Starting Oct. 12, James Madison’s Rho Kappa Social Studies Honor Society is joining forces with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in order to transcribe the lives of Holocaust survivors and heroes.

Participants in this new joint program will add subtitles to video interviews of these survivors taken from the museum’s digital archives. Following the transcription of these videos, they will be shown as the museum’s first oral history publications.

According to Rho Kappa Social Studies Honor Society President Jack Ruszkowski (’17), meetings for the program will occur every two to three weeks. He will provide all the training that participants need for working with Amara, the transcriptional program. Participants will earn service hours for their time but are welcome to help even if they do not need them.

“We are going to be the only high school in the world [in this partnership]. This is a completely unique program,” Ruszkowski said.

Although the program is currently only open to Rho Kappa members, organizers are eventually “going to try to expand it to anyone who has an interest,” Rho Kappa Sponsor Christina Vandenbergh said.

Ruszkowski, who has been transcribing videos for the USHMM for over a year, is passionate about the work and hopes that participants will get to experience what he has in hearing the stories of Holocaust survivors and liberators.

“It’s the moments of inspiration and humanity that pull through for me, like the humor when people tell a joke or a story or a fun memory and they start to smile. [It’s] those moments when you realize that those are real people and that it’s not some far-off subject in history,” Ruszkowski said. “These are actual people, some of them who are still alive just like the rest of us, and that kind of blows you away.”