Dimensions in Testimony in IWitness Pilot in South Africa Draws Praise from Students, Educators—and Interview Subject Pinchas Gutter
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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.
The Last Goodbye virtual reality experience is now available on Oculus Rift.
Four years ago, Pinchas Gutter traveled back to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where he had been imprisoned as a child during the Holocaust. In this emotional journey, Pinchas shares his firsthand testimony of what he saw and experienced there and invites you into the spaces and memories with him.
USC Shoah Foundation has launched a path-breaking online teaching tool to enable students and educators to ask questions that prompt real-time recorded responses from Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter.
The tool will be available at no cost through a new activity in the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness.
In his interactive biography taken in 2014, Pinchas asks today’s youth to be accepting and tolerant of one another.
In his interactive biography taken in 2014, Pinchas asks today’s youth to be accepting and tolerant of one another.
Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter describes how he, his mother and sister took the train to Warsaw posing as Christians - which meant that Pinchas's long payos, or sidelocks, needed to be cut. Pinchas describes the experience first in his testimony for the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in 1993, and then in his testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in 1995.
Pinchas Gutter recalls his arrival at the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia two weeks prior to his liberation by the Soviet armed forces in 1945. He relates he refused to participate in the mistreatment of the German ghetto guards by Soviet soldiers during the liberation of the ghetto. He remembers the sadness he felt over the mistreatment of anyone even of perpetrators.
Liberation75 and USC Shoah Foundation partnered on a virtual student program, “Stories are Stronger than Hate: A Call to Action,” hosted by actor/director Mike Myers, with special guest Akim Aliu, Co-founder of Hockey Diversity Alliance, on Monday June 22.
Through the personal narrative of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter and other stories, participants explored how stories create the possibility to learn about ourselves, about others and about how we can affect the change we want to see in our communities right now.
For Pinchas Gutter, visiting his homeland is a haunting reminder of the family he lost and the life he might have lived. He returns one last time to say goodbye and capture his personal saga in virtual reality for future generations.