Dr. Rosalyn Livshin is a British historian who collects oral testimonies from refugees and Holocaust survivors

I was born in Sunderland, near Gateshead, and moved to Manchester to study history at the University of Manchester. I met my husband there, in Manchester, and I’ve lived there ever since.

I received my degree in the 1970s, and I’ve been conducting interviews with refugees and survivors to get their testimonies of what happened to them during the Holocaust ever since. One of my first projects was commissioned by the 45 Aid Society, a society of child survivors who had been brought to England by the British Government and having lost everyone, had become family to one another. In the 1980s, one of them died, without ever having recorded his story. The society members realized that if they didn’t record their stories, they’d take them with them to the grave.

At another point along the way, I worked for the Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) to meet survivors and record their stories. I realized that the AJR projects didn’t include any chareidi survivors, as they hadn’t joined the refugee association. I persuaded them to allow me to conduct 25 interviews with chareidi survivors, which was really a credit to them, as they had no obligation to share their resources with nonmembers.

In the course of my career, working with eight different major projects and organizations, including the Shoah Foundation and the British Library, I must have interviewed around 200 refugees and survivors, arguably more than anyone else in Britain. I’m still doing interviews today, although obviously the number of survivors is much fewer now — I’ve just been told of a survivor who’s in her nineties and has quite a story to tell, and am in the process of setting up an interview.