Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (interjúprojekt)

The three main tasks of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (the National Relief Committee for Deportees or DEGOB) were to help the repatriation of survivors to Hungary, provide them with social aid, and pursue projects of documentation. As part of the project of documentation, around five thousand survivors articulated their experiences in the offices of the National Relief Committee for Deportees as early as 1945-46 whereby the largest collections of early witness accounts was created. To facilitate the task of the interviewers and standardize the contents, DEGOB gradually developed a questionnaire with twelve major topics that defined the major subjects of the interviews as follows: personal data; the situation of Jews at their places of residence; ghettoization and its prehistory; deportation; arrival; the destination of the first deportation, its organization and life in the camp; labor camps, their organization and life in them; evacuation; stages following evacuation; liberation; life in the camp upon liberation; the way home. The resulting thousands of early post-Holocaust Hungarian Jewish witness accounts were thus the result of semi-structured interviews and can be considered co-products of interviewer and interviewee. The length of the records varies from just a few paragraphs to dozens of pages, however, most of them are rather concise and descriptive. On the website www.degob.hu the complete, predominantly Hungarian texts and the scanned images of more than 3500 protocols can be found. Presently this is most extensive Holocaust testimonial online database in the world. In 2006, the translation of the documents into English was commenced. Additional DEGOB interviews can be found in Israeli holdings.