Sydney Jewish Museum immortalises Holocaust survivor stories using cutting edge 3D technology

In an Australian first, the Sydney Jewish Museum is using cutting-edge technology to capture the stories of Holocaust survivors to preserve them for future generations.

Olga Horak delicately handles a black and white striped blanket, which, at first glance, appears unextraordinary — until she explains its origins.

The blanket was woven for SS guards using human hair shaved from Jewish people at Auschwitz, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Olga inherited it by chance.

“It was three weeks before the end of the war and people who didn’t want to be recognised as SS guards who owned these items threw them away. I was lucky to see it and I picked it up,” she said.

“I was 29 kilograms at that time. I was desperately sick and I was cold — it was the middle of winter. And I had that blanket until I was repatriated back to my former home.”

The blanket is now on display at the Sydney Jewish Museum, where Olga, a 94-year-old Jewish-Australian Holocaust survivor, volunteers.

 

For nearly three decades, she has shared her story with visitors.

She tells them about the day in 1942 when her 16-year-old sister was rounded up by the Nazis, taken to Auschwitz and never seen again.

She explains how she and her mother were stripped, shaven and numbered, surviving horrific conditions at concentration camps at Auschwitz, and then Bergen-Belsen — only for her mother to die the day after liberation in April, 1945.

A promise to survive

Holocaust survivor Yvonne Engelman, now 93, recalls the promise she made to her father when their family was taken away in cattle wagons.

“On the third night, my father said to me, ‘I don’t know where we are going, but I’m sure we’re not going for a holiday. I want you to promise me one thing — that you survive,'” she said.

“And I said, ‘Of course I’ll survive.’

 

“One particular SS, his name was Dr Mengele. He had a baton in his hand. He took roughly my mother’s hand away from mine, and they went to the left and I was to the right.

“So that was the last time I have seen my parents.”

‘I could smell the fear’

Francine Lazarus, now 82, was born in Belgium two years before the war started.

Her earliest memories are moving between safe houses as her parents desperately tried to find a home that would take her in.

She recalls walking on the street with her father in Brussels when they heard soldiers’ footsteps approaching.

 

“He pushed me into a doorway … and he covered me with his coat,” she said.

“I could smell the fear.”

They escaped undetected, but her father was later caught.

“He was going to look for food and he was caught and sent to the death factory Auschwitz with the very last convoy.”

Preserving their stories for future generations

Holocaust survivors have been an integral part of the museum since it opened in 1992 but, as many grow older, a new project is using cutting-edge technology to immortalise their stories in hologram form.

“Looking at all the artefacts and so on is an incredible experience,” said Norman Seligman, CEO of the Sydney Jewish Museum.

 

“But hearing first hand from somebody that was there, and who’s able to tell you what the experience is really like, is what people really take away from the museum.

“What we’re hoping to do is to replace that experience of talking directly to a survivor with something that is as close as we can get to the real thing.”

The Dimensions in Testimony project, developed with The Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, will create interactive biographies with six Holocaust survivors.

 

Each survivor will be asked around a thousand questions over five days. Their interviews will be filmed in 360 degrees by 23 cameras. The result will be a 3D interactive image, similar to a hologram, on display at the museum, whereby visitors can ask questions and the survivor will respond in real time.

“It really will give visitors of the future for decades to come the opportunity to hear and listen and effectively interact with a survivor, as if the survivor was right there,” Mr Seligman said.

Olga Horak said she took part in the project to ensure the events of the past are never repeated.

 

“For me, to talk about the Holocaust and what happened to me, it’s not easy, yet I try very hard to talk about it in order to educate people,” she said.

“The past is not easy to forget, and I do not want to forget.

“I don’t live in the past. The past lives in me.”