AI and VR Help Students Learn From Holocaust Survivors (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, a day for remembering the 6 million people who were murdered by the Nazi regime over 80 years ago. As part of the commemorations, the Holocaust Educational Trust has launched a new project where school children can speak to survivors using AI. John Maguire reports.

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: Susan, can you tell me about your childhood in Hungary?

[00:00:23] Speaker 3: We were only two children, my brother and myself, but we had a wonderful extended family.

[00:00:32] Speaker 2: It may seem strange to ask a virtual Susan questions about her long life when sitting beside the real one, but she wanted to demonstrate how she'll be able to answer questions long after she's gone.

[00:00:45] Speaker 3: Well, I'm just overwhelmed with the technology and the science and whatever it involves. Remarkable.

[00:00:55] Speaker 2: The Testimony 360 project gives school children the chance to immerse themselves in a Holocaust survivor's life story. Using virtual reality headsets, they can walk around places from Susan's life, including the Nazi concentration camps where she was taken as a young teenager.

[00:01:14] Speaker 3: This environment that they placed me in, in Auschwitz, appearing every morning stark naked in front of Dr. Mengele. I knew his name. And looking at our body, who's lost so much weight and who's still able to do some work. It just, I can't describe this to you, how, how inhuman the conditions were. So I crawled out. I couldn't walk anymore. And like I said, I was dying, I think. It was just so inhuman. So, not even frightening anymore. Why, why, why did they do that to us? And the Nazis, so many of them, educated. They want, they wanted to kill us all. And they practically did.

[00:02:44] Speaker 2: She was filmed answering around a thousand questions and using artificial intelligence can respond to whatever the students ask.

[00:02:52] Speaker 4: To be able to explore the Holocaust through a lens of a person, this re-humanises that history. It's so hard to comprehend the Holocaust when we're just looking at statistics. Six million people, how can, how can we ever understand that? But to see someone's life and how a family and how a community has been destroyed because of it, it's so much easier to comprehend something that is very complex.

[00:03:19] Speaker 2: The objective is to educate young people about what previous generations had inflicted and their victims endured. Lessons from history that resonate today.

[00:03:30] Speaker 5: We're really privileged that we have survivors like Susan still with us. And the impact she has had and continues to have is tremendous. But that's why we're so fortunate that she agreed to be recorded for Testimony 360, because long after Susan, people will still be recording Susan, people will still be able to ask her questions, have a real relationship, if you like, with a person, understanding their story long after the survivors are gone.

[00:03:58] Speaker 2: Susan has always visited schools to tell them about her life and near death at the hands of the Nazis. These days, she can't commit as much time or travel as far as she used to. But with the Testimony 360 project, her experience, wisdom and humanity is immortalised. The lessons from history of Susan's story will live on. John Maguire, BBC News, London.

[00:04:27] Speaker 1: Well, let's take a look at these live pictures from Poland, where survivors of the Holocaust are paying tribute to those who died in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is the 81st anniversary of the camp's liberation in those closing months of World War Two in 1945. According to estimates, some two million people, mostly Jews, were murdered in this camp in the Holocaust.