Last October, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center made headlines when it unveiled pioneering hologram technology as part of its new Take a Stand Center. In a counterintuitive twist, this futuristic addition allows the American museum to retain the intensely personal approach that has been its hallmark since opening in a small storefront in the late 1970s.
At the time, the Chicago suburb of Skokie had the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel; when neo-Nazis planned a march on the city, many of them knew they had to speak up. They formed the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, their mission being to tell their stories to adults as well as students. It wasn’t easy – most wanted desperately to leave the past behind, to simply live their new lives. Instead, they repeatedly went through the pain of recounting their harrowing past, hoping that these interactions would give a human dimension to the grim statistics of genocide and that education would overcome hate.
In 2009, their grassroots efforts culminated in the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, a 55 million dollar building with permanent displays that take visitors through the years before and during World War II. Among the thousands of objects on view are items donated by Chicago-area Holocaust survivors, many of whom are museum volunteers. It is particularly poignant when they are there in person to tell visitors about these artifacts.
But all the survivors are now quite elderly – what will happen when they are no longer here? Without living witnesses, the Holocaust could well be “reduced to a paragraph in a history book,” as one of them put it. “Our pain, our loss, our surviving will be forgotten or homogenized.” The museum’s board has long been concerned about this outcome, brought to the fore this past Aprilwhen 86-year-old Aaron Elster, the museum’s beloved vice president and a volunteer since the 1980s, passed away.
Yet a few days later, Elster could be seen at the museum as usual, sitting in a red chair on the stage of the Take a Stand Center theater. Looking relaxed in khaki pants and a blue shirt, he told local eighth graders about the two years he spent hiding from the Nazis in a cramped attic in the Polish countryside. He patiently answered their questions, reliving yet again the extreme heat and cold; the inability to bathe or even brush his teeth; his tremendous fear, loneliness, anger and boredom. And the aching hunger that never left him. When he finally came out of hiding, he was 13, the age of the students in the audience. “I was full of lice and weighed about 50 pounds,” he told them. “My older sister survived, but my parents and little sister were dead.”
The room was totally silent. Elster’s lifelike 3D hologram had not only awed this tech-savvy crowd, it had moved them.
Developed in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation, this revolutionary interactive technology came along just in time. During the past two years, Elster and 14 other survivors traveled to Los Angeles, where they each spent a week sitting against a green background answering some 2,000 questions while being filmed by hundreds of cameras.
It was physically and emotionally exhausting. “FritzieFritzshall, the museum’s president, was one of the participants,” said CEO Susan Abrams. “She was the youngest of 599 women in a slave labor camp at Auschwitz. Every day, each woman would give her a crumb of their meager rations so she could survive and tell their story. Fritzie’s now in her late eighties, and making that hologram was grueling, but she kept going for the women who perished.”
New Dimensions in Testimony, as the technology is known, is impressive but not perfect – sometimes the image jumps a bit, other times the survivor answers a different question than was asked. Yet the interactive aspect makes these holograms more personal, more touching than even the most technically perfect film. And docents have noticed an unexpected advantage: People don’t worry that they will offend the hologram if they ask personal questions.
The holograms are only part of a museum experience that seeks to “move visitors from knowledge to inspiration to action.”The Take a Stand Center and various temporary exhibitions also stress the importance of “upstanders” – people who stand up for human rights throughout the world, from Elie Wiesel to Nelson Mandela to Malala. To this day, some survivors are convinced that the Holocaust never would have happened if their neighbors had spoken up instead of remaining passive bystanders. The museum therefore presents visitors of all ages with practical options for being upstanders in their own lives, from confronting bullies to writing letters to the editor, contacting lawmakers, organizing fundraisers and starting petitions.
Widening the museum’s scope beyond the history of the Holocaust gives it new relevance at a time when neo-Nazis and racists are being emboldened and, according to a recent survey, two-thirds of Americanmillenials have never heard of Auschwitz. “Charlottesville totally brought that fear back into me,” said Fritzshall in an interview shortly after the Center’s opening. “I see that and I think what happened to me can happen to your children, your grandchildren if I don’t speak out.”
To give Fritzshall’s story and those of the other survivors even greater reach, the museum is working with the USC Shoah Foundation to create holographic as well as otherpackages that can be licensed to institutions throughout the world. The cost has not been finalized, but the goal is to offer a range that will be widely affordable and accessible.
