New Dimensions in Testimony Begins Three-Month Installation at CANDLES Museum in Indiana

Eva Kor "talks" with Pinchas Gutter at CANDLES Museum

The fourth museum installation of New Dimensions in Testimony kicked off last week at C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. It will remain open to the public for the next three months.

Holocaust survivor Eva Kor founded the organization CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) in 1984 and opened the CANDLES Museum in 1995. Kor recorded her own interactive testimony for New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) earlier this year. Her testimony is also preserved in the Visual History Archive.

For this installation, visitors will get to have a “virtual conversation” with Pinchas Gutter, the first survivor to be recorded for NDT. In 2013, Gutter answered over 1,000 questions about his life while being filmed in 360 degrees on the “light stage” at USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Now, natural-language software allows museum visitors to ask the digital Gutter a question and hear his answer instantly.

NDT was previously installed at Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and is currently at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, through January 2017. It has also been demoed at Sheffield Doc/Fest in England and the Future of Storytelling festival in New York.

USC Shoah Foundation staff traveled to Terre Haute last week to set up the display and instruct museum docents in operating it and leading the public’s interaction with the digital Gutter.

Kor herself had the chance to sit down and try out the NDT technology. She first introduced herself to Gutter as a fellow Holocaust survivor and then asked if anyone in his family had survived the Holocaust. She also asked if he was alone in the concentration camps – perhaps influenced by her own experience as a survivor of the twin experiments at Auschwitz along with her sister Miriam.

NDT is currently in post-production for the additional 10 Holocaust survivors and one Nanjing Massacre survivor who have been filmed for the project.