WWII survivor shares stories of Holocaust

It was 1943 in Italy, and World War II was nearing its end. A young Jewish girl spending some rare time downstairs listening to the people talking in the farmhouse. A neighboring farmer knocks on the door. As he enters, he spots her drinking sugar-water. Everybody in the farmhouse freezes with fear, hoping the neighbor would not discover the Jewish family that was being harbored upstairs.

Panicking, the little girl sprints upstairs, her face white as a ghost. The thought running through her head is that she might have caused her entire family's death.

Instead, the family was safe, because the neighbor was told she was a visiting relative.

This is just one of the stories Daisy Miller, a child survivor of the Holocaust, spoke of during the German Society and Hillel's presentation of "Beyond the Holocaust" at Cal State Long Beach Thursday.

Miller was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1938. Her family made attempts to cross into Italy but they didn't have the proper papers. Finally in 1941, they were saved by Italian farmers, willing to risk their own family's lives to help them. Miller was not taken to a concentration camps because she and her family managed to hid out in farmhouses until the end of the war.

Miller is the community relations director of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The foundation was started by Steven Spielberg after the release of the movie "Schindler's List." Spielberg was approached by so many people who wanted tell their stories of the Holocaust that he decided to record them.

The project was started at the end of June 1994 and Miller began working there in late August of that same year. The project is currently scheduled to go on for another three years and has a goal of recording 40,000 stories, but Miller feels there may be more and the project will go longer.

The cost of the project is estimated to be $50-60 million. Spielberg initially put up some money to start the project and is now calling on donors to help fund the project. Miller said that Spielberg is very involved and is aware of what is happening with the project.

The project involves videotaping survivors from around the world. So far they have interviewed 2,500 survivors from eastern Europe, Germany, Australia, Toronto, New York, Florida and Chicago.

The interview lasts 2-2 1/2 hours. The survivors are asked about their life before, during and after the Holocaust. The videotape is transferred to a compact disk. The ultimate goal is have people be able to sit and call-up any story they want to hear. Miller said it will eventually go on-line and be available to students.

"I feel compelled to be involved in this project,"Miller said. "I have no choice [but] to remember and remind, to keep it in people's consciousness."