New App IWalk Preserves Holocaust Survivors’ Stories, Where They Took Place

Each year since 1988, the March of the Living has brought together thousands of people from around the world — survivors, families, teens — to honor the victims of the Holocaust by walking the three kilometers from Auschwitz to Birkenau. The physical experience is the point — a refutation of the death marches Jewish prisoners were forced to undertake, and an opportunity for new generations to see, feel and experience the Nazis’ most notorious death camp.

This year, as the coronavirus pandemic rages, the physical march, which was scheduled for April 21, has been canceled. Instead, there will be a virtual march. The survivors, a resilient bunch, will join digitally. They want to continue to share their stories, even if they can’t be physically together in Poland. And you can join, too, to show survivors we will always walk beside them, in whatever form that takes.

But this year’s virtual march is forcing us to reckon with an unavoidable fact: In the not-too-distant future, there will be no survivors left to march. We still will march to honor their memories, but we will be without that living connection to history. That is when the shape of our community will change, and the meaning of the Holocaust will change.

This year is a test, then. What will we do when the survivors are gone? What strategies do we have in place to ensure their presence remains, that their stories still are told?

This is what I spend my days thinking about as executive director of USC Shoah Foundation. Since our founding a quarter of a century ago, we have sought to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and to develop empathy, understanding and respect through the video testimonies we’ve recorded from more than 52,000 survivors.

IWalk places survivors’ stories in the locations where they actually happened, building a physical connection to history.

We’re constantly looking for new ways to harness technology to tell those stories. That’s why we developed “IWalk,” a new app that not only tells survivors’ stories, but accounts for the importance of physical spaces.

Like all our work, the starting point of the app is survivor testimonies, recorded for future generations. Like the March of the Living, IWalk places those stories in the locations where they actually happened, building a physical connection to history.

Using the app — available for free download on Apple and Android devices — people visiting important sites of Holocaust history will hear from survivors at the places where they were prisoners. Right now, there are tours available with survivor testimony in Kyiv and Krakow, in Budapest and Bratislava. There are many more coming. We’d planned to use this year’s march to film survivors telling their stories at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Ed Mosberg has participated in the March of the Living for more than 20 years. Last year, he marched alongside his two doctors as he’d recently been diagnosed with blood cancer. Mosberg has given a 360-degree “Testimony on Location” in 23 sites across Poland and Austria. Those stories are available online; you can walk the streets where the Krakow Ghetto once stood with him in virtual reality. And that testimony is available as an IWalk. When you visit Krakow, your GPS will know where you are and bring up his story. Or from your own home, you may choose Krakow in the app and select the walk where you’ll see Mosberg standing in the street.

This technology is one way we’ll make good on our promise to future-proof survivors’ stories.

This Yom HaShoah, we’re happy to be able to meet online, to commemorate and reflect together. Our generation and those that follow can go to the places where the Holocaust happened — whether that means physically traveling there or being transported virtually — and the witnesses, through their testimonies, will be alongside us to tell us how it was. No pandemic can block this physical and virtual bridge.

Stephen D. Smith is Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation and the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education.