Some 400 harrowing stories of Michiganders who made it out alive from Nazi concentration camps have been collected in a new interactive online exhibit, "Portraits of Honor: Our Michigan Holocaust Survivors."
Mark Stryker reports in the Free Press that the website www.PortraitsofHonor.org, a companion to a permanent exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, offers access to a searchable database of survivor interviews, maps, photographs, audio messages and a trove of authoritative historical information about the Holocaust. The exhibit was created by the Program for Holocaust Survivors and Families, a service of Jewish Senior Life of Metropolitan Detroit.
While there are many online educational resources chronicling the stories of the Holocaust, including the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, "Portraits of Honor" appears unique in its user-friendly interface, its accessibility from any computer and the way the layers of information allow viewers to go as deep as they like into the subject.
The database is searchable by name as well as experience, including the categories of "death camps," "escape," "child survivors," "labor camps" and others.
