Interact with Holocaust survivors
Tech on loan to Toronto helps create simulated conversations
Pinchas Gutter vividly recalls his experiences during the Holocaust.
He remembers living happily in Lodz, Poland, with his parents, who were winemakers, and his twin sister until the war broke out when he was 7. That’s when the nightmare began. “My father was almost beaten to death by the Nazis almost immediately,” he says.
Gutter recalls surviving the Warsaw Ghetto and six concentration camps, as well as the time he risked his life to have a secret Bar Mitzvah, one of countless religious acts that were strictly prohibited and punishable by death at the hands of the Nazis.
He remembers being liberated at 13 and living in an orphanage before moving to Toronto when he was older. Gutter doesn’t want the next generation to forget. Thanks to a project by the University of Southern California’s (USC) Shoah Foundation and Institute for Creative Technologies, members of the public can now not only listen to Gutter’s Holocaust testimony, but also ask him questions without him even being in the room.
Five years ago, Gutter, now 84, recorded answers to upwards of 1,500 questions about his experiences before, during and after the Second World War and even his opinions on lessons of the Holocaust.
The technology, on loan to The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto until May, allows people to simulate conversations with Gutter by speaking into a microphone and watching him answer their questions on a screen.
The experience is almost like talking to Siri on a cellphone, but more personal. Gutter’s answers haven’t been edited, which brings out his personality and preserves his emotion and conversational tone.
Gutter was the first of 12 survivors, and the only Canadian, to participate in the project, called “New Dimensions in Testimony.” For five days, he sat in a chair surrounded by 57 cameras answering question after question, sometimes twice, for eight hours straight.
“Holocaust education and Holocaust study is very much an academic thing. Historians are busy with it, researchers, scientists of different kinds,” Gutter told the Star of why he participated.
“But all of them have got their own subjective way of looking and seeing things. The Holocaust survivor tells you the way it was.”
Gutter said it was important to him to fight against Holocaust denial.
“As far as I’m concerned, today you still have Holocaust survivors who can go along and prove to them their experiences,” he said.
“They are living witnesses of what happened. In the time to come, they won’t be there.”
The Neuberger centre is one of many Holocaust education centres that will be testing out the technology, currently in the pilot stage. It still has a few kinks — certain keywords in a question might accidentally trigger a somewhat unrelated answer — but this will be fed back to USC to iron out.
It’s open to the public by appointment during weekdays at the centre’s North York office near Bathurst St. and Sheppard Ave. W.
Michelle Fishman, education coordinator and interim manager of public programs for the Neuberger centre, said the technology provides an innovative solution to the challenge of keeping Holocaust education relevant with fewer and fewer survivors left.
“Many Holocaust organizations right now are facing a pivotal turning point with Holocaust survivors, of course, unfortunately passing away,” Fishman said. “I think many organizations are sort of deciding now ‘how will we move forward without Holocaust survivors,’ especially in a way that will actually engage future generations.”
Once refined, the hope is to eventually have a permanent exhibit in Toronto that would allow students to interact with survivors like Gutter in hologram form, making it feel even more as though he is actually in the room.
After visiting the exhibit this week along with representatives of Toronto’s Board of Rabbis, Rabbi Elyse Goldstein of the downtown City Shul said she hoped to bring her synagogue’s Hebrew school for a visit.
“The only way the younger generation can relate to anything is through technology and I mean that not as a judgment,” Goldstein said. “I think it’s going to be great for kids who have to have this technology all the time for everything they do.”
The group asked Gutter questions about what his life was like before the Holocaust, whether he had any friends in the concentration camps and how he wound up in Canada.
The session concluded as Gutter described his hope for future generations.
“That is to tolerate each other and to accept different cultures and different religions and different ways of life,” he says onscreen. “Just live together, you know? Your prayers to god, you do it this way, I do it my way. I say psalms, you read the Qur’an. Why can’t we live together?”