More than 80 years ago, two young girls in Germany were separated by the Holocaust. The friends said their goodbyes and fled from the Nazis. Betty Grebenschikoff and her family moved to Shanghai, China, and then the United States. Her friend Annemarie Wahrenberg moved to Chile. The two friends never saw each other again — until a recent, emotional reunion.
Every Sunday, Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg have a scheduled phone call. They often lose track of time talking, as best friends tend to do. The weekly calls are only a recent ritual. In fact, just four months ago, both women believed the other had died in the Holocaust.
"But we shouldn't have an outright ban on deepfakes for satire or freedom of expression. And the growing commercial use of the technology is very promising, such as turning movies into different languages, or creating engaging educational videos," says Professor Sandra Wachter, a senior research fellow in AI at Oxford University. One such educational use of AI-generated videos is at the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation, which houses more than 55,000 video testimonies from Holocaust survivors.
Tune into 1 hour 57 seconds of the radio broadcast to hear an interview with USC Shoah Foundation indexer Ita Gordon, who played a part in helping reunite survivors Ana María Wahrenberg and Betty Grebenschikoff, and hear the two childhood friends talk about their first meeting after 80 years.
Two elderly Jewish women who were best friends as children in 1930s Berlin have been reunited after 82 years thanks to a Holocaust researcher who recognized a connection in interviews they gave in different countries.
82 years after fleeing Nazi Germany with their families, two childhood friends are brought together by USC Shoah Foundation researcher who ‘linked’ their testimony.
Few people alive today will have the chance to speak with a soldier who liberated Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Fortunately, a virtual version of that experience is now available to anyone visiting the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
Survivors of the Holocaust now have the chance to preserve their stories in a way that allows them to directly answer future generations' questions about their experiences.
Glauben became a tireless advocate for the 55,000-square-foot, $78 million Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which opens to the public on Sept. 18.
“The younger generation, they have to remember,” Kaufman says of the Holocaust, while turning to a newly installed portrait of himself at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. “Those people, they looked up at me and said: ‘If you survive, don’t let them forget us.’”
Melbourne’s Lee Liberman has been inaugurated as the new chair of the Board of Councillors to the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, making her the foundation’s first chair to be based outside the United States.
Smith said 21 survivors of the Holocaust have been filmed so far, and they are recording survivors in more languages — Russian, German, Spanish and Hebrew — to capture cultural and linguistic nuances in their responses. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz and features in The Last Survivors, was also interviewed for the project, once in 2015 in English, and once again this March in German.
“The Last Survivors,” airing on PBS, is the stronger of the two, a sparely told Frontline presentation in which not just survivors but family members discuss the ordeal as well as how it affected them in the years after. Later in the week, there’s “Liberation Heroes: The Last Eyewitnesses,” a Discovery Channel hour made in conjunction with the Shoah Foundation.
The one-hour documentary is part of the foundation’s 25th anniversary commemoration and its Stronger Than Hate Initiative, and is intended to serve as a cautionary reminder of what can happen when hatred remains unchecked, Discovery described.
Dimensions in Testimony is a revolutionary project which allows a person to have a Q&A with a Holocaust survivor via projection technology. Created by the USC Shoah Foundation in partnership with the Genesis Philanthropy Group. The projections have the ability to answer a specific questions someone may have for a survivor.
A central feature of this new museum in Dallas will be the small theater in which visitors can have real conversations with Max Glauben in the form of that holographic image made possible by new technologies. And through that, his message from the past, which he repeats today, will live on forever: “Believe!”
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 director is reissuing “Schindler’s List,” as he expands the mission of the Shoah Foundation through video testimonies of genocide survivors.
Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” is back in theaters to mark the 25th anniversary of its release. And the director said it couldn’t come at a more appropriate time, saying that “there is more at stake today than even back then."
Now, as the film comes to theaters again, the world is at a critical crossroads similar to what the generation in the film faced: Globally, authoritarian governments are in ascendance — with fascist parties gaining traction in many European nations. Further, a stark rise in violence targeting Jewish communities has reflected rising antisemitism as not seen since the Second World War.