By Dr Bea Lewkowicz
I am very pleased to say that we have conducted our first Zoom Remote interview with child survivor Martin Stern MBE. Martin was born in 1938 and lived in Holland. He survived Westerbork and Theresienstadt camps. Thank you Martin for spending more than six virtual hours in four sessions with me. Watch an extract from the video below:
To my delight the technology worked and I found it a very moving experience. While it is not the same as a face-to-face interview, the remote interview has clearly some advantages. The most obvious ones are the lack of time and space constraints. With a Zoom interview, there is no need to finish the interview in one session and the location of interviewer and interviewee does not matter. The other aspect I was surprised about is the immediacy of the interview itself. As an interviewer, sitting in front of my computer and listening only to the voice of the interviewee on my headphones, creates a situation of great focus, with less distractions than sitting in an actual space. I will reflect more about this process once we have conducted more interviews.