The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, known for its work preserving genocide survivor testimonies, had embarked on a new project: interactive three-dimensional recordings of Holocaust survivors, to allow people to continue speaking to them long after they are gone. I wanted to know more.

Maria Zalewska grew up in what acclaimed writer and journalist Martin Pollack calls the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built. Her physical proximity to spaces of the Shoah, as well as her familial relationships to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drew her initially toward the study of the different ways in which Eastern Europeans filled, organized and produced spaces of memory.