Prewar Riga; Boat

“Kodak Safety Film” logo. A group of men and women standing outside a building with a sign says “Rigas Pilsetas Juanatines Un Aroda Piemerotibas Petisanas Institus” [Riga City Youth and Occupational Fitness Research Institute]. The women are wearing dresses and the men are in suits. On a boat named “Konug Oscar”. Woman and a teenage boy and other family members are on the boat smiling and pulling the bell. The camera pans to several large buildings. Bridge. Cars and horse-drawn carriages near the boat. Family waves from the boat. Filming from the boat, a woman stands with the Captain, couple sits on deck chairs. David Pablo Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with displaced persons. Arriving in Paris in late July, Boder would spend the next two months interviewing 130 displaced persons in nine languages and recording them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. The interviews were among the earliest (if not the earliest) audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. They are valuable not only for the testimonies of survivors and other DPs, but also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded at various points during the expedition. Boder's itinerary included four countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and German—and sixteen different interview sites. On most days he conducted between two and five interviews, with each interview lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. As the weeks went by and Boder sensed his time drawing short, he stepped up the pace. Toward the end, he completed as many as nine in a single day (on September 21 in Munich). Most days total half that number; some days are unaccounted for. Boder left Europe in early October, having recorded over ninety hours of material and completely used up the two hundred spools of wire that he had brought with him. A very detailed biography is published at http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder and in Alan Rosen's The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.