Technology brings images of Holocaust survivors to life
The recollections of the Dallas resident who as a Jew in Poland survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi concentration camps are now being preserved in a way that will allow generations to come to ask his image questions. Glauben, who turns 91 on Monday, is the latest Holocaust survivor recorded in such a way by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. The Los Angeles-based foundation has recorded 18 interactive testimonies with Holocaust survivors over the last several years, and executive director Stephen Smith says they’re in a “race against time” as they work to add more, seeking both a diversity in experiences and testimonies in a variety of languages.
For more than a year now, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center has featured the survivors’ images in a special theater . Museum CEO Susan Abrams says that when visitors interact with the images, the impact is often obvious: “People get teary; people laugh.”
The Illinois museum is one of four currently featuring the images. Other museums are in Houston, Indiana and New York. The Holocaust museum in Dallas will start showing them starting in September, after it opens in a new location and with a new name — the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
The Dallas museum currently brings in survivors to talk to students and has found that’s often the most meaningful part of their visit, according to President and CEO Mary Pat Higgins. This technology ensures that can continue, she said.
“It’s actually video that responds to human voice commands,” he said. “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.”
See the full story here: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/12/virtual-reality-holocaust-survivors/