Echoes of Memory provides survivors who volunteer at the Museum with a powerful outlet to share their experiences and memories—through their own writing. The Museum conducts guided writing workshops to strengthen the writers’ abilities to recount their experiences for the historical record. In these videos, survivors who have taken part in the workshop read their own essays.

This is one more way that the Museum helps survivors—eyewitnesses to the Holocaust—to help new generations gain insight and understanding of Holocaust history from a deeply personal perspective.

This program, originally inspired by the Leave-A-Legacy Writing Workshops developed by the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study, has been facilitated since 2001 by Dr. Margaret Peterson. The writer’s workshop model she has employed prioritizes the voice and authority of each writer and allows the participants to support each other in telling his or her own story of survival.