Maggie Macintosh
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Winnipeg Free Press
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is using artificial intelligence to introduce visitors to lifelike avatars of aging survivors of the Holocaust who can hold real-time conversations with them.
Grades 7 to 12 students from École Héritage Immersion School were the first to experience the immersive technology Friday.
The group met Marguerite Élias Quddus and Pinchas Gutter — or rather, interactive autobiographies that the Jewish-Canadians helped record and resemble holograms of them in a dark theatre.
“They say a picture’s worth a thousand words,” said Adam Thorvaldson, a history teacher from the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 school in St. Pierre-Jolys, located about 50 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg.
“In this scenario, they have a moving picture of a survivor, as well as their direct story, and they are stories that we’d never be able to recoup without technology like this.”
Thorvaldson’s students took turns using a mic to ask questions, such as “When was the last time you saw your family?”
Every prompt yielded an immediate oral and written reply from a realistic avatar and complementary chatbox.
The Dimensions in Testimony exhibit relies on hundreds of hours of video interviews with survivors about their separate lives before, during and after the Second World War.
Élias Quddus, who was born in Paris and now lives in Montreal, shared intimate details about how she hid her true identity during the systematic murder of six million Jews between 1941 and 1945.
Toronto-based Gutter spoke about being separated from his family in Lódź, Poland and forced into concentration camps.
Grade 8 student Monroe Audette said the unique medium of storytelling allowed her and her peers to observe how deeply emotional these experiences — and recounting them — was for survivors.
Their body language, including foot-tapping, and mid-reply voice cracks have stuck with her, the 14-year-old said.
Audience members flinched Friday when the on-screen Gutter suddenly rose his hands above his head as he recalled a harrowing anecdote about the Nazi operations.
“I didn’t know why they made us run with our hands up, and then I learned that they… could squeeze more and more people into the gas chamber (that way),” he said.
The AI program processes and matches key words from user questions with corresponding footage of Élias Quddus and Gutter.
It was developed by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. Schindler’s List director Steven Spielberg founded the non-profit organization to create educational audio-visual content to share Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies.
“When they tell you the story in their own words, it makes it more impactful,” said Azalea Hiebert, 13, after visiting the interactive exhibit in Winnipeg.
Museum curator Jeremy Maron noted that there are fewer survivors of this historic tragedy who are able to share their first-hand experiences every year.
This tool will ensure engaging conversations with direct witnesses to history continue to happen, said Maron, who oversees the museum’s Holocaust and genocide exhibits.
Both Élias Quddus and Gutter have agreed to allow their stories — in French and English, respectively — to continue being aired after they die.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca
