The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
New tech, 3-D holograms preserve Holocaust survivor stories
SKOKIE, ILL. » Fritzie Fritzshall knows she is running out of time.
She knows the day will come when she won’t be here to describe being herded onto a boxcar, hearing the cries that turned to whimpers that turned to the silence that signaled another death. And she won’t be able to tell of the doors opening to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where an old prisoner, as he unloaded the dead, whispered to her in Yiddish to lie to the guards about her age. That lie kept her out of a line to the gas chambers.
Preserving her story is why she’s on stage, or at least a three-dimensional likeness of her is on stage, at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, just outside Chicago.
Fritzshall is one of 13 Holocaust survivors who tell their stories through holographic images that invite the audience to ask questions, creating what feels like a live conversation.
The interactive display is the latest version of an exhibit that’s been shown at a handful of sites including New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But those exhibits were two-dimensional, with survivors appearing as they would on a movie or television screen. The exhibit in Skokie marks the first time that the voice-recognition technology powering conversations with audiences has beenmarried to 3-D ho- lographic technology to tell survivors’ stories.
“We are the first in the world to have this and show it like this,” said museum CEO Susan Abrams. “We will be working with the Shoah Foundation to license this globally so that it can be seen by asmany people as possible.”
The holographic theater is part of the Skokie museum’s new Take a Stand Center. It’s the result of a threeyear, $5 million project using New Dimensions Testimony technology devel- oped by the Shoah Foundation. The foundation, based at the University of Southern California, grew out of an effort by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to preserve as many survivors’ stories as possible.
For her part, Fritzshall spent a week in Los Angeles in a studio, one of three in theworld like it, surrounded by a 3-D camera system. She answered some 2,000 questions about a life that was shattered one night in Czechoslovakia when German soldiers pounded on the door and told her family at gunpoint they had 15 minutes to pack and leave.
On stage, Fritzshall’s holographic image nods, tilts her head and appears to listen as someone in the auditorium asks a question. Stumping her is next to impossible, thanks to technology that turned her responses to those 2,000 questions into 30,000 answers, Abrams said. Fritzshall not only provided horrific details about her two years in Auschwitz, but if a child asks about her favorite color or food, the hologram can answer those too.