JERUSALEM, Jan 27 (Reuters) – For those who survived the Holocaust, the memories can never be erased, but their generation is dying. Educators and historians are looking for new ways to keep their experience alive and connect with younger people.
With the film “Triumph of the Spirit”, seen through a virtual reality helmet, the spectators find themselves in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
More than 1.1 million people, around 90% of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz, one of Nazi Germany’s network of camps on occupied Polish soil during World War II.
The site is open to visitors as a memorial and museum. Thanks to virtual reality, viewers see the same things without moving.
“You see people’s shoes, you see… all their stuff,” David Bitton, a 16-year-old Jewish seminary student, said after seeing the film in Jerusalem. “When you watch it, it’s like a nightmare you don’t want to be in.”
A World Zionist Organization report ahead of Friday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day describes a surge in global anti-Semitism after the COVID-19 pandemic created a ‘new reality’ as activity escalates. is diverted to social networks.
Indeed, almost a quarter of Dutch people born after 1980 think the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of its victims has been greatly exaggerated, according to a survey published this week by an organization working for material compensation for survivors. .
[1/5] A group takes a virtual guided tour of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Polish Jewish community before the Holocaust using virtual reality headsets as part of an initiative named Triumph of the Spirit , which was developed by ultra-Orthodox women, in Jerusalem, January 16, 2023. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The three filmmakers behind the project hope technologies like virtual reality will have a positive impact. They offer the experience to groups who can book a screening and individual users can watch the film at a mall in Jerusalem.
“The fact that … young people are into this technology, it helps us capture their attention and then when they put on these headsets, that’s it,” said co-creator Miriam Cohen.
Viewers are given a guided tour of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust, visit the Nazi extermination camp, and then a tour of Israel while hearing stories of survivors.
For Menachem Haberman, 95, sent to Auschwitz in 1944 on a cattle train, the immersive experience was overwhelming. He cried as he took off the VR glasses.
His mother and six siblings were killed in the camp’s gas chambers. He survived and was sent to another concentration camp which was liberated in 1945. He then moved to Israel.
He recalled an area where medical experiments were carried out on prisoners and a wall in front of which people were shot.
“I felt like I was going back to that same period from the start,” he said. “I saw all those things, and I remembered some things that I can’t forget to this day.”
Reporting by Emily Rose; Editing by Alison Williams
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