Thanks to artificial technology, it’s now possible to have a conversation with Holocaust survivors who are no longer living, as Lesley Stahl reports in the April 5 edition of CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Heather Maio had worked for years on Holocaust-related exhibits and knew that director Steven Spielberg had created the Shoah Foundation to record the testimonies of thousands of Holocaust survivors. But Maio wanted to create something more interactive.
“I wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor like I would today, with that person sitting right in front of me,” she told Stahl. Maio believed that artificial intelligence technology could make her notion realizable, so she pitched her idea to Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, and now her husband.
Smith was intrigued, but some of his colleagues initially feared it could cheapen or “Disney-fy” the Holocaust. Says Smith, “We had a lot of pushback on this project. ‘Is it the right thing to do…Are we trying to keep them alive beyond their deaths?’ Everyone had questions except for one group of people, the survivors themselves, who said, ‘Where do I sign up?’”
So far, more than 20 interviews, including one with a 93-year-old U.S. Army veteran who helped liberate a concentration camp, have been recorded. Each subject spends a full five days answering questions in an attempt to record responses to every question conceivable. The questions are then logged, and alternative questions are entered into the database. Each interview is recorded with more than 20 cameras, so that as technology advances and 3D, hologram-type display becomes the norm, all required angles will be available.
Three of the survivors interviewed have since died. One of them was Eva Kor, who appeared on “60 Minutes” in 1992 to tell her story of having been experimented on, along with her identical twin sister, by Nazi S.S. physician Josef Mengele. Kor died last summer, but using the Shoah foundation’s technology, Stahl was able to conduct another interview with Kor’s digital image. “[Mengele] had a gorgeous face, a movie star face, and very pleasant, actually,” Kors’ digital image says in the video. “Dark hair, dark eyes. When I looked into his eyes, I could see nothing but evil. People say that the eyes are the center of the soul, and in Mengele’s case, that was correct.”
Another survivor, Pinchas Gutter, who was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp at age 11, was the only member of his family to survive. Stahl asks him how he could still have faith in God after the horrors he experienced, and his digital image replies, “How can you possibly not believe in God?…God gave human beings the knowledge of right and wrong, and he allowed them to do what they wished on this earth, to find their own way. To my mind, when God sees what human beings are up to, especially things like genocide, he weeps.”
Watch a clip here.
