Can we continue talking with Holocaust survivors, even when they’re no longer among us?
A new technology at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Dania Beach wants us to answer in the affirmative. The interactive program, called Dimensions in Testimony, uses artificial intelligence to anticipate more than 1,000 questions likely to be asked by the curious and has recorded the answers of two South Florida Holocaust survivors, who submitted to days of interviews.
This video magic comes courtesy of Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation, which the director founded in 1994 to assemble Holocaust survivor testimonies.
Inside the facility’s new state-of-the-art Interactive Learning Center, to be dedicated on Sunday, visitors can take a seat in a mini-theater in front of a video screen so they can pose their questions. The interactive program responds through one of the two South Florida survivors, who previously answered almost every conceivable query: about their lives before World War II, their forced separations from their families, the abuses they endured, how they were rescued, their marriages, their kids, their favorite colors.
“As more questions are asked, the machine learns,” said Cate Wilson, a community engagement and outreach specialist at the Shoah Foundation. “We provide a list of sample questions for folks that feel a bit hesitant or shy.”
Examples: “Which camps were you in?” and “Do you have hope for the future?”
Sometimes, there are glitches, and the machine puts the wrong answer in the survivor’s mouth. Wilson said programmers are working on these kinks and expect the technology to continually perfect itself.
Dimensions in Testimony is already accessible at Nova Southeastern University’s Craig and Barbara Weiner Holocaust Reflection and Resource Center and at The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg. It can be found in 13 museums around the world, and the Shoah Foundation is talking with 26 others about installing it, Wilson said.
Now that almost 80 years have passed since the end of World War II, there is a limited number of survivors left to share their firsthand experiences. Fewer than 3,000, all in their 80s and older, are estimated to live in South Florida, said Rositta Kenigsberg, the documentation center’s president. That’s down from about 10,000 just last year and 40,000 in the 1970s.
Although many South Florida survivors have visited schools for decades to share the stories of their lost families and the perils of Holocaust denial, there’s still a shocking lack of knowledge about the Nazi regime’s destruction of European Jewry. A 2018 survey by the Claims Conference, which distributes reparations to Holocaust survivors around the world, found that about a third of Americans believe fewer than 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and 45 percent of respondents couldn’t name a Nazi concentration camp or ghetto.
Despite this knowledge gap, Holocaust denial remains very rare in the United States: 96 percent of respondents said the genocide was real. Florida has mandated Holocaust education in schools since 1994, but there’s little funding for the lessons and it’s up to principals to implement as they see fit.
Educators see projects such as Spielberg’s as increasingly essential as the World War II generation ages and students have fewer relationships with elders who can share their stories from that era.
Fortunately, Stella Sonnenschein, a survivor and Aventura resident, is still vibrant at 88. Last year, she submitted to hours of questions by representatives of the Shoah Foundation. The interviews were recorded on a set at the Dania Beach documentation center.
Sonnenschein’s story is filled with twists of fate that saved her life. She was born in Warsaw in 1935, and her family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939. She initially hid in her father’s factory, but her parents decided to have her smuggled out of the ghetto, posing as a Catholic orphan whose parents had been killed. She lived with several Polish foster families and never revealed her true identity.
Her father and brother were killed during the war, but she reunited with her mother in 1946. They moved to Israel in 1950. She met her husband there in 1958 and they moved to the United States, where they had two children.
She hasn’t yet seen how her Dimensions in Testimony interviews came out, but she said she has high hopes for the technology.
“The survivors worry about who is going to tell our stories when we are no longer here,” she said Wednesday. “The most important thing is the message about tolerance and love, that we must love each other. This is the message that we want to make sure to transmit.”
Morris Dan, of Margate, also sat for five days of interviews with the Spielberg project last year. He was born in Ciechanow, Poland, and was 16 when he was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp by the Nazis, who occupied his town a few weeks after invading Poland in 1939. His mother, two sisters and younger brother were killed in the camp upon arrival, and another brother was murdered shortly after during a Birkenau work detail.
As Russian troops approached in 1944, Dan was forced to march to several other camps, finally arriving in Czechoslovakia, where the Czech people offered the prisoners food and shelter. In 1949, he was able to move to Canada with his surviving brothers. He started a building company, married and had two children, moved to New Jersey and then to Florida.
He lived in Margate for the past 16 years but died on May 26 at age 96.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Interactive Learning Center and Dimensions in Testimony
WHEN: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Fridays; visitors need to schedule tours in advance
WHERE: Holocaust Documentation & Education Center, 303 N. Federal Highway, Dania Beach
COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for students; free for survivors, liberators and their spouses
INFORMATION: hdec.org
GRAND OPENING: The grand opening is 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 15, for the Interactive Learning Center, which will house two theaters to showcase Dimensions in Testimony as well as Interactive Smart Tables that allow visitors to access the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive of more than 55,000 survivor stories. The center will also unveil a 5,000-volume Holocaust Library. To register, call 954-929-5690 ext. 314, or email AssistCoordinator@hdec.org.
