In an effort to spark a social movement against hatred in all forms, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education – and Discovery Education, the leading provider of digital content and professional development for K-12 classrooms, today announced the winners of the 2018 IWitness Video Challenge.
BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh (AP) — Mohammed Hashim hid in the hills and watched as his brother begged for his life, his arms bound behind his back as soldiers marched the 35-year-old teacher away. It was the last time he saw him alive. It was Aug. 26, the day after Rohingya Muslim separatist attacks on military outposts in the Rohingya homeland in western Myanmar. In their wake, Myanmar’s military and local Buddhists would respond with a campaign of rape, massacre and arson that has driven about 700,000 Rohingya into Banglades
The survivor community for one of the worst war atrocities in modern history is dying. New technology will allow future generations to hear their stories.
At the Shoah Foundation, I was able to converse with a still-living Holocaust survivor named Pinchas Gutter. Pinchas wasn’t really there, though; I was chatting with a hologram of Pinchas, which appeared on a flat, 2D display in the hallway. The conversation felt almost absurdly natural, due in large part to the foundation’s development of its own natural language processing system. At one point, I realized I felt rude interrupting a video.
NEW YORK - Eva Schloss lived through Auschwitz. Her father and brother did not. Pinchas Gutter survived five Nazi concentration camps and was, as he says, “torn apart” from his family when they were killed.
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.
USC SHoah Foundation has announced the "Stronger Than Hate" initiative to support educators by providing them with tools and training to responsibly engage their students now and into the future.
After 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, his former high school teacher Derek Weimer reported that his student had been fascinated by the Nazis at school. Weimer’s classroom was not where Fields’ fascination began, but where he was able to express himself openly and publicly with pride. The Second World War and the entire period of Nazi power was indeed fascinating, but Weimer realized that Fields’ interests lay in a deeper and darker place.
The USC Shoah Foundation is using big data to recreate the experience of having a one-on-one conversation with someone who lived through the Holocaust.
To ensure the world that each of us won't forget the dark chapters of history, such as the Holocaust and World War II-related atrocities, a group of technology-savvy scholars and researchers is creating audio-visual accounts with survivors and witnesses.
Where “Blackout” thrives in the present, “The Last Goodbye” takes a look into the past. A co-production between Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz of Here Be Dragons, the USC Shoah Foundation, MPC VR and OTOY, the experience follows Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he toured the Majdanek Concentration Camp in July 2016 to cope with the loss of his family. The documentary-style piece entails the viewer visiting the camp with Gutter and exploring it in ways never seen before, all while listening to his heart-wrenching story of perseverance and loss.
Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum is using new technology to tell the stories of 13 Holocaust survivors, including 7 from Chicago. The technology takes first-hand survivor accounts to create interactive holograms, which allow for visitors to ask questions and get answers - long after the survivors have passed on.
Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology
As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This warning has quickly become a staple of history classes around the world, and is why it’s so important to acknowledge the wrongful actions of our past. However, reading about genocide and war in a history book isn’t quite as powerful as hearing it talked about by veterans and survivors. That’s why assemblies and speeches tend to be so powerful—there’s something about listening to someone who lived through a particular piece of history that makes it much more personal and real.
One of the great questions — in life, not just in VR — is how we’ll memorialize victims of mass tragedy. Technology offers myriad tools, but how to use them so that they’re effective and not exploitative? Specifically, this has been a question involving the Shoah — how will the murder of 6 million people be marked when the day comes that anyone old enough to have lived through it will have died? As the youngest survivors approach 80, it’s more than a hypothetical.
During the election, teachers around the US struggled with issues arising in their classrooms — new kinds of bullying, confusion between fact and fiction, fear. And in the 100 days since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, those topics only continued to generate challenges for teachers. The organization USC Shoah Foundation heard those concerns and developed an initiative called “100 Days to Inspire Respect” to support learning through Trump’s first 100 days in office.
There are several parallel stories told in the documentary “Finding Oscar.” The main one lays out, with traditional means, the horrific circumstances of a 1982 atrocity perpetrated by Guatemalan army commandos against the residents of a small Guatemalan village. Taking its name from the location of the raid, the so-called Dos Erres massacre left 250 civilians dead — many of them unceremoniously dumped down a well, with some thrown in while still alive — by a squad of elite military operatives, known as Kaibiles. The Kaibiles had gone in search of guerrillas they suspected of having recently ambushed government soldiers during the country’s long-running civil war with rural leftist rebels.
All of the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation’s educational resources about the Armenian Genocide can now be found on the IWitness website that launched on April 17, one week before the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
It’s really easy to mess up a film project about the Holocaust. The wrong tone, the wrong direction, and it can all go horribly awry. Add cutting-edge technology operated by unskilled hands to a topic as devastating as survivor testimony, and you could have a disaster. Fortunately, the VR film The Last Goodbye, which debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, gets it right.