Director Steven Spielberg expressed shock at the atrocities of Hamas terrorists against the Jewish people on Oct. 7 in announcing a project to document its horrors.
The violence that occurred that day in Israel and the wave of antisemitism around the world that followed has reminded many of echoes of the Holocaust.
Spielberg, who directed the Oscar-winning Holocaust film "Schindler’s List," indicated the terrorist attacks left him shaken in a press release from his USC Shoah Foundation announcing the project.
"I never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime," he said.
The USC Shoah Foundation, a Holocaust visual history archive founded by Spielberg in 1994, is working to gather hundreds of interviews in an initiative to collect the harrowing accounts from survivors of Oct. 7.
The Shoah Foundation hosts tens of thousands of testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, but its work also extends to documenting contemporary antisemitism through the Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection (CATT) initiative.
The Oct. 7 testimonies will be part of CATT, which Spielberg said is "an effort that will ensure that the voices of survivors will act as a powerful tool to counter the dangerous rise of antisemitism and hate."
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"Holocaust survivors are the most courageous and brave among us, and their accounts are a lasting testament to the resilience of the human spirit," said Spielberg. "Both initiatives — recording interviews with survivors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony — seek to fulfill our promise to survivors: that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hate of any kind. We must remain united and steadfast in these efforts."
