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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A St. Pete woman is reunited with her best friend after fleeing Nazi Germany more than 80 years ago.
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.