The USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) have launched a new educational web page featuring the first Spanish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), an interactive biography that invites students to engage in conversation with the recorded testimony of a Holocaust survivor.
Inside a Warsaw light stage surrounded by nine cameras, prominent historian and journalist Marian Turski in late June completed the first ever Polish-language interactive biography.
Conducted by USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (POLIN), Turski’s interview was a truly international collaboration involving 15 team members from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the U.K and the U.S.
Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.
"It’s very important that the Swedish Holocaust Museum is one of Sweden’s National Historical Museums. We believe the Holocaust is not a Jewish concern, but that it is, and must be, a universal one." Lizzie Oved Scheja (pictured above, full interview below), founder and director of J! Jewish Culture in Sweden, speaking earlier this month after Swedish Minister of Culture Jeanette Gustafsdotter inaugurated the country’s first museum dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.
Two Holocaust survivors and friends of USC Shoah Foundation, Max Eisen and Dr. Agnes Kaposi, have been recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for their work in Holocaust education.
Eisen was appointed to the Order of Canada for his “contributions to Holocaust education, and his promotion of transformational dialogue on human rights, tolerance and respect.”
In February 2012 Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter sat down inside a light stage surrounded by 50 cameras and 6,000 LED bulbs to give his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
Gutter’s interview was the first proof of concept of Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), a groundbreaking new technology that enables viewers to pose questions to survivors like Gutter and hear their responses in real-time, lifelike conversation.
The Swedish version of USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony installation was presented in Malmö at the International Forum On Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén hosted the event in Malmö on October 13th and visited the installation where he engaged with interactive biographies of two Swedish Holocaust survivors.
King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden attended the forum, where they visited the installation and met with Holocaust survivors.
Steven Spielberg’s U.S.C. Shoah Foundation, founded in 1994 to record survivors’ stories, is at the forefront of the evolution. In a 2018 New York Times article, Spielberg described the need to broaden the focus, saying: “The presence of hate has become taken for granted. We are not doing enough to counter it.”
“The holographic likeness of Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone, 97, is part of a new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, which reopens on Saturday more than a year after the pandemic forced museum doors closed.”
The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.