News — For decades, a mysterious set of cassette tapes sat gathering dust in the Cline Library archives. 
The 80-tape collection was labeled, simply, “Delaware Valley Holocaust Committee.” Library archivists hadn’t had a chance to play them and learn more about their contents … until 2023, when Karl Krotke-Crandall, a specialist in Russian-Holocaust genocide studies, came to the NAU Honors College as an assistant teaching professor.
“I was at a new faculty event at Cline Library, and one of the archivists, Sean Evans, struck up a conversation with me,” Krotke-Crandall said. “He told me about these tapes that no one had time to look into; archivists always have too much on their plates. I knew the tapes were nearing the end of their shelf life, and I said, ‘I’m not going to let them waste away.’”
Since then, Krotke-Crandall and a handful of student interns have been hard at work digitizing, transcribing and tracing the origins of the tapes—which turned out to be a series of interviews with Holocaust survivors living in Arizona and the East Coast. These rare survivors’ accounts will eventually become part of the collections at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where they’ll help shape visitors’ and researchers’ understanding of the Holocaust and its grim legacy.
“The more time passes, the more disconnected our society becomes from the genocide of Jews during World War II,” Krotke-Crandall said. “We have data that shows more and more people are not learning about the Holocaust or don’t believe it happened. That’s why it’s still so important to give voice to these individuals who saw it happen firsthand. ‘Never again’ can’t just become a slogan; it needs to remain a pledge.”
The Delaware Project
Back in 2023, Krotke-Crandall’s first task was to find out if these interviews were already part of the Holocaust archives. Along with staff member Robin LaCorte at NAU’s Martin Springer Institute, he scoured catalogs and digital repositories worldwide and confirmed that no one else had these interviews. 
“These are by and large unheard voices, so the Holocaust Memorial Museum was interested in the collection from the start,” Krotke-Crandall said. “They said they would take care of the digitization and transcription, but I really wanted students to be involved.”
Krotke-Crandall partnered with Cline Library, the Martin Springer Institute and the Honors College to secure funds to digitize the tapes. Then, he hired students through NAU’s program to help digitize and transcribe the audio. He called their work the Delaware Project, an homage to the only written record that accompanied the tapes when they were found.
Krotke-Crandall said the interns—Korryn Penner, Rowan Vance, Rebecca Sandhu and Sara Brinson—have had the opportunity to enrich their understanding of the Holocaust the same way he did, by listening to survivors telling their stories. Aside from being among the first people to hear these accounts, Krotke-Crandall said, students also get a peek into how faculty research works and a glimpse at Arizona history as seen through Jewish immigrants’ eyes.
Sandhu, an Honors College sophomore who is double majoring in political science and politics and media, joined the Delaware Project to learn more about how politics and genocide are intertwined. She spent hours listening to and transcribing the survivors’ stories, writing summaries and compiling keywords that will help future scholars find these resources in database searches.
Sandhu went into the internship thinking she’d hear several similar stories, but she’s been struck by how each survivor has a completely different tale to tell. While some fled their homes to escape the Third Reich, others hid in convents or were sent to Nazi death camps. 
“If no one listens and learns about these challenging historical topics, they will continue to be repeated,” Sandhu said. “There is an importance in hearing these people’s experiences and the ways, even into their older ages, they are still affected by the genocide that was committed against them and their community. These diverse experiences have broadened my understanding of the impact of genocide and the resilience of humans.”
Among the more extraordinary interviews Sandhu and other students have found is a recording of Leon Pullada, an investigator at the Nuremberg Trials who later moved to Flagstaff and taught courses for NAU, describing his chilling prison-cell interaction with Nazi leader Hermann Göring.
“He had a completely clear mind and a clear conscience,” Pullada mused, astounded. “Göring felt that all the things that had been done either had not been done by him, or they had been done because they were necessary and they were acts of state.”
Enriching the public record isn’t the NAU research team’s only goal. They’re also trying to answer a longstanding question: How did these tapes get to Flagstaff in the first place?
“All we had was the piece of paper that said, ‘Delaware Valley Holocaust Committee,’” Krotke-Crandall said. “That’s all we knew.”
A first pass through the recordings revealed interviews with Holocaust survivors based mostly in the Tucson area. Some recordings, like Pullada’s, were from lectures given at NAU. Given the Arizona connections, it made sense to the researchers that these recordings ended up in Lumberjack hands—even more so when they connected with two 1980s alumni named Fred Petti and Gary Hyde. They told interns they’d taken part in recording survivors’ stories as part of a project led by a professor whose full name has been lost to history.
Less logical, Krotke-Crandall said, were the interviews with Holocaust survivors from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states along the Eastern Seaboard. 
“That’s what we’re still trying to piece together,” Krotke-Crandall said. “It seems like Professor Platt got connected with someone named Joan Keats, who was interested in duplicating what he was doing in the Delaware Valley.”
Perhaps, Krotke-Crandall theorized, Platt agreed to keep Keats’ work at NAU as part of a larger preservation effort. Or maybe the two traded pieces of each other’s libraries, and yet more interview tapes are still at large, gathering dust in some New Jersey attic.
As Krotke-Crandall and his interns prepare to hand the interview files over to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, they’ll continue to unravel the mystery of the Delaware Holocaust Committee by interviewing Petty and Hyde, tracking down Keats’ descendants and finding others who may have more information.
“When you localize a topic that’s international in scale, you draw connections between your life and something that once felt very distant,” Krotke-Crandall. “Hearing from these interviewers and understanding why they came forward isn’t just important to the broader history of the Holocaust. It’s also important to Arizona, to Flagstaff.”
Jill Kimball | NAU Communications
(928) 523-2282 | [email protected]
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