19 October 2006
Cinema director Steven Spielberg has presented a documentary about the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine, several weeks after the country marked the 65th anniversary of the tragedy. Spielberg was co-executive producer of the film "Spell Your Name" by Ukrainian director Serhiy Bukovsky. It contains the testimony of Jewish survivors who escaped brutal execution and those who rescued friends and neighbors during the Holocaust. "The stories and experience of survivors in Ukraine need to be seen and heard by the people of the world, who may not know what happened in Ukraine during the Holocaust," Spielberg said at a news conference. "I really believe that listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors from all around the world is going to change the world and already has in many ways." Spielberg's Holocaust film "Schindler's List" won an Oscar in 1993. It focused on the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jewish lives. "Spell Your Name" was produced by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, a Los Angeles-based organization founded by Spielberg in 1994. With a collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies from Jewish survivors, political prisoners and war crimes trial participants, the Institute's archive in one of the largest visual history archive in the world. "This film is not only the memory of my people, this is the memory of my family, too," said Anatoly Kerzhner, a historian at a Kiev-based institute whose grandmother was shot dead at Babi Yar. The premiere marked Spielberg's first trip to Ukraine, where his grandparents came from.
