The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center has long focused on honoring the memory of people murdered during the Holocaust and preserving the stories of those who survived.
Now a new pair of short virtual reality films will enable visitors to hear those stories while experiencing immersive visuals that help explain the survivors’ experiences. One film, entitled A Promise Kept, tells the story of the late Frieda “Fritzie” Fritzshall, who was imprisoned and enslaved at Auschwitz as a teenager, and went on to serve as president of the museum until her death last year at age 91. Other imprisoned women would give Fritzshall, the youngest of a group of 600, crumbs of food. The title comes from Fritzshall’s promise to them that if she survived, she would tell their stories. Her grandson Scott Fritzshall says that she was able to wrap up filming for the project before she died.
The second film, Don’t Forget Me, commemorates the experience of survivor George Brent at the Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ebensee concentration camps. It takes its title from Brent’s father’s words to him at Auschwitz, before they were separated. Brent was later sent on to do brutal forced labor at the other two camps.
“I always felt that it’s important that you shouldn’t forget—that you should remember,” says Brent, who is now 92 and retired from his dental practice. “Also, if you run into people who deny it [you] should be able to answer them and bring up facts that will show that this really happened—that 6 million Jews were killed.”
“Pretty much across the board, viewing audiences have been moved by this in ways that they couldn’t have expected,” says museum CEO Susan Abrams. “They feel like they are standing there having this intimate one-on-one experience with this incredible human being.”
“Our goal is to create a piece that people will continue to respond to for the next 10 years at least,” he says. The production process took more than two years and required complex techniques to stitch together footage of the survivors with drone and other camera footage of the Holocaust sites, as well as illustrations and historical photos. The videos, which will also be viewable on Google Cardboard and other simple VR headsets for off-site exhibitions at schools and other locations, have so far elicited comments only about the stories they’re telling, not any technical aspects, which Healer sees as a sign of success.
“As we show it to people, they’re simply into the story, and that’s huge,” he says.
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