Spielberg Leads Huge Holocaust On-Line Project : Multimedia: ‘Schindler’s List’ director’s foundation will conduct interviews with thousands of Jewish survivors. Their remarks will become part of a computerized database and educational software.

It has the epic proportions of “Schindler’s List” and employs state-of-the-art technology like “Jurassic Park,” but Steven Spielberg’s newest multimillion-dollar project will never make a dime at the box office.

That’s because the three-time Academy Award winner’s latest enterprise is strictly a labor of love: He intends to capture the eyewitness testimony of thousands of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust on videotape and create the first major archival database using multiple media.

Then he plans to create educational software based on the interviews and make them accessible enough so that any seventh-grader who knows how to go on-line will be able to see and hear these vivid accounts of survival in the face of genocide.

The filmmaker calls the ambitious effort “a race against time” because most of the survivors are 62 to 100 years old. “My whole dream is to take as many testimonies as is humanly possible and make their stories available for no fee for those who want it,” Spielberg said.

With $16 million in seed money from his own funds and contributions from movie studios, he has founded the nonprofit Survivors of the Shoah (Hebrew for “Holocaust”) Visual History Foundation.

In June the foundation launched a pilot program in the Los Angeles area, where it has collected more than 100 interviews. Next month, interviewers--who include filmmakers, rabbis, therapists, professors and adult children of Holocaust survivors--will begin 20 hours of training in New York, Toronto and South Florida. The project is expected to cover the globe and cost $50 million to $60 million over several years.

Although he hopes to expand the project to include non-Jewish survivors, the first thrust, Spielberg said, will be to tape Jewish survivors “because the Holocaust was really about what happened to European Jewry--the destruction of Jewish culture on that continent.”

“You should know,” he said, “that some people would not talk to us. There are a lot of Jewish survivors that would like this to die with them because the memories are too horrible to confront.”

The interviews will make up what he believes will be the largest multimedia database in Holocaust studies, incorporating visual, aural and written material.

Spielberg emphasized that his interdisciplinary team of filmmakers, computer hardware manufacturers, software developers, historians, archivists and educators is “not reinventing the wheel. We’re committed to sharing resources and joining forces with important organizations engaged in Holocaust survivor documentation,” he said.

Some of the institutions that are training the foundation’s interviewers are the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University; the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. They will also serve as the initial repositories for the collection.

The interviews, each two to three hours long, include accounts not only of pain and loss, but also details of how, after losing so much, survivors managed to rebuild their lives. Photographs and documents are preserved on tape. When possible, spouses and children appear on camera during the final moments. Each survivor receives a copy.

Thanks to Spielberg’s near-obsession with cutting-edge technology, researchers using computers will be able to call up the interviews or portions of them using keywords. They will be able to select interviews by a subject’s surname, gender or hometown, or a topic mentioned in the interview, such as the name of a concentration camp.

James Moll, one of two hands-on producers overseeing the project, said the team is using the latest digital technology that will allow the interviews to be stored for long periods of time and copied without any loss of quality.

Besides the database, which will be used mainly by scholars, the foundation is developing educational software programs for different age and grade levels, Moll said. A student might “walk through” the barracks of a concentration camp and see different faces. He or she could then click on a face to hear that person’s story. The program could also include documentary film footage. If the programs are sold, he said, all profits would be channeled back to the foundation.

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Moll and fellow producer June Beallor, who had teamed up to make documentary educational and promotional films before being tapped by Spielberg for the foundation, see their work as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” and acknowledge that it has a highly emotional aspect.

“James and I have always worked on projects that we consider meaningful,” Beallor said, “but this one has changed our lives. We put our whole heart into it.

“I grew up Jewish,” she said. “But it’s one thing to read or hear about the Holocaust and another to watch an eyewitness account.”

She was deeply affected, she said, by the story of a man who was forced by the Nazis to hang his own father. She received a moving letter of thanks from another man whose father had never been able to talk to him directly about his experiences in the death camps. But the father volunteered to be interviewed by the foundation and then gave the taped interview to his son. Only then, the son wrote, did they begin to talk openly about the Holocaust.

Moll, who is not Jewish, said: “I don’t know how to respond when people ask me how I can be so dedicated to documenting the stories of Jewish survivors. I don’t understand how they don’t understand,” he said softly. “The other non-Jewish people on our staff feel the same way.”

Spielberg said the idea came to him in the middle of making “Schindler’s List,” the 1993 film based on the Thomas Keneally book about Nazi industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews during World War II. “I felt that a much more important contribution to remembering the Shoah would be an aural-visual history,” he said.

The 46-year-old director’s own interest in the Holocaust goes back to early childhood. “My grandparents were a major presence in my life. . . . Because of them,” he said, “I had a bar mitzvah in an Orthodox synagogue and kept kosher for most of my formative life.

“They were not survivors,” he added, “but many of their friends were, and my awareness (of the Holocaust) came from them.

“Also, because of my mom’s interest in classical music, a lot of survivors who were musicians would come to our house in Cincinnati,” he said. “There were people playing cellos and violas with Auschwitz-Birkenau tattoos on their arms. I remember when I was 3 years old learning to count by touching the numbers on the forearm of one of them.

“Long before ‘Schindler’s List’ was even written, I would read everything I could and see documentaries on the subject.”

One of his main reasons for undertaking the foundation project, he said, was to give young people a more vivid sense of history, help them “wake up to the fact that we are all part of every episode that has happened.”

The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is trying to contact Holocaust survivors and recruit interviewers around the world. Inquiries can be made in writing to P.O. Box 8940, Universal City, CA 91608-0940, or by telephone from within the United States and Canada at (800) 661-2092.