David P. Boder

David Pablo Boder (9 November 1886 – 18 December 1961) was a Latvian-American professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with Holocaust survivors. During that trip, he collected over a hundred interviews totaling 120 hours on a wire recorder developed by fellow professor Dr Marvin Camras. He was the first to record the experiences of the survivors and is a highly noted primary source reference.

Family and career Boder was born Aron Mendel Michelson to Berl and Betti (Frank) Michelson, a Jewish family living in Liepāja, Latvia. The large Jewish community residing in Liepāja at that time likely allowed Boder to grow up speaking Yiddish and German, reserving Russian for speaking at school. At around age 19, Boder began studying psychology, first in Leipzig and then St. Petersburg. While living in St. Petersburg, Boder married Pauline Ivianski in 1907, who gave birth to their daughter Elena later that year. They divorced in 1909. Most of the subjects were Eastern European Jews, primarily from Poland, but Boder also spoke with Western European Jews, non-observant German Jews, Greek Jews and non-Jews.

In October 1946, Boder returned to the U.S. and began transcribing the interviews and working on a book manuscript, supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1949, a collection of eight transcribed interviews and Boder's analysis was published under the title I Did Not Interview the Dead, though this book sold poorly and went out of print. Boder would continue to work on transcribing the interviews until 1956, when his funding from the National Institute of Mental Health ran out.

Later life In 1951, Boder interviewed persons displaced by a large flood in Kansas City. In 1952, Boder retired from the Illinois Institute of Technology and relocated with his wife to UCLA as an unpaid research associate. Boder died of a heart attack on December 18, 1961 at age 75.

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