Weidner Foundation Contact Languages

Preservation Activity In Final Year

Archivist Stan Tozeski has completed the cataloguing and preservation of John Weidner’s correspondance.  The 11-linear feet of correspondance has been translated, from the French by Janet Carper of Standish, Maine, and from the Dutch by Tony Sluis of Toms River, New Jersey. Both translators are volunteers.

As part of the preservation project, letters have been placed in acid-free file folders, have had metal staples and paper clips removed and are stored in a dry cool room.

Phase Two involves the translation, cataloguing and preservation of forged transit visas and other documents accumulated by Weidner as he managed the Dutch-Paris Line.

Phase Three calls for 21 taped interviews and numerous films to be transferred to disks.  The film and casette tapes, many from the 60’s and 70’s are slowly deteriorating.

Phase Four involves the cataloguing of photographs related to the Dutch-Paris Escape Line.  On October 29, Judith Cohen, Director of the Photographic Reference Collection and Henry Mayer, Chief Archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum visited the Weidner Center.  Cohen and Mayer met with archivist Stan Tozeski, Kurt Ganter, and AUC President Norman Wendth to discuss the “digitizing” of the Weidner Center photographs and printed material. One copy of the microfilms will be provided to the Weidner Center and the other kept at the USHMM in Washington, DC.

The group began discussing an agreement between the USHMM and the Weidner Foundation to define when such work would begin and to define any restrictions regarding the use of the microfilmed materials by the USHMM.

According to Stan Tozeski, all primary archival materials will have been catalogued, translated, and preserved by the Fall of 2010.  What remains is to transfer the 20+ taped interviews of line members and the spouses of decesased line members as well as films onto discs before the taped materials become to brittle to handle.