Holocaust Museum - The RESISTANCE 2 of 3

First Hand Accounts- Anita Lawler Wallfish

We had the opportunity to “interview” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (she will be 100 years old in July), a German-British cellist, and a surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. She played marches as the slave laborers left the camp for each day's work and when they returned and gave concerts for the SS. In October 1944 after being saved from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by her cello playing, she was then sent with 3,000 others to Bergen-Belsen, living on almost no food for 6 months until liberation. She published her story in 1996 in a memoir called Inherit the Truth.

The Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive has over the last 27 years recorded 55,000 testimonies in 65 countries in 43 languages. Twenty-four of them are unique like Anitas since it is using a technology called “Dimensions in Testimony” that enables people to ask questions that prompt real-time responses from pre-recorded video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide. The pioneering project integrates advanced filming techniques, specialized display technologies and next generation natural language processing to create an interactive biography. This allowed us to have conversational interactions with these eyewitnesses to history to learn from those who were there.

The Dimensions in Testimony interviewee is recorded in a green-screen environment surrounded by cameras and in front of a microphone. The interviewer asks questions. Each answer is recorded as a separate video clip. About 1,000 questions are posed – and answers given. This results in a list of responses that can be prompted by questions posed verbally by audience members. Using natural-language technology, the Dimensions in Testimony system transforms asked questions into search terms. The system then matches the search terms to the most appropriate interviewee response to your question and plays back the associated video clip, resulting in a conversational-like experience. The system logs every question and answer. To improve the accuracy of the system, trained staff at USC Shoah Foundation review the system logs to make sure the most appropriate answer was chosen for each question. When necessary, staff manually link to the more appropriate response. As a result, the quality of the system improves with every question asked. What you see is a 3-dimensional video projection of the person answering your question. Amazing.Read more