'Tell the world': Holocaust survivors entrust memories to AI

Khaleej Times

28-01-2025

Survivors of the Holocaust have entrusted their memories of the Nazi death camps to artificial intelligence to ensure that generations to come can access recollections of the genocide of six million Jews.
The project at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (MJH) in New York saw 10 survivors undertake interviews on a range of topics to allow future visitors to question their virtual likenesses about their experiences.
Artificial intelligence will be used to interpret questions from members of the public, who will be played a fixed set of pre-recorded responses to "answer" their questions.
"Somebody will survive because we have to tell the world what happened — and maybe it's us," said Toby Levy, in her 90s, who was born in a region of Poland in 1933 that is now Ukraine.
"I remembered (my father's) words, 'you will be the one who will have to tell the world.' Seventy-five years later, here I am in the United States."
Levy looked at herself on a screen as the technology was demonstrated at the museum, located on Manhattan's southern tip, in view of Ellis Island where many Holocaust survivors first arrived in the United States by sea.
She was among 200 Holocaust survivors who gathered on Monday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
They assembled to watch the live commemoration ceremony in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland, and several denounced the resurgence of anti-Semitic hatred around the world.
"We all survived," said Levy, who arrived first in New Orleans before building a life in New York. "Let's do our share, what we have to do."
The project will protect the memories of the survivors forever, said Mike Jones, the brains behind the project, a collaboration between the University of Southern California Libraries and the MJH.
"There's a timelessness that it's always going to be important and urgent until the day that there's simply just peace on Earth," he said.
The 10 survivors underwent extensive video interviews in the summer of 2024, touching on their childhoods prior to the Holocaust, survival in the camps, and their recollection of liberation and resettlement.
Visitors to the museum or its website can then "converse" with them on screen, and the survivors respond interactively according to the pre-recorded answers.
Alice Ginsburg, born in 1933 in what was then Czechoslovakia, now Hungary, recounted her deportation in 1944 to Auschwitz where she almost died from hunger and forced labour before the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. She arrived in the United States two years later.
"It's important to publicise it so it should never happen again," she said. "This is man's inhumanity to man."
Eighty years on from the horrors of the Holocaust, Ginsburg said she worried about the increase "of Holocaust deniers, which is a form of anti-Semitism."
Jerry Lindenstraus, who was born in Germany in the early 1930s and has lived in New York since 1953 after exile in Shanghai and South America, said he wanted to speak out "so that we never forget what happened".
"I give talks here to high school students who have no idea what happened," he said.