This is an extract of an article that has been published as part of CLARIN’s impact stories.

The Voices from Ravensbrück project is the result of the curation and selection of multilingual oral history interviews with survivors from the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women.

Organised and funded in the context of CLARIN’s Resource Families, this interdisciplinary project brings together multilingual experts in the fields of linguistics, speech technology, speech corpora curation, phonetics and history.

The project gives voice to a heterogeneous group of women who survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp, including resistance fighters, aid workers, prisoners of war, and Jewish women and children. After the camp was liberated by Soviet forces, the women returned home or emigrated.

The new CLARIN Ravensbrück Oral History Resource Family brings together a specific kind of speech data: first-person spoken testimonies with a historical and deeply personal character. The Ravensbrück dataset currently includes interviews in Dutch, German, English and Italian. The interviews were selected with the aim of enabling the comparison of data that covers a similar topic from a multilingual and multidisciplinary perspective. 

At a time when most possible perspectives and themes about WWII have been covered, resources such as this enable a new era of comparison. The multilingual character of the archive offers the possibility, for instance, to explore and compare the communication strategies and narrative styles used by different groups of the camp population. The dataset also allows the exploration of non-verbal communication, such as silences and pauses, perhaps revealing some universal features to the women’s testimonies. The wide range of interdisciplinary opportunities arising from the creation of this Resource Family means that, while it is the outcome of this project, it also represents the beginning of a much larger project.

Read more about the CLARIN-project Voices from Ravensbrück: The Value of Multilingual Oral History

Ravensbrück Oral History Resource Family:

‘Voices from Ravensbrück’ CLARIN Café (with introduction):

Speech Data & Technology

CLARIN is a digital infrastructure offering data, tools and services to support research based on language resources.

Image: thanks to the CLARIN Voices of Ravensbrück project. The Ravensbrück Oral History Resource Family includes 38 interviews from many different countries.