Steven Spielberg to create British Holocaust memorial

Steven Spielberg is lined up to create a permanent Holocaust memorial in Britain. The Schindler’s List director set up the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation in 1994, an institute which aims to capture visual testimonies of Holocaust survivors. The Foundation has filmed around 52,000 two-hour eyewitness accounts in its 20-year history.
Members of the Holocaust Commission, set up by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron in January (14), hope Spielberg will help launch a similar project in the U.K., by capturing stories of survivors who now live in the country. These video accounts will create a permanent British memorial, details of which are being kept under wraps.
Britain’s Justice Minister Simon Hughes says, “It is our intention to speak to Mr. Spielberg. I think the Commission will want to create a group of volunteers who can capture these audio-visual testimonies from across Britain.”
The Commission hopes to create the memorial by April next year (15) to mark 70 years since the British liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where approximately 37,000 prisoners, mostly Jewish, died between 1943 and 1945.