OPINION: The ‘miracle’ of using technology to safeguard the stories of Holocaust survivors

This week we launched an educational resource that involves technology we could not have dreamt of many decades ago. Manfred Goldberg certainly couldn’t. Born in Germany in 1930, the television had only just been invented, so perhaps that’s why Manfred describes it as a ‘miracle’ when he watches himself interact online with students and when he visits his hometown without ever stepping foot on a plane but wearing a VR headset.

Manfred was just three years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the country of his birth. It was the start of a tortuous journey through ghettos, labour camps, concentration camps and a death march. Manfred’s brother Herman was murdered by the Nazis – to this day he does not know when or where. Miraculously Manfred survived. He made his home in the UK, one of the 732 child survivors of the camps who was granted refugee status after the war.

After a period of recuperation, Manfred was ready to restart his life – he resumed his education, had a career and built a wonderful family. It would be decades before Manfred felt able to re-open the wounds of the past and share the horrors he faced.

However, doing so for that very first time gave Manfred a whole new mission: to tell his testimony to anyone willing to listen.

From Scotland to Cornwall, Manfred has travelled across the country speaking at schools and reaching tens of thousands of students. He will allow nothing to get in his way. Even at the height of the pandemic when schools were shut, this nonagenarian managed to master the complicated tech of Zoom and teams in order to keep sharing his testimony.

Sadly though, we know Manfred cannot continue forever. With survivors becoming fewer and frailer, the world of Holocaust education and remembrance is facing its biggest challenge – how do we ensure that the legacy of people like Manfred lives on, even after they are no longer with us. There is no clear answer. Nothing will ever replace our incredible survivors. But at the Holocaust Educational Trust, we have been determined to safeguard the legacy of survivors like Manfred.

In 2021, as soon as pandemic restrictions were lifted, we went into a film studio, and we embarked on something special – Testimony 360.

Manfred spent five long days being filmed within a green screen rig, from multiple angles at once, using special volumetric capture cameras, answering over 1,000 questions to create an ‘interactive survivor testimony’. It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t seen this remarkable technology yet, but his virtual self can answer almost any question a student may pose about his experiences during the Holocaust – in real time. Combined with virtual reality headsets, students will be able to see the town of Manfred’s birth, and Stutthof, the concentration camp he survived. They get to hear from Manfred without him being there in person.

Piloted already with over 800 students, this week we are taking the programme nationwide. We launched with pupils from Sacred Heart Catholic School in Camberwell – an area with almost no Jewish community, but a school committed to educating about the Holocaust and the antisemitism that led to it. As part of the launch, Manfred visited the school. As he walked into the classroom, the teacher asked if he could show Manfred something before they got started. It was a display board made a few years ago by students from the school who had visited Auschwitz with the Trust and in advance of their visit had met Manfred’s lifelong friend Zigi Shipper BEM z”l. There was a powerful moment as Manfred looked at the photos of Zigi and he reflected on the two boys from Stutthof in the same room, one there in person and as a virtual version of himself; and one there in spirit, on the board.

In incredibly powerful scenes, Manfred interreacted with his virtual self, asking questions of the technological imprint of himself, smiling at the answers. He toured his hometown and the camp where he was imprisoned in virtual reality, from a school in Camberwell. It is beyond what anyone could have imagined in the year of his birth. He described the programme as ‘close to magic’.  I couldn’t agree more.

Click here to find out more about Testimony 360.

• Karen Pollock, chief executive, The Holocaust Educational Trust