by Kiel Majewski, Executive Director

I recently spent 10 days in Los Angeles, which is one of my favorite cities in the U.S. But I wasn’t hanging out at Santa Monica Pier or going to Chavez Ravine for a Dodger game. Most of my time was spent in a little building in Playa Vista, near the airport. Inside this nondescript building, a dozen people or so were working on a project they hope will be the future of Holocaust education.

The most important structure in that building is a geodesic dome covered in lights and cameras. The inside of the dome is covered in green screens, including the floor to about halfway up. And in the center of the dome is a stage on which sits the most important person in the whole building: a Holocaust survivor.

The survivor on the “light stage,” as the staff members call it, is Eva Kor, survivor of Auschwitz and founder of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Eva’s name for the light stage is the “love box,” which she says in a down-to-earth tongue-in-cheek way to describe the grueling process that takes place inside the dome. Eva often makes use of humor to deal with challenging circumstances in her life.

This whole project is called New Dimensions in Testimony. The creators of the project are in the room too. They work for the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The Shoah Foundation is known for its Visual History Archive, a database of some 53,000 survivor testimonies. Its New Dimensions in Testimony (or NDT) will be a collection of interactive testimonies projected in three dimensions. The term “hologram” is used often by laymen like me to describe the project. The designers don’t like to use the word because “hologram” has specific and varying definitions according to science. But when you hear Eva talk about it, she’ll say “hologram.”

When I say “interactive testimonies,” I’m referring to the voice recognition technology that is employed in the exhibit. After filming for some 20 hours during a week, the team will then index that testimony by keyword and tie those keywords to voice recognition software. Students will thus be able to ask questions of the survivor’s recording, and the recorded survivor will reply immediately with the most appropriate response it can find in its database of footage.

This product has already been developed and tested with one survivor – Pinchas Gutter of Toronto. It’s on display now at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

You’ll hear Eva and CANDLES talk and write more about our participation in the NDT project in the coming weeks. I just wanted to close with some quick thoughts about the time I spent with Eva during those 10 days.

I’ve shared an office with Eva for nine years. I’ve spent countless hours with her in cars, planes, and the museum. I’ve read probably thousands of articles about her, from the 1980s to today. I can channel Eva’s memories and interpret them for any topic, no problem. Yet when I was in Los Angeles with Eva, I realized how much more I (and we) have to learn about this woman’s life and the lessons she espouses.

Some of the lessons come across clearly in her bold, provocative, and inspiring statements on survival, overcoming the odds, healing, and forgiveness.

Other lessons are more subtle. They take some context, some interpretation, and some introspection to understand. Often these lessons come cloaked in her humor. Sometimes they can be found in the issues she is currently wrestling with, like aging. Sometimes they can even be extracted in spite of her spicy words and unwavering stances. Some things were just interesting facts that I hadn’t ever realized about Eva.

For example, the person she most admires is her mother, who was caring and compassionate beyond measure. Jaffa Mozes brought beggars off the street to stay with the family for some temporary relief. She was also a tough supporter of girls’ education back when fathers may have decided their girls shouldn’t go past elementary school. Eva regards her mother as a “guiding light” in her life, and is often motivated by the thought, What would my mother think of me?  Would she be proud of me?

I kept a voice recorder and/or a video camera going for the majority of the time I was around Eva. I’m looking forward to mining those audio and video files and sharing some of the stories and lessons with you. In fact, we hope to put together a super low-fi mini-documentary of our trip and share that with you.

Perhaps when you see and hear some of this stuff, you’re going to agree that there’s still so much more to learn from Eva and other survivors of genocide. That’s what we at CANDLES are working on: an organization that can espouse and interpret these lessons from Eva and other survivors far into the future, for our humanity’s sake.