In 1994, after filming Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg established this foundation with an urgent mission: to chronicle, before it was too late, the firsthand accounts of survivors, liberators, rescuers, and other eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.

Recording more than 50,000 unedited testimonies, the largest undertaking of its kind, the Shoah Foundation launched its mission to create a multimedia archive to be used as an educational and research tool. The archive is comprised of 200,000-plus videotapes filled with more than 100,000 hours of testimony. To watch the entire collection straight through would now take about 13 years and six months.