The editor of a book on the 228 Incident on Sunday called for a concerted effort to collect audio and video records of the event, saying that such evidence could be kept alongside materials at a US Holocaust-documentation foundation.
Felicity Chiu (邱斐顯), editor of Righting the Wrongs of the 228 Incident and Transitional Justice (二二八平反與轉型正義), made the call during a speech at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum.
The book is a collection of interviews with key figures, including victims’ relatives, politicians and academics, in which they discuss ways of redressing the aftermath of the 1947 events in which thousands of people were killed.
The Legislative Yuan on Dec. 5 last year passed the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), authorizing the government to set up an independent agency to address crimes and injustices committed during the 228 Incident and the White Terror era that followed it.
As victims and their children, who could provide eyewitness accounts of the tragedy, gradually pass, there is an urgent need to speed up efforts to record their oral histories, she said.
She suggested that such audio and video recordings could be kept alongside those of the US Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California, which was founded by US film director Steven Spielberg.
“We should keep the audio and video records” of narratives by the survivors and victims’ family members for the sake of future generations, Chiu said.
The Shoah Foundation has collected 53,000 video recordings from 63 countries, including a number on the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.
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