David P. Boder (1886–1961)

David Boder was born Aron Mendel Michelson to a Jewish family in Libau (Liepaja), a port city in Latvia then under Russian rule. His parents Berl and Betti Michelson were part of a growing Jewish community there and he likely spoke Yiddish or German at home and Russian in the classroom.

He attended the Jewish Teacher's Institute in Vilna from age 13 to 18 or 19.
Upon graduation, he left Russia and headed west to Leipzig, Germany, where he spent six months studying with Wilhelm Wundt, one of the pioneers of modern psychology. He also traveled for the first time to the USA and became passionately interested in Jewish immigration to the country. He next headed to St. Petersburg to study psychololgy at the Psychoneurological Institute, where Jewish students did not face a quota. In 1907, he married Pauline Ivianski, with whom he had a daughter, but the couple divorced not long after. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to work with a Russian engineering army battalion. In 1917, as the turmoil in Russian society reached a fever pitch, he went east to Omsk, Siberia, where he served as the director of Adult Education for the Trans-Siberian Railroad and remarried to Nadejda Chernik.
In 1919, they fled east to escape the ravages of the Russian civil war, finding refuge first in Japan and subsequently in Mexico. Nadejda died in the worldwide flu pandemic but Boder learned Spanish and fashioned a new life in the new world. He lectured at the National University in Mexico City, directed psychological research for the Mexican prison system, and supervised testing services for several government colleges. He concluded his stay by marrying for the third time in 1925 to Dora Neveloff, a Russian-born U.S. citizen. They relocated to the USA, where Boder obtained an MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Northwestern. He was hired at the Lewis Institute to help develop its psychology department, and in the mid-1930s, launched a Psychology Museum. He served on the clinical staff of Michael Reese Hospital and the Institute for Juvenile Research. At the outbreak of World War II, Boder published a manual on Morse code and set out the wartime role of psychology.

The end of the war set in motion the endeavor that would define Boder's work for the rest of his life. In 1946, he obtained approval from the Allied forces to visit occupied Western Europe for a major interview project, and raised funds to finance the journey. His goals were to investigate, record, and preserve an authentic record of wartime suffering and its effects, and to raise awareness among the post-war public of the Holocaust.

Boder spent two months interviewing 130 displaced persons in nine languages and recording them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. The interviews were among the earliest audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. They are today the earliest extant recordings, valuable not only for the testimonies of survivors and other displaced persons, but also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded at various points.

Boder's itinerary included four countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and German. His interviewees covered the extreme ends of the spectrum of modern Jewish experience, from passionately Torah-observant Jews from Lithuania to assimilated German Jews married to non-Jewish spouses. He also highlighted the experiences of children and youth. By 1948, his book manuscript was ready, originally published as The D.P. Story and eventually published in 1949 under the title I Did Not Interview the Dead. In 1951, he again interviewed displaced persons, this time the victims of a huge flood in Kansas City. He retired in 1952 and arranged to be based as a Research Associate in the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he published The Impact of Catastrophe in 1954 in the Journal of Psychology.