The Holocaust is a harrowing time in history, with millions of innocents murdered, countless treasures stolen from people and their homes, as well as the mortifying end many souls faced. We can hardly imagine the atrocities people witnessed and the daily life inside a concentration camp. The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation has recorded 18 interactive testimonies from Holocaust survivors throughout the last several years in an effort to preserve their stories.
Max Glauben, who celebrated his 91st birthday Monday, was the latest interviewee for the foundation. Glauben lost his mother, father, and brother by Nazi hands and was on a death march from one concentration camp to another when he was liberated by U.S. troops at the age of 17. He survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi-run concentration camps; now he is lending his memories along with the other survivors to provide future generations a chance to ‘ask’ his image questions regarding his experience.
Glauben says, “I thought that my knowledge could cure the hatred and the bigotry and the killings in this world if somebody can listen to my story, my testimony, and be educated even after I’m gone.”
The foundation, established in 1994 by film director Steven Spielberg, has approximately 55,000 audiovisual testimonies regarding genocides in a handful of languages, a majority of which come from the Holocaust. Executive Director of the Shoah Foundation Stephen Smith says that they are in a “race against time” as they try to compile as many testimonials as possible. Thus far, the foundation has survivor’s speaking English, Hebrew, and Spanish, but they hope to gather even more accounts in diverse languages.
The most interesting aspect of the work the foundation has accomplished is all due to the interactive technology. Visitors to the museum are able to hold actual dialogue with survivors and ask them questions about their experience. The interaction provides a human element with storytelling versus walls of images and text. It brings the atrocity to life, so to speak, in the people who were there to witness one of the darkest times in our world’s history.
When discussing this interaction, Smith says, “It’s your questions that are being answered.” He even goes on to add that asking questions regarding forgiveness is particularly emotional among survivors and museum goers. He says, “You actually see sometimes them struggling to know what to answer.”
For just over a year, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center featured survivor images in a special theater. CEO of the museum, Susan Abrams, has noticed that visitors are significantly impacted by interacting with the images, “People get teary; people laugh.” Giving a face to a name and a story allows visitors to get an intimate sense of the survivors because the environment is almost like that of a group conversation.
The Holocaust museum in Dallas will begin showing the survivor accounts in September, following the opening of a new location with a new name, The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. At present, the museum regularly has survivors visit to speak with students. And with the new technology, it will ensure that the tradition continues. President and CEO of the Dallas museum Mary Pat Higgins says of the interactive technology, “Our survivors are aging, and so in 20 years we won’t have any survivors who are still able to do that themselves.”
The images of the survivors appear on a flat screen or are projected in a way that appears 3D. The new building that the Dallas museum is building will hold a special theater so the image will appear three-dimensional on stage. The technology isn’t ‘smart’ in the sense we have come to know, but it is revolutionary in how it’s being used.
If you think the technology used is complex, Smith says, “It’s actually video that responds to human voice commands. And all that’s happening is rather than you watching a linear testimony, all the bits of the testimony are broken up, and then when you ask it a question, it finds that piece of video and plays it for you.”
Glauben has made it his mission to tell everyone about the Holocaust, was actually one of the patrons to found the Dallas museum. Losing his family and everything he knew sparked him to, “do anything possible to educate the people and let them know what kind of tragedy this was.”
Every year we lose survivors of unspeakable evil, and in turn, we lose their stories, their memories of a time that we can hardly grasp. The technology used at the Shoah Foundation will aid in preserving those stories, testimonies, and memories of people who want to continue to educate others about the Holocaust long after they leave this world.