - the Holocaust, emigration. Sometimes the photograph or document chosen by the interviewees constitutes the only testimony to the existence of their parents or grandparents. The material used by the witnesses during the interviews is digitised (in the best available quality) and incorporated into the oral history collection as an its integral part.
