The Making of ERA Video

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The Making of ERA-Video

The Making of ERA-Video shows you the process of the 9 months it took to generate the first steps of ERA. You will see the first meeting of all participants in Reggio Emilia, the realization of the interviews in the participating countries and the memorial trip to Krakow and Auschwitz in March 2007.
The website has been created through the work of many people – so here you can get a small impression of the variety of working steps of the ERA-project.

What is ERA?
ERA is a space in which individual stories of people having resisted against the terror, humiliation and despair fascism brought over Europe are kept alive and visible for everybody.

The protagonists and eyewitnesses will disappear in the next years. Soon, there will be no other testimonies of the happenings apart from those having been collected, recorded, recounted and written down. The value of eyewitness interviews is unique. No book or film can replace the opportunity of watching eyewitnesses tell their stories of resistance and independent decision to do so.

The European Resistance Archive will enable the documentation of this precious knowledge. It offers video interviews with women and men having taken part in the antifascist resistance. In Europe, these testimonies are often only available to those personally visiting archives or documentary centres.

Currently six countries are involved in the project: Poland, Slovenia, Austria, France, Italy and Germany. But it would be in the sense of the project to extend the range of countries and in future being able to integrate every European country being afflicted by fascism and Nazism.
 
ERA is defined to be an open and growing website and it bears the possibility of being extendible in various directions. It should work as a first step in a network of historical research covering the various faces of the European resistance.
 
In the process of creating this new platform, young people participated actively in the realization of the project in form of doing the interviews. The young participants were guided in their work by historians, memory worker and a professional video-team.

We hope that this creates an understanding and coming together of the different generations and makes the understanding of the history of Europe possible.