Holograms of Holocaust survivors at Illinois museum let crucial stories live on
It is a question that haunts Holocaust survivors and their heirs more intensely each day: What will happen when the survivors are no longer here to tell their stories? Books, articles and documentary films, of course, will convey what happened. But nothing quite matches the urgency of seeing and hearing a survivor standing before you, looking you in the eye, answering your questions, describing how she escaped death, how her relatives and friends did not, how she wants the world to know.
Today, more than 70 years after the end of World War II, only the youngest of the survivors are still here to educate the rest of us, and they’re mostly in their 80s or older. Who will take their place when they are gone? No one really can, of course, but the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, in Skokie, is the first in the world to embrace an emerging, interactive technology that’s about as close as you can get to speaking with a survivor who’s not really there.
When it’s fully operational, in the fall of 2017, the Survivor Stories Theater will enable visitors to ask questions, pose follow-ups and otherwise engage with a three-dimensional, hologram-like image of a Holocaust survivor. Even in its current, two-dimensional form – which is on view at the museum – the Interactive Survivor Experience feels viscerally real.
In a small, makeshift space that next year will give way to the full-fledged Survivor Stories Theater, a lifesize projection of survivor Pinchas Gutter flickers on a high-definition screen, his eyes blinking, his face alive with emotion, his attention focused squarely on a visitor.
What was life like during the Holocaust? I ask the electronic version of Gutter, who was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1932 and survived Majdanek, Buchenwald and other concentration camps.
“Life in the camps was indescribable,” he tells me, “because it was living death.” As he speaks, he gestures with his hands to emphasize his points. “You were just one centimeter from the grave,” he adds. How did you maintain hope? I ask him. “What motivated me not to give up – first of all, I was a child in the ghetto,” he answers, meaning he could not have fully understood the gravity of the situation.
“And everybody kind of believed – including myself, because I had listened to the older people speaking to my parents – that when the war finishes things will change. Nobody knew what was going to happen later on. So in the beginning, despite the torture, despite the hunger and despite all these, you know, terrible things that were going on... that wasn’t the worst.”
No one could have imagined what the worst would be, Gutter, who has lived in Toronto since 1985, is telling me in Skokie.
When I ask if he might sing a song from his childhood for me, he begins to chant a Hebraic prayer, the lamenting melody and the cry of his voice conjuring not just the Poland of his youth but Jewish life reaching back thousands of years. It’s enough to make you weep.
How is it possible for Guttman to respond to me so quickly, precisely and poetically?
Several years ago, the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles – which serves as a repository and advocate for Holocaust research – began looking for ways to evoke in three dimensions what it’s like to speak with a survivor. A worldwide search for the latest technology led the foundation full circle back to the University of Southern California and its Institute for Creative Technologies, which was working to develop breakthrough interactive experiences.
Together, the two institutions (in partnership with concept developer Conscience Display) created New Dimensions in Testimony, which merges ultrasophisticated filming techniques, innovative voice-recognition technology and three-dimensional presentation.
Just as the project was gaining momentum, Susan Abrams – appointed CEO of the Illinois Holocaust Museum in 2014 – learned about it from board member Jim Goodman and decided “that’s something I have to jump on right now,” she remembers. “I was focused on how we tell our survivors’ stories for generations to come.”
Abrams’s move came at the right moment, for the USC project soon would need a home for its pilot installation.
“They had the technology,” says Abrams, referring to USC, “but we have the museum and education center. We have the range of visitors, from schoolchildren to a general adult audience, and a theater to help them develop it.”
Thus the museum invited a few survivors from what Abrams calls the “museum family” to travel to Los Angeles for what turned out to be extremely intense interview sessions. For several days, each of these survivors sat before 50-plus cameras, answering upward of 2,000 questions on their experiences, memories, philosophies, opinions and more. It was not easy. “They take you all the way back to your childhood,” recalls Auschwitz survivor and museum president Fritzie Fritzshall. “What do you remember from your childhood? What do you remember from when you were three years old? They fish everything out of you. They know how to do this.”
Through this avalanche of questions, “They brought me into the ghetto,” adds Fritzshall. “They brought me into the camp. And so they have put me through this entire five days where I relived this entire thing.
“And they kept going over and over and over about Auschwitz .... They put me right back into cold and into hunger and into the entire experience of Auschwitz.”
When Fritzshall returned home, she says, she needed time to recover.
Survivor Aaron Elster, the museum’s vice president, says the interviewers “knew more about me than I could ever remember,” at one point even correcting him on a detail of his own story.
And museum president emeritus Sam Harris found that the experience made him feel “like I was being interrogated by the FBI,” he says. “Deep inside, I was getting angry, and I don’t usually get angry.”
To coax every morsel of information and reflection from the survivors, Shoah Foundation researchers had read as much as possible about them in advance, then interviewed them at least twice off-screen. The preparation generated approximately 800 questions for each survivor, says Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith, but that was just for starters.
The interviewers also drew from about 300 general questions likely to come up when visitors meet up with the projections, such as, “Do you hate the Germans? How do you feel about genocide? What about God? Do you go to synagogue? Have you told your children your story?” explains Smith.
Then, while a principal interviewer posed these questions during filming, another interviewer listened closely for possible follow-ups, generating hundreds more inquiries. And the survivors were asked to define certain terms, such as “Passover” and “Seder,” to form a kind of glossary.
Why have the survivors put themselves through this ordeal?
“I was one of the lucky people,” says Fritzshall. “I had somebody help me to lie about my age to save my life. I had an aunt who gave up her bread, her daily bread, [who would] bring me into her barracks. Then [there are] the women who shared their crumbs of bread with me. I promised to be their messenger.
“So I’m saying to myself: Why am I one of the lucky ones? Why was I saved? Why did they risk their lives? I [must] follow through and be the person that they asked me to be, so I have to literally become a messenger.”
Harris, too, considers it his duty to participate in this project, explaining why in contemporary terms.
“It would be like if you saw a bus being hit by a car, and there were 100 children in the bus, and they all died, and I drove by, and I saw the accident, and I never ever told anyone about it,” Harris says. “I owe it to report to the world that that accident happened and 100 innocent children died. Well, we’re talking about 1.5 million Jewish children who died.” To survivor Elster, it’s about posterity. “When the grass is on top of me, instead of me being on top of the grass,” he says, “I’ll be able to still correspond with and interact with young people.”
Though the museum stands at the forefront of the new, interactive technology, both Abrams and Smith point out that this is just one more way of nurturing the stories and lessons of the Holocaust.
“I look at things written in diaries and letters during the Holocaust by victims who did not survive,” says Smith, “and it’s amazing how relevant what they had to say remains.”
And though the museum will be first in bringing the new technology to the public, “I would expect five years from now many Holocaust museums would have these [interactive] testimonies embedded into their current exhibitions,” says Smith.
That the venture should begin in Skokie seems thoroughly fitting, for the Chicago suburb decades ago emerged as a nexus of Holocaust survivors, an estimated 7,000-8,000 having congregated there. Now some of their stories will live on as never before.
– Chicago Tribune/TNS