In the meantime, Abrams has this bit of advice for organizations that are working to prevent genocide through education: “Gather as much survivor content as possible. Record, record, record, in as many formats as possible. You never know what future technology will allow you to do with that material.”
At the time, the Chicago suburb of Skokie had the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel; when neo-Nazis planned a march on the city, many of them knew they had to speak up. They formed the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, their mission being to tell their stories to adults as well as students. It wasn’t easy – most wanted desperately to leave the past behind, to simply live their new lives. Instead, they repeatedly went through the pain of recounting their harrowing past, hoping that these interactions would give a human dimension to the grim statistics of genocide and that education would overcome hate.
In 2009, their grassroots efforts culminated in the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, a 55 million dollar building with permanent displays that take visitors through the years before and during World War II. Among the thousands of objects on view are items donated by Chicago-area Holocaust survivors, many of whom are museum volunteers. It is particularly poignant when they are there in person to tell visitors about these artifacts.
But all the survivors are now quite elderly – what will happen when they are no longer here? Without living witnesses, the Holocaust could well be “reduced to a paragraph in a history book,” as one of them put it. “Our pain, our loss, our surviving will be forgotten or homogenized.” The museum’s board has long been concerned about this outcome, brought to the fore this past Aprilwhen 86-year-old Aaron Elster, the museum’s beloved vice president and a volunteer since the 1980s, passed away.
Yet a few days later, Elster could be seen at the museum as usual, sitting in a red chair on the stage of the Take a Stand Center theater. Looking relaxed in khaki pants and a blue shirt, he told local eighth graders about the two years he spent hiding from the Nazis in a cramped attic in the Polish countryside. He patiently answered their questions, reliving yet again the extreme heat and cold; the inability to bathe or even brush his teeth; his tremendous fear, loneliness, anger and boredom. And the aching hunger that never left him. When he finally came out of hiding, he was 13, the age of the students in the audience. “I was full of lice and weighed about 50 pounds,” he told them. “My older sister survived, but my parents and little sister were dead.”
The room was totally silent. Elster’s lifelike 3D hologram had not only awed this tech-savvy crowd, it had moved them.
Developed in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation, this revolutionary interactive technology came along just in time. During the past two years, Elster and 14 other survivors traveled to Los Angeles, where they each spent a week sitting against a green background answering some 2,000 questions while being filmed by hundreds of cameras.
It was physically and emotionally exhausting. “FritzieFritzshall, the museum’s president, was one of the participants,” said CEO Susan Abrams. “She was the youngest of 599 women in a slave labor camp at Auschwitz. Every day, each woman would give her a crumb of their meager rations so she could survive and tell their story. Fritzie’s now in her late eighties, and making that hologram was grueling, but she kept going for the women who perished.”
New Dimensions in Testimony, as the technology is known, is impressive but not perfect – sometimes the image jumps a bit, other times the survivor answers a different question than was asked. Yet the interactive aspect makes these holograms more personal, more touching than even the most technically perfect film. And docents have noticed an unexpected advantage: People don’t worry that they will offend the hologram if they ask personal questions.
The holograms are only part of a museum experience that seeks to “move visitors from knowledge to inspiration to action.”The Take a Stand Center and various temporary exhibitions also stress the importance of “upstanders” – people who stand up for human rights throughout the world, from Elie Wiesel to Nelson Mandela to Malala. To this day, some survivors are convinced that the Holocaust never would have happened if their neighbors had spoken up instead of remaining passive bystanders. The museum therefore presents visitors of all ages with practical options for being upstanders in their own lives, from confronting bullies to writing letters to the editor, contacting lawmakers, organizing fundraisers and starting petitions.
Widening the museum’s scope beyond the history of the Holocaust gives it new relevance at a time when neo-Nazis and racists are being emboldened and, according to a recent survey, two-thirds of Americanmillenials have never heard of Auschwitz. “Charlottesville totally brought that fear back into me,” said Fritzshall in an interview shortly after the Center’s opening. “I see that and I think what happened to me can happen to your children, your grandchildren if I don’t speak out.”
To give Fritzshall’s story and those of the other survivors even greater reach, the museum is working with the USC Shoah Foundation to create holographic as well as otherpackages that can be licensed to institutions throughout the world. The cost has not been finalized, but the goal is to offer a range that will be widely affordable and accessible.
In the meantime, Abrams has this bit of advice for organizations that are working to prevent genocide through education: “Gather as much survivor content as possible. Record, record, record, in as many formats as possible. You never know what future technology will allow you to do with that material.”
