Survivors

I spent a bundle of hours with her in 1995, taking her around from school to school here in the neighborhood. I remember sitting to one side and watching her tell her story to middle school students, gymnasiums full of them, right here, in fact, in the town where I now live--a decades-old gym with an uneven wooden floor, kids filling every square inch, hundreds, it seemed. 

I was apprehensive. She was 75 years old. The madness of putting her up in front of 200 middle-schoolers to tell her Holocaust story and expecting it to fly was preposterous. What happens if they couldn't care less? What happens if some kids start pinching or fighting or just jabbering as she goes on about the deprivations of life and death in a concentration camp? What happens if all those kids simply can't relate or don't care?

I don't remember a failure, not one. What I remember is rapt audiences--some elementary kids, some middle-school, some high school. Seemed not to make a difference. Once this 75-year-old woman began talking, people listened, in part because of the passion that carried the story, in part because the story was unlike any other they'd ever heard, unless, of course, they'd read Anne Frank.

Back then, just about everyone had heard something about the Holocaust, the Nazi horrors, the madness of a man with a hateful mustache. Everyone had seen a moment or two of mass crowds, ten thousand arms raised in reverent salute. It was 1995, fifty years since Allied troops had swarmed into western Europe, into Germany itself, and along the way discovered camps full of emaciated men and women, crematoriums, factories of death. It's likely that everyone knew something at least, enough to make them--even the middle-schoolers--willing to listen.

She's gone now, died at just about 100 years old. Google "Diet Eman" sometime. You can still hear her tell her story a dozen YouTube videos. She will go on telling her story as long as people channel up a recording. She died several months ago, but her war stories live on.

It's an odd thing really, her being able to tell that story long after she is herself beyond the telling. The Shoah Foundation, at the University of Southern California, has created a means by which hundreds of Holocaust survivors (all of whom are aged, of course) can continue to tell their stories long after their deaths in an almost horrifying way. Maybe you've seen them--video reminiscences. There's a stack of them ten feet from where I'm sitting. I've never seen them, but I know they're there.

And now, the Shoah Foundation has begun something new. They've recorded the stories of some survivors in immense detail and on multiple cameras, hours of remembrance, then technologically forged video impressions in a manner that produces 3-D like images, not unlike holograms, and created thereby spirit-like figures who speak to listeners as if they were perfectly alive. 

And more. By way of technological voo-doo far beyond my capacity to understand, they've been able to create within that image a communication encyclopedia that is not unlike Siri or Alexa, so that this hologram-like being is seemingly capable of answering questions from an audience. 

What the Foundation is attempting, you might say, is using cutting-edge technology to keep people like Diet Eman alive. Something about that is wonderful, but something is also, well, scary.

Once upon a time, thirty years ago, I helped her tell her story, both on stage and in a memoir. Wasn't I doing the same thing? And isn't there good reason? We should never forget, right? 

Never? 

I don't know the answer to that one